Hispanic studies / european History / sexuality / popular culture

Cultures of the Erotic reveals a candid and irreverent Spain that, before succumbing to the stifling circumstances of the post–Civil War Franco dictatorship, reveled in the undying impulses of the human libido.

“Cultures of the Erotic in Spain, 1898–1939 will change forever the way we view early twentieth-century spanish culture. Zubiaurre trains a sharp eye for telling details on a wide array of erotic popular culture—sex advice manuals, novelettes, magazines, postcards, photographs. The book unveils the internationalist, playful, titillating side of a spain we have up to now associated only with ‘serious’ art and writing.”

—roberta Johnson, author of Gender and Nation in the Spanish Modernist Novel

Vanderbilt university pressnashville, tennessee 37235

www.Vanderbiltuniversitypress.com

To escape the heat of an august day in Madrid, Maite Zubiaurre ducked into an

antique shop, and there among world globes and old maps she came across a peculiar photo album. tucked away behind formal photo-graphs of King alphonso xiii and Queen isabel ii was a whole collection of images of naked women and men. and, unlike the king, these people were not just posing. instead, they were engaged in a variety of “unnatural” sex acts, clearly at odds with the spanish catholic church’s doctrine of sex being for procreation alone: acts of ménages à trois, fellatio, cun-nilingus, and zoophilia. But perhaps the most surprising images of the collection were a series of photos and sketches devoted to nuns and priests frolicking together on consecrated ground. Zubiaurre realized she had discovered more than just a half-hidden collection of “naughty pictures.” rather, she held in her hands a wealth of suppressed or forgotten materials that revealed a subversive countercurrent to the orthodoxies of spain’s male-dominated official high culture in the early twentieth century. she set about studying these images and others like them as a countertext to traditional narratives of and about the time. The result, Cultures of the Erotic in Spain, 1898–1939, is the first academic book to analyze the rich array of visual and textual representa-tions of the erotic in spanish popular culture during the first half of the twentieth century. it examines erotic magazines, illustrations, pho-tographs, stereoscopic images, “French” post-cards, and pornographic short films, as well as erotic novelettes, texts and images on naturism and nudism, writings on early sexology and psychoanalysis, moral-judicial treatises, and philosophical essays on sexual love.

Maite Zubiaurre is professor of spanish at the university of california–los angeles, where she specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century spanish literature, cultural studies, and comparative literature. she is the author of El espacio en la novela realista: Paisajes, piniaturas, perspectivas.

cover image: cover of Muchas Gracias courtesy of the Biblioteca nacional, Madrid. cover design based on a concept by amanda Valenzuela.

Cultures of theErotic in Spain,

1898–1939

Maite Zubiaurre

CULTURES OF THE ERO

TIC IN SPAIN, 1898–1939

Zubiaurre

Vanderbilt

isBn 978-0-8265-1696-1

Cultures of the Erotic in Spain, 1898–1939

Cultures of the Erotic in Spain, 1898–1939

Maite Zubiaurre

Vanderbilt University PressNashville

© 2012 by Vanderbilt University PressNashville, Tennessee 37235

All rights reservedFirst printing 2012

This book is printed on acid-free paper.Manufactured in Mexico

Publication of this book has been supported by a generous subsidy from the Program

for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zubiaurre, Maite.Cultures of the erotic in Spain, 1898–1939 / Maite Zubiaurre. p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-0-8265-1696-1 (cloth edition : alk. paper)1. Erotica—Spain—History. I. Title. HQ458.Z83 2010306.7—dc22 2010020360

To Fernando

Contents

Preface ix

1Introduction

Spain as Erotic Wunderkammer 1

2Historicizing Eros 31

3Sex at a Distance

Amatory Elitisms 59

4Erotic Postcards

The Spanish Inventory 99

5Sexual Naturism

Nudists and Bathers 135

viii C ont e nt s

6Sensual Reflections

Mirrors and Books 179

7Imported Techno-Eros

Bicycles and Typewriters 223

8Patriotic Sex

Mantillas, Cigarettes, and Transvestites 255

9Erotic Fictions

Narrated Sex and Pedagogy 289

10Conclusion

Sicalipsis in Postmodern Iberia 331

Notes 337

Bibliography 359

Illustration Credits 375

Index 383

ix

Preface

In the short story “La sorpresa del viejo” (The Old Man’s Astonishment), pub-

lished in 1924 as part of a collection titled El llanto irisado (Iridescent Tears), Span-ish avant-garde writer Rafael Cansinos Assens tells of an old man slowly walking the streets of Madrid and marveling at the prodigious changes occurring in his city. An aged version of Charles Baudelaire’s flâ-neur in Le peintre de la vie moderne (The Painter of Modern Life), Cansinos Assens’s character observes a modern urban life, so different from the dark world of crime and squalor—armed robberies, families dying of hunger, dignified seniors committing suicide with their hats on—depicted in the newspapers. In stark contrast to strikes, so-cial conflicts, and political protests, the city puts on frivolous airs: “Urban life sparkles and revels in luxury, sumptuous buildings adorn the city, even the poorest of women wear pearl necklaces. Cars rush along the streets, and there are theaters and bars on every corner.” The old man is further “as-tonished about the luminous billboards, and startled by the continuous honking.” But more than anything, he is afraid of “the young, with their firmly set faces and the cold, determined eyes with which they look at old people” (101).1 Modernity shows no respect for tradition. Not unlike the old man in Cansinos As-sens’s story, I too was suddenly faced with

the “other” early twentieth-century Spain— sparkling, dynamic, uninhibited, freed from tradition, happily oblivious to sexual con-straints and gender norms, so radically dif-ferent from the somber, identity-searching country of which history seems so fond. The Spain I discovered did not populate the noisy streets of Madrid, but lay dormant between the covers of an old photo album. On a hot August day in Madrid after a copi-ous lunch accompanied by several glasses of wine, I entered an antique shop located on a small downtown street. The store specialized in old maps and mapa mundi, but, oddly enough, every item in the store was labeled in gothic print “No se vende” (Not for sale). As it turned out, the owner of the store was the son of a wealthy Spaniard who had made his fortune in Mexico. Both of his sons loved old and venerable things, so the father gave each of them an antique shop. The two shops did not exist for financial gain but rather to provide endless pleasure. Paramount among the pleasures, it seems, was erotic delight, at least in one of the shops. Among the arti-facts that were not for sale was a voluminous photo album with leather covers profusely adorned with golden floral motifs. The front cover indicated in golden letters, “Fotos de la Familia Real” (Pictures of the Royal Family). Sure enough, the first pages show-cased pompous pictures of Alfonso XIII and Isabel II. But suddenly royalty vanished from

x Cu l t u r e s o f t he E r o t i c i n Sp a i n

the album, and there appeared instead one naked woman after another, no doubt shock-ing (or delighting) their late nineteenth- century and early twentieth-century viewers. Many of these women were not just posing, but were engaged in a variety of daring sex acts—ménages à trois, fellatio, cunnilingus, and zoophilia. There were also close-ups of genitals and a series of pages devoted to nuns and priests frolicking on sacred ground. The photo album ended as respectfully as it had begun, with (dressed) kings and queens, princes and princesses, and their courtly entourages. Unlike the photo album in the antique shop, this book leaps directly into erotica, without the royal pages. But it is aware that erotica was forced to hide, as it does in the photo album, and to survive between the heavy covers of society and its constrictive mores. Contemporary Spain has inherited a photo album robbed of its erotic pictures and postcards. This book seeks to restore the erotic pages and do away with the royalty.

It would have been impossible to write this book without the help and support of fam-ily, friends, colleagues, scholars from both side of the Atlantic, graduate students, and, last but not least, libraries, cultural institu-tions, antique stores, specialized bookstores, and private collectors in Spain and the United States. My husband, Fernando Za-patero, supported me unfailingly and had more faith in my work than I. He carefully read all the versions of the manuscript and offered invaluable advice. He embodies the reader I want for my book—someone who is interested in all things cultural and lit-erary, but who is not necessarily an expert in Spanish culture. In addition my Univer-sity of California, Los Angeles, colleagues Roberta Johnson and John Dagenais have

graciously assisted in various aspects of manuscript preparation. Roberta applied her wisdom and profound understanding of turn-of-the-century Spanish culture to various versions of the book, advising on both content and style. John read the final version of the manuscript with the atten-tion and skill of an expert in manuscript culture. He mercilessly wielded the scalpel of his cunning precision on the translations of the Spanish quotations into English, but particularly on the manuscript itself. More important, he constantly showed that he be-lieved in my book. My special thanks also to Betsy Phillips, my editor at Vanderbilt University Press, who freed the book from any potential “pro-vincial” airs and ensured that it would ap-peal to a wide audience. If the book breathes and moves, it is because of Betsy’s insight and daring vision. And if it is readable, it is because of the invaluable and patient work of the copyeditor, Jessie Hunnicutt. I also want to thank my research assistants, Vanina Eisenhart, Sarah Older, and Amanda Valen-zuela. Vanina did invaluable work in locat-ing obscure bibliographical sources; Sarah assisted with the translation of the Spanish quotations; and Amanda scanned slides and photo images, edited photos, revised foot-notes, carefully edited the main text, and designed the cover. Scholars and friends from different universities also offered their generous support and feedback. My most heartfelt thanks to Brad Epps, Jo Labanyi, Luisa Elena Delgado, Jordana Mendelson, Susana Martín Márquez, Lily Litvak, Alda Blanco, David Herzberger, Gonzalo Sobe-jano, Harriet Turner, Maryellen Bieder, David Gies, Joan Ramón Resina, Lee Fon-tanella, Alberto Alvarez Sánchez Insúa, Ri-cardo Quinones, Gerardo Luzuriaga, Adri-ana Bergero, Antonio Cruz Casado, Shirley Mangini, María Zanetta, Andrés Zamora,

Pr e fa c e xi

Diana Sorensen, Randal Johnson, Efraín Kristal, and Rosalía Cornejo-Parriego. I also want to express gratitude to the scholars and institutions who invited me to give talks and seminars on the subject of my book: Roberto Díaz (University of Southern Cali-fornia), Gerardo Luzuriaga, John Dagenais and the graduate students Manuel Gutiérrez and Catalina Forttes (University of Califor-nia, Los Angeles), Stephanie Sieburth (Duke University), Ana Paula Ferreira (University of Minnesota), Cristina Martinez Carazo (University of California, Davis), Joan Ramón Resina (Stanford University), Ro-berta Johnson (Modern Language Associa-tion, 2003, San Diego), Jordana Mendelson (Modernist Studies Association, 2004, Van-couver), and Isis Sadek (University of South Carolina). I owe a debt of gratitude to the librar-ies, archives, publishing houses, museums, private collectors, curators, and indepen-dent scholars on both sides of the Atlantic that offered the materials for the book—the research libraries at the University of Cali-fornia, Los Angeles, and at the University of Southern California; Isabel Ortega, Rosario Ramos, Roberto Sansegundo, Pilar Oliet, and Consuelo Cordobés from the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid; director Carlos Do-rado Fernández and librarians and archivists Cristina Antón and Raúl Fonseca from the Hemeroteca Municipal de Madrid; Car-men Lara, publisher at Círculo de Lectores, Gala xia Gutemberg; the Museo Municipal de Madrid; the Museum Julio Romero de Torres in Córdoba, Spain; the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; the Mauritzhuis Museum in The Hague; Sarah García Monge, librarian at the ABC newspaper archive; Juan Antonio Pérez Millán, director of the Filmoteca de Castilla y León; Juan Carlos Albert, indepen-dent scholar; Rafael Amieba, collector and owner of the antique store Mexico II; Blas

Vega, private collector and owner of the an-tiquarian bookstore Librería del Prado; Mar-tin Carrasco, private collector and owner of the vintage postcard shop Casa Postal; and the private collectors and librarians from La Cuesta de Moyano. I am equally indebted to the Casa-Museo Unamuno in Salamanca, and to María Teresa Rodríguez Prieto, direc-tor and curator of the Museo de Bellas Artes de Badajoz. My special thanks also goes to these institutions, publishing houses, and indi-viduals in Barcelona: the Axiu Historic de Barcelona; Susana Penelo, Conxi Petit, and Merche Fernández Sagrera, curators and li-brarians at the Arxiu Nacional de Cata lunya; Oriol Massegu, publisher at the Angle Edito-rial Premsa; private collectors and indepen-dent scholars Jordi Riera and Guillem Huer-tas; and journalists Montse Armengou and Joaquim Roglan. I also want to thank José Luis Rado, private collector of audio visual materials and director of the Filmoteca de Valencia. My appreciation also goes to the director of the Publishing House Editorial Renacimiento in Seville, Abelardo Linares, and his assistant, Isabel García. I am par-ticularly grateful to private collector and author José María López Ruiz, who invited me to his home in Torremolinos, Málaga, and offered the wealth of his collection with extra ordinary generosity. I am particularly grateful to the Univer-sity of Southern California and the Univer-sity of California, Los Angeles (especially Dean Timothy Stowell), which supported me unstintingly while I wrote this book and pro-vided financial support throughout the pro-cess. UCLA’s Center for Digital Humanities granted me a fellowship to create a webpage on Spanish erotica, which will complement the book and greatly expand its scope. Finally, my gratitude goes to my friends Gloria Arjona, Sofía Ruiz Alfaro, Galina

xii Cu l t u r e s o f t he E r o t i c i n Sp a i n

Bakhtiarova, Mariana Chodorowska, Ana-tere Martínez, Andrea Parra, and Claudia Soria. My love and gratitude too go to my dear friend Helena Medina, who helped me in so many ways, and to my family, who put up with me heroically—my husband,

Fernando; my sons, Nicolás and Sebastián; and my “adoptive daughter,” Lupe Yáñez. Note: The website at sicalipsis.humnet.ucla.edu/ contains visual and textual materi-als complementary to the book.

Cultures of the Erotic in Spain, 1898–1939

31

2Historicizing Eros

Jo Labanyi refers to modern Spanish cul-ture as a “ghost story,” in the sense that

critical writing, “by largely limiting itself to the study of ‘high culture’ (even when the texts studied are non-canonical), has systematically made invisible—ghostly—whole areas of culture which are seen as non-legitimate objects because they are con-sumed by sub-altern groups” (“Introduc-tion” 1). Undoubtedly, sexual history and culture within modern Spain perfectly fit the definition of a phantasmagorical reality. Ob-scured by the “bigger” issues of politics and high culture, sexuality nonetheless leaves its ghostly imprint on everything it touches. And it touches virtually everything. More-over, it has its own history, made, as all his-tories are, of a long string of alternating epi-sodes, some with loud fanfare, others more subdued. Since much of Spanish sexology was im-ported, it is important to begin abroad when historicizing Spanish theories of sexuality. Sexology as a (pseudo)science originated and developed in Germany and Great Brit-ain before spreading to the United States and the rest of Europe. As Joseph Bristow states, “Known in German as ‘Sexualwis-senschaft,’ the word ‘sexology’ is attributed to the German physician, historian, and sex researcher Ivan Bloch (1872–1922)” (12). Bristow further notes that the term sexology “initially designated a science that developed

an elaborate descriptive system to classify a striking range of sexual types of persons (bi-sexual, heterosexual, and their variants) and forms of sexual desire (fetishism, masoch-ism, sadism, among them)” (13). Lucy Bland and Laura Doan put it simply: “Sexology is the study and classification of sexual be-haviors, identities, and relations. In the last third of the nineteenth century, the disci-pline emerged in Western modernity as part of a wider concern with the classification of bodies and populations, alongside other new sciences, such as anthropology, sociology, psychology and criminology” (1). Historians and cultural critics usually identify the Germans Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Ivan Bloch, and Otto Weininger as the fathers of early sex ology. A second generation follows, with German Magnus Hirschfeld, British Havelock Ellis, and Austrian Sigmund Freud as the three luminaries that “dominated sexology dur-ing the early years of the twentieth century” (Bullough 61). All these authors (with the intriguing exception of Hirschfeld) quickly became known in Spain, mainly thanks to the creation of the Junta de Am pliación de Estudios e Investigaciones Científicas (Com-mission for the Advancement of Scientific Study and Research, 1907–1938). With Nobel Prize winner Santiago Ramón y Cajal as its president, the Junta awarded ap-proximately two thousand fellowships in order

32 Cu l t u r e s o f t he E r o t i c i n Sp a i n

for (male) Spaniards to continue their gradu-ate studies abroad (Amezúa, Los hijos 28). Ac-cordingly, on their return home, these gradu-ate students smuggled new and revolutionary findings on sexuality into the country. Efigenio Amezúa describes this historical phenome-non as being “without precedent” and adds that “this could explain the fact that Spanish was the first language into which some of the complete works [of sexologists] such as Ellis’s (in 1913) or Freud’s (from 1923 to 1935) were translated along with some selected works by Bloch, [Auguste] Forel, etc.” (Los hijos 28). Eu-ropean sexual science heavily influenced the works of leading Spanish sexologists, such as Luis Jiménez de Asúa, César Juarros, Gregorio Marañón, Quintiliano Saldaña, Jaime Torru-biano Ripoll, Hildegart Rodríguez, and Ángel Garma, among others. The influence of Ger-man sexological thought (which encountered considerably less resistance than Austrian-born psychoanalysis) was so notable that it became a stereotype. For example, the main character in Ignacio Sánchez Mejías’s theater piece La sinrazón (The Unreason) is a psychiatrist who owes his “revolutionary” medical ideas to his years of study in Germany. Critics interested in the sexual history of early twentieth-century Spain have put em-phasis on certain events and circumstances, starting with Gregorio Marañón’s series of lectures in 1915 at the Ateneo Literario (Lit-erary Athenaeum) in Madrid on “El sexo, la vida sexual y las secreciones internas” (Sex, Sexual Life, and Internal Secretions) as the first public manifestation of what later be-came Marañón’s lifelong interest and one of his main areas of research (Cleminson; Bru Ripoll and Pérez Sanz, Las jornadas eugenési-cas; Amezúa, Los hijos 29–34; Amezúa and Cleminson; Vázquez García and Moreno Mengíbar 131–37). Only four years later, the Instituto de Medicina Social (Institute

of Social Medicine, 1919–1923) became the home base for certain “ideas in the air,” such as eugenics, family planning, and sexual education (Amezúa, Los hijos 29). The main objectives of the Instituto de Medicina So-cial regarding sexual hygiene and eugenics were outlined in a “letter of presentation”:

If it is better to prevent than to cure, one must go back to where life begins—that is, to the pregnant mother, to the couple’s relationship, to available infor-mation on contraceptive methods and to the well-being of the parents as man and woman. . . . Home and hearth are the most urgent targets for medical edu-cation. . . . Children who do not reach term and those who arrive unexpectedly and unwanted are curses that we must combat. . . . Information and well-being are essential to good health. (Qtd. in Amezúa, Los hijos 30)

The initial plans of the Instituto were ambitious and showcased such distin-guished intellectual figures as César Juarros, Luis Huerta, Salvador Albasanz, and Mara-ñón among its founding members (Bru Ri-poll and Pérez Sanz, Las jornadas eugenésicas 7–8). Even so, the activities of the Instituto rarely went beyond the organization of a series of scattered courses and seminars on issues related to eugenics and social medi-cine. The Instituto closed in 1923, the same year dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera came to power. It remains unclear whether this political circumstance had any connection with the Instituto’s disappearance. Early twentieth-century Spain also wit-nessed a rapidly growing number of scien-tific collaborations on sexuality in the medi-cal reviews of El siglo médico (The Medical Century) and La gaceta médica (The Medical

H i s t or i c i z i ng E r o s 33

Gazette), and an increasing interest on the part of José Ortega y Gasset’s journal Revista de occidente (Occidental Review) in sexual themes, as made evident by its numerous articles on the subject by both foreign and national experts. Particularly noteworthy is the unprecedented creation of a weekly magazine called Sexualidad: Amor fisiológico, amor morboso (Sexuality: Physiological Love, Perverted Love, 1925–1928), which, over the course of three years and more than two hundred separate issues, kept its read-ers updated on sexual matters and aware of the dangerous consequences of sexual igno-rance and unprotected sex. Its slogan, “No te pedimos que seas casto sino cauto, para una mejor descendencia” (We don’t ask you to be chaste, but to be cautious, in order to guarantee healthier offspring), appropri-ately summarizes the magazine’s eugenicist philosophy. Estudios (Studies, 1923–1938) was a monthly magazine on eugenics. The first is-sues appeared in the small town Alcoy, in the Spanish province Alicante, under the reveal-ing name Generación consciente (Conscious Generation). After considerable success, it changed its name to Estudios in 1929 and re-located to Valencia (Amezúa, Los hijos 107). As Amezúa rightly states, “Estudios seems to be the obverse of Sexualidad. . . . If the mag-azine Sexualidad presented itself as a call for caution, Estudios proved to be an incitement to audacity.” Also according to Amezúa, Estudios added to its anarchist agenda the concomitant ideology of naturism and, hence, should be termed an “anarcho- naturist” magazine (108). None of these publications, however, was as successful as Marañón’s Tres ensayos sobre la vida sexual (Three Essays on Sexual Life, 1926), the printed and mature version of his famous lectures in the Ateneo Literario

in Madrid. Marañón’s book became a true best seller, with seven consecutive editions in Spanish and translations into the main Euro-pean languages. As is widely acknowledged, Tres ensayos triggered much subsequent in-terest in sexuality in early twentieth-century Spain and spurred an increase in the number of publications that dealt with human sexual behavior. But despite this revolutionary ef-fect on modern eros, Marañón’s thoughts on sexuality can hardly be considered truly innovative or radical. In fact, Tres ensayos passed Francoist censorship with flying col-ors, which clearly points to the conservative nature of its content. The growing interest in sexuality tran-scended the printed page and became the focal point of the “Primer curso eugénico español” (First Spanish Eugenics Course, 1928), jointly organized by La Sociedad de Amigos del Niño (The Association for the Protection of Children) and the Gaceta médica española (Spanish Medical Gazette) (Cleminson; Bru Ripoll and Pérez Sanz, Las jornadas eugenésicas; Àlvarez Peláez, “Euge-nesia y control social”; Àlvarez Peláez, “Pe-netración y difusión”). It was also responsible for the creation of the Liga Española para la Reforma Sexual Sobre Bases Científicas (Spanish League for Sexual Reform Based on Scientific Grounds, 1932) as part of the Weltliga für Sexual Reform (World League for Sexual Reform), which had existed since 1928. The Spanish section of the Weltliga had the most renowned Spanish sexolo-gists among its founding members (Vázquez García and Moreno Mengíbar 136). The main objective of its magazine Sexus, pub-lished three times a year, was to inform the Spanish public about the activities of the Weltliga and its affiliated organizations.1 It also spread the eugenicist doctrine and gave Spaniards a much-needed sense of

34 Cu l t u r e s o f t he E r o t i c i n Sp a i n

connection with the outside (European) world. The introduction to the first issue (October 1932, 5) proclaims that

the Liga Española para la Reforma Sexual Sobre Bases Científicas, a branch of a broad international movement firmly rooted in the popular consciousness, has come into existence precisely to assist, to channel, and to guide [Spain’s new interest in sexu-ality]. Sexus, a scientific review . . . , seeks to dismantle prejudices and is avid to hold up to professionals but also to the general public a mirror of the great wave of inter-est that has been forged worldwide con-cerning the fascinating sexual problem.

In conjunction with the Gaceta médica española and the Asociación Profesional de Estudiantes de Medicina (Professional As-sociation of Medical Students), the Liga Española was also partly responsible for the organization of the 1933 “Primeras jorna-das eugenésicas españolas” (First Spanish Eugenics Conference; Cleminson 97). The 1928 eugenics course and the 1933 eugen-ics conference were the agglutinating force of sexual culture in early twentieth-century Spain. Thanks to their strong social impact, sexuality went public and earned unprece-dented political influence. Primo de Rivera initiated his own political demise when he vetoed the eugenics course of 1928. En-rique Noguera, one of the organizers of the course, did not hesitate to call this repres-sive measure a “modern auto-da-fe” and to characterize it as “an arrogant and uncom-prehending gesture, a reactionary tactic that lends credence to the black legend of Spain” (406–7). The measure ignited a strong anti-government movement, particularly among the student population, which ultimately put an end to the dictatorship.

According to Richard M. Cleminson, the “ill-fated” course, “which would have run from February to mid-April 1928 if it had not been banned in mid-stream by the dicta-tor Primo de Rivera, brought together many scientists and lay people to discuss the de-sirability and parameters of Eugenics” (84). In fact, it was an honest effort to have intel-lectuals and experts from widely differing ideologies express their views. Right-wing thinkers (such as Angel Ossorio y Gallardo, a famous lawyer and politician, and former minister during Antonio Maura’s regime; Sebastián Recaséns, gynecologist and dean of the School of Medicine in Madrid; and José Antonio de Laburu, Jesuit theologian and well-known biologist) were supposed to engage in intellectual dialogue with liberal Marañón and with a group of more radical left-wingers (such as José Sanchís Banús, a prestigious neurologist; Luis de Hoyos Sáinz, professor of physiology; and Luis Jiménez de Asúa, the most respected expert and pro-fessor in criminal law at the time).2 In fact, Jiménez de Asúa’s lecture, held on February 9, 1928, and titled “El aspecto jurídico de la maternidad consciente” (The Legal Aspect of Conscious Motherhood), became the trigger for a series of irate outbursts from conserva-tive Catholics. Jiménez de Asúa challenged prevailing Catholic morals on various fronts. He di-vided his talk on eugenics into two main areas of concern, “la progenie sana” (healthy offspring) and what he framed as “materni-dad consciente” (conscious motherhood). In regard to the first subject, the distinguished law professor started by bluntly decriminaliz-ing prostitution for the sake of public health: “Prostitution should rather be considered a misfortune than a crime. Thus to regulate prostitution is absurd. Doctors cannot assess with complete certainty whether a prostitute

H i s t or i c i z i ng E r o s 35

is absolutely healthy, which means that any regulation would generate trust and this, in turn, would facilitate contagion” (336). Then he harshly criticized the dangerous secrecy that surrounds all circumstances re-lated to sexually transmitted diseases and encouraged Spanish authorities to follow the enlightened example of other Euro-pean countries, such as Denmark, Swe-den, Norway, France, and Germany, which were able to implement active campaigns to teach sexual prophylaxis to the population (336–37). Jiménez de Asúa also referred to the double sexual life of Spanish males, who practiced mercenary polygamy while at the same time preserving their unblemished love for their chaste girlfriends and wives to be. According to Jiménez de Asúa, the consequence of what he called “el desdobla-miento del amor” (the splitting of love) is that monogamous households had become a very rare occurrence in Spain. Males en-tered marriage with a broad experience in sexual excess and debauchery, thus finding conjugal intimacy unappealing in its cold-ness and lack of excitement (337). Finally, Jiménez de Asúa remained skeptical about the usefulness of the “certificado médico prenupcial” (prenuptial medical certifi-cate).3 According to the respected jurist, this naive solution to protected the health of the legitimate spouse but had no impact on extramarital affairs and therefore jeop-ardized the well-being of illegitimate chil-dren and their mothers. Jiménez de Asúa put it in strictly orthodox, eugenicist terms: “Venereal contagion should be considered a crime . . . , since what is at stake here is not only a marriage, but the entire race” (337). On the issue of “conscious motherhood,” Jiménez de Asúa passionately defended the right of women to govern their own bodies and to decide on the number of children they

wished to bring into the world. To support his argument, he mentioned Victor Margue-ritte’s Ton corps est à toi (Your Body Belongs to You), a novel that was very popular in the rest of Europe but scarcely known in Spain (338). Although Jiménez de Asúa was ada-mantly against any form of sterilization, he fully supported the use of contraceptives. He even defended abortion if the mother’s life was at risk, in which case he called it “nec-essary abortion,” or if it was “eugenically” motivated—that is, if the pregnant woman was mentally deficient (340). In these two cases, he found abortive practices to be medi-cally justified and argued that they should therefore be authorized by law. In regard to abortions practiced for “sentimental” reasons to avoid the moral torment of women whose pregnancy was due to rape, Jiménez de Asúa claimed to have found the appropriate legal procedure: “In the case of ‘sentimental abor-tions,’ those should not be granted a priori by law, but only a posteriori, and after a judge has had the opportunity to psychologically assess each specific case” (340). Jiménez de Asúa’s article touches on a series of sexual issues that had become a matter of concern and heated controversy in early twentieth-century Spain. His views rep-resent the liberal end of the ideological spec-trum, although they are never so radical as to call into question the inviolable principles of hetero sexuality and family based on insti-tutional love. In fact, eugenic measures and a more effective “sexual culture” are meant to further strengthen sexual differentiation: “We need to intensify sexual culture, con-tinuously increasing femininity in women and helping men to reach supreme virility, which is only achieved through work” (337). Jiménez de Asúa’s conservative and strictly “Marañónian” approach to gender and gender roles brought him dangerously

36 Cu l t u r e s o f t he E r o t i c i n Sp a i n

close to a fascist-type discourse, in which the union of the perfect (and radically sexually differentiated) man with the perfect (radi-cally sexually differentiated) woman would “automatically” produce the perfect race. Francisco Haro, who was as interested as Jiménez de Asúa in “fostering births of supe-rior offspring,” believed this would be pos-sible if certain initiatives were implemented by the government:

Here we have the example of the Federico Gómez Arias Foundation in Salamanca, which, already twenty-three years ago [in 1910], offered a prize of 1,000 pesetas toward a dowry to an unmarried woman of good physical constitution, robustness, health, beauty, good character, and with at least a basic education, between 15 and 23 years of age and willing to join in canonical or civil marriage with a man of analogous physical and moral qualities, and of an age compatible with that of the bride. (337)

Haro included this anecdote in a paper he gave during the 1933 eugenics conference. Interestingly, Hildegart Rodríguez, the “per-fect” female product of a couple almost iden-tical to Haro’s hypothetical one, also spoke at the conference and probably even listened to him as he talked about “her” parents. Hil-degart’s mother, Aurora, a highly intelligent woman with a robust constitution and an iron will fueled by the “truth” and wisdom of eugenics, had wanted to have the perfect daughter. First, Aurora found the ideal male to match her own perfection. Once preg-nant, she rigorously followed the advice of eugenicist doctors regarding food and ex-ercise. When Hildegart was born in 1914, Aurora continued her solitary Pygmalion-esque endeavor. She designed an education

plan meant to quickly catapult her daughter to genius. Soon, Hildegart astonished the world with her intellectual achievements. She spoke fluent French, English, and Ger-man well before her teenage years, and she began to study law in 1927, when she was only thirteen years old. In 1929 she entered the socialist Unión General de Trabajadores and became a well-respected and prolific writer and journalist on politics, eugenics, and feminism (for a list of her works, see the Bibliography). She graduated in 1932, and that same year registered as a student of medicine. In 1933, when she spoke at the conference on eugenics, nineteen-year-old Hildegart was introduced as “Srta. Hilde-gart, Lawyer, Publicist, and Secretary of the Liga Española de Reforma Sexual Sobre Bases Científicas.” On June 9, 1933, one month after the conference and her seminar on conscious motherhood, Hildegart died at her own mother’s hands. Aurora shot her own work of art, after learning that Hilde-gart was in love and was planning to leave her to start a new life.4 The racist component of eugenics was al-ready in evidence during the 1928 Spanish eugenics course, well before it escalated into fascism and eugenicist experiments gone deadly wrong, à la Hildegart. Racism, how-ever, did not really bother moral authorities at the time. They were blinded by the glar-ing light of one sexual heresy after another (decriminalized prostitution, destigmatized sexually transmitted diseases, mothers mak-ing decisions about their own bodies and reproductive organs, “baby-killing” doc-tors and judges). They even failed to see how strong Jiménez de Asúa’s faith was in the heterosexual couple and how much that couple resembled the biblical couple, sancti-fied by Catholicism. Unavoidably, a heated debate ensued between the conservative

H i s t or i c i z i ng E r o s 37

Catholic press (El debate, El siglo futuro) and its liberal counterpart (El liberal, El social-ista), until a royal decree (real decreto) put an abrupt end to it all on March 22, 1928. This new law, passed by Primo de Rivera’s dicta-torial government, prohibited eugenics from becoming birth-control propaganda or por-nography, which were offensive to Christian morals and society’s ethical foundations. Of course, what the Spanish government really feared was that sexual knowledge would spread outside the sanctified walls of academia and science and beyond the autho-rized brains of male intellectual authorities, thereby contaminating the unprepared and innocent minds and souls of women, young people, and the lower classes. Noguera, who was editor in chief of the Gaceta médica espa-ñola, had specifically referred to the presence of “a great number of women prestigious in various branches of knowledge” at the first course on eugenics (403). Moreover, it is important to note that in addition to being open to the public, the polemical eugenics course was also accessible to people who did not personally attend the conferences. The talks were all broadcast on radio (Bru Ripoll and Pérez Sanz, Las jornadas eugenésicas 13) and therefore reached a wide audience. This unprecedented fact explains the Church’s deep concern and subsequent com-plaints to the government. The government readily complied with the Church’s wishes, as did certain liberal thinkers in a more subdued way. Marañón was a visible public figure at the 1928 course, as he was at the eugenics conference in 1933. However, he ended up not giving his broadly announced lecture during the 1928 eugenics course, since his talk was planned for March 29, ex-actly one day after the real decreto became effective. The aborted event was not Mara-ñón’s fault, although it echoes the eminent

endocrinologist’s ambivalent attitude about how much the Spanish masses should know about sexuality. Only one year before, he had been invited by the Asociación Hispano-cubana de Cultura (Hispano-Cuban Cul-tural Association) in Havana to give a three-part lecture on “Los estados intersexuales en la especie humana” (The Intersexual Phases in the Human Species). What Marañón had to say to his Cuban audience in 1927 apro-pos psychoanalysis and infantile sexuality was eerily similar to what the real decreto stated and ordained in 1928 in the name of Spanish public morals:

In these times of limitless literary dis-semination and excessive professionalism, widespread diffusion of certain concepts [related to the sexuality of children] be-comes unavoidable. This has a demoral-izing and regressive effect on unprepared minds—that is, on almost all minds. I realize that, in tactful hands, the ideas of Freud and other psychologists of his school are perfectly harmless, and occa-sionally enlightening and useful. But those hands are an exception. To destroy a bene-ficial myth [the myth of the sexual purity of the infantile soul] is probably scientific, but is socially quite dangerous. (169)

Compare Marañón’s last sentence with the real decreto’s assertion that the discussion of sexual issues “is legitimate from a purely sci-entific perspective, but dangerous in its so-cial derivations.” Marañón takes to Spain’s recently lost colonies the scientific elitism, moral snobbism, and consistent paternal-ism that was a landmark of (post)imperialist Spain. In a seemingly (neo)colonialist and often-seen gesture, Marañón lectures Cu-bans on who should know, and who should not know, and for what reasons.

38 Cu l t u r e s o f t he E r o t i c i n Sp a i n

Throughout Marañón’s scientific and in-tellectual career, he made sure that the unfit minds of “subalterns” (Cubans, women, proletarians) were not exposed to harmful knowledge and to the crumbling of socially “beneficial” myths (beneficial, that is, to the status quo and ruling patriarchy). Accord-ingly, in a long refutation of the harsh cri-tique Austrian psychologist Oliver Brachfeld made of his sexual doctrine and the dangers of its public dissemination, Marañón pas-sionately defended himself and his work by pointing out that he had always been very careful to offer his knowledge only to a pro-fessional audience. Precisely for that reason, he had refused “dozens and dozens of invita-tions to give talks” on the subject. Moreover, years earlier, in a prologue to the Spanish translation of Ivan Bloch’s La vida sexual contemporánea (Contemporary Sexual Life), he had specifically warned against the dis-semination of such works beyond scientific circles. Finally, and to the same purpose—namely, to eliminate “extra-scientific appeal in scientific works”—Marañón decided to eliminate all visual materials from the sec-ond Spanish edition (published with the new title La evolución de la sexualidad y los estados intersexuales, 1930) and from the French and English translations of this second version. “Therefore,” Marañón asserted to Brachfeld, “in these matters, my conscience is at peace” (Brachfeld 146). Although not having contributed to the dangerous sexual enlightenment of the masses assuaged Marañón’s conscience, he still had many causes for concern. Despite all puritanical efforts to “de-eroticize” sexual science and to limit it to a highly restricted audience of savants, eros prevailed and re-emerged in popular culture. The aborted 1928 eugenics course, ironically known after the real decreto as “las jornadas del regodeo

pornográfico” (the conference on porno-graphic delight), resulted in a phenomenal bibliographic hangover, with many popular as well as high-cultural venues commenting on and often defending the “scandalous” points of Jiménez de Asúa’s polemic article and other similar, liberal approaches to sexu-ality. According to Noguera, “The growing interest in the subject led to the quick selling out of the books on eugenics by Marañón, Saldaña, Jiménez de Asúa, Joaquín No guera, Torrubiano, etc.” (407). Moreover, the abrupt end to the 1928 course served as powerful motivation for a second round of uncensored and unin-terrupted lectures at the 1933 conference, which took place in the midst of Republi-can fervor and well after Primo de Rivera’s demise. From April 21 to May 10, more than fifty experts participated in talks and specialized seminars. Consecrated writers like Pío Baroja and Ramón J. Sender talked about sex and love in literature, while a long list of doctors, lawyers, and publicists spoke on genetics, heredity, and the many medi-cal and legal aspects of sexuality (Bru Ripoll and Pérez Sanz, Las jornadas eugenésicas 31). The 1933 conference on eugenics en-compassed a wider selection of themes and ideological perspectives than the 1928 course had. Now unafraid of censorship, eu-genicists openly talked about their political, scientific, and ethical agendas. According to Carmen Bru Ripoll and Pilar Pérez Sanz, “They spoke about sterilization, contracep-tion, neomalthusianism, marriage, divorce, free love, conscious motherhood, and abor-tion, all issues that were considered to be ‘dangerous monsters’ by the Church and the conservative right” (Las jornadas eugenésicas 31). However, not all subjects were treated with equal emphasis and detail. Cleminson, for example, notes the “comparatively little

H i s t or i c i z i ng E r o s 39

attention given to obligatory or ‘voluntary’ sterilization” (102). Contraceptive methods were not a par-ticularly popular issue either, although there was noticeable progress from 1928 to 1933. According to Noguera, during the first course on eugenics “it was said that in San Carlos we were showing films on contraception that were crudely realistic in the extreme,” an accusation he categorically denied (404). Thus the public had to wait patiently for a more favorable political atmosphere in order to have access to the specifics of contracep-tive methods. At the 1933 conference, both Hildegart (in “Vista panorámica del birth control” [Panoramic View of Birth Control], the second lesson of her practical seminar on conscious motherhood) and Francisco Haro (in “Anticoncepcionales” [Contraceptives], the second part of his practical seminar on “Concepción y anticoncepción” [Concep-tion and Contraception]) spoke extensively and in a practical and user-friendly manner about the subject. Haro was probably the more outspoken of the two. After caution-ing his audience about the graphic content of what they were going to hear, he followed eugenicist and birth-control advocate Mary Carmichael Stopes’s classification of contra-ceptive methods (340). In general, he ap-plauds the recommendations of the British author, based on his own extensive medical experience as a gynecologist at the Benefi-cencia Municipal de Madrid (Public Hos-pital of Madrid). Interestingly, he disagrees with her on the efficacy of the condom, declaring it one of the most efficient birth control methods for reasons that perfectly fit contemporary notions on its usefulness and prophylactic virtues:

In the case of men, we recommend the use of the rubber prophylactic or condom,

well known for its authorized use as prophylactic against venereal diseases. Despite the opinions of certain authors and most particularly those of Mary Stopes’s campaign, our personal opinion is that the condom is one of the very best contraceptive methods. We do not share the belief that its use is an obstacle to the natural development of coitus to orgasm. . . . In regards to safety, we consider it to be rather safe, particularly because its only failure is rupture, and it has, above all, the advantage that it is the only method that announces its own failure. Since its rupture is immediately apparent this allows one to resort to vagi-nal douches with antiseptic substances, in order to reduce the risk of pregnancy. Even its outspoken detractor Mary Stopes acknowledges that the condom offers great safety, although, according to her statistics, it fails 75% of the time, which we find quite surprising. (347)

However, only a few of the seminars and talks adopt this optimistic view of eros and the possibilities that birth control offers not only to family planning but also to a less anxiety-ridden and more pleasurable sex life. More often than not, emphasis is put on the dangers of sexuality and the need to combat certain sexual ailments that ultimately jeop-ardize the health of a race/nation. As Cle-minson notes, a great deal of “importance [was] awarded to the general idea of [racial and social] degeneration” (100). According to the conference program there were papers on “degenerative constitution,” syphilis, and tuberculosis and its negative impact on sexual health, as well as a series of seminars focused specifically on racial degeneration, including a paper titled “El foco degenera-tivo de Las Hurdes (con proyecciones)” (Las

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Hurdes, a Focal Point for Degeneration [with Film]) by J. Goyanes.5

Interestingly, Goyanes’s talk was pre-sented with a somewhat different title than that which had appeared in the program: “Las Hurdes, foco de degeneración, redimido (degeneración racial)” (Las Hurdes, a Focal Point for [Racial] Degeneration, Redeemed). However, the alteration of the title can easily be explained. Las Hurdes, one of Spain’s most impoverished provinces at that time, had become a “dark spot” of mythical pro-portions in the otherwise unblemished to-pography and history of Castile and Central Spain.6 Considered by some to be the “cradle of Spanishness” because it is located in Ex-tremadura, a land of conquerors bordering hyper-Castilian Salamanca, Las Hurdes sim-ply had to be rescued from squalor and racial degeneration.7 In a symbolic gesture, Mara-ñón, who knew the region well from previous journeys, accompanied King Alfonso XIII on his legendary trip to Las Hurdes in 1922. More than ten years later (in 1933), Luis Bu-ñuel filmed a highly controversial documen-tary inspired by the royal visit, and Goyanes gave his talk about the same subject. The royal visit was a necessary political measure if Spain was to give the impression that its former imperialist glory was not en-tirely lost. As long as the spirit and identity that had given birth to heroic conquests was deemed worthy of rescue, the nation could still rise from its ashes. Las Hurdes was an ashen land, and modern Spain was, sup-posedly, the phoenix eager to come back to imperial life. Therefore, Goyanes changed the title to show that Las Hurdes could be redeemed, or had already been redeemed thanks to the timely intervention of the king and the all-male cohort of doctors (includ-ing Goyanes himself), engineers, teachers, and priests that accompanied him during his

trip. It was imperative, and also feasible, to free Las Hurdes from subhuman living con-ditions, all too often symbolized in scenes of sexual promiscuity:

The [huts] of the so-called professional beggars of the farmsteads perched on the mountainside usually have only one bed-room, in which the whole family sleeps together promiscuously (although it is true that they most often do so in their clothes), without regard for age or sex. In one of these huts in Martilandrán, there was a bed that took up the whole room where the owner slept with three women: his wife, one of her sisters, and a third woman who worked as a servant. Each of these three women cultivated a portion of a vegetable garden that their boss (the sul-tan) had given them. (Goyanes 419–20)

As frequently happens, sexual immorality is equated with Oriental degeneration. Be-cause he is promiscuous and perverted, the Spanish male automatically metamorphoses into a Moorish “sultan.”8

Although Goyanes’s talk, supported by the disheartening testimony of photographic materials, offered the bleakest possible pic-ture of Las Hurdes, Goyanes nonetheless ended on an optimistic note. Armed with a propagandist rhetoric uncannily similar to that used by the chroniclers of Spanish conquest, the Spanish doctor/conquistador/ colonizer documented how Christian wisdom and civilization were once again triumphing over Moorish ignorance and backwardness. As a consequence of Marañón’s famous trip to Las Hurdes, a Patronato de Las Hurdes (Board of Las Hurdes) was created, which, according to Goyanes, radically improved the living conditions of the region. The three small valleys that constitute Las Hurdes now

H i s t or i c i z i ng E r o s 41

had local hospitals, rebuilt churches, twenty-five new public schools, paved roads that for the first time made it possible to travel across Las Hurdes by car, and improved commu-nications through public phones and postal service. Goyanes announced that thanks to these spectacular improvements, infant mortality in Las Hurdes was only slightly higher than in other rural areas in Spain. He proudly stated that the region was now “redeemed, and about to join civilization” (421). Goyanes’s rosy conclusion stands in stark contrast to Buñuel’s very different de-piction of the region in the very same year, 1933. Liberal intelligentsia, in accordance with Republican agrarian politics, wanted the rehabilitation of Las Hurdes to be a suc-cess story, worthy of figuring in the annals of eugenicist thought. Such thought was dedicated to proving that a race and nation could be saved from themselves, and that racial and national degeneration was revers-ible, and therefore curable.9

At the same time, the national obsession with Las Hurdes and its eugenicist potential as redeemable territory proved how keen the central government and its intellectual ap-paratus still were on Castile as the heart and crown jewel of Spain. A region that was part of such a “jewel” had to be cleansed (Goyanes 420). Moreover, it showed the extent to which Spanish eugenics’ emphasis on racial and sexual degeneration reinforced Spanish poli-tics’ focus on national decadence. In addition, it further confirmed “official” Spain’s fixation on death and the past and its utter disregard for modern life and times. Once again, “la Es-paña negra” was able to cast its somber shadow over “la España verde,” or erotic Spain. Thana-tos triumphed over eros during the Spanish “jornadas eugénicas” of 1933. It is telling that none of the highly popular and irreverent writers of sicaliptic novelettes

were given the chance to talk during these eugenics courses (Bru Ripoll and Pérez Sanz, Las jornadas eugenésicas 50). Fortunately, Spaniards of the 1930s already knew that one of the best sources of erotic knowledge (coupled with simultaneous sexual gratifica-tion) was sicalipsis in its printed and visual forms. Even pseudoscientific sexology, despite its frequently stern moral tone, did not shy away from offering practical advice on very specific sexual matters, such as contraceptive methods; foreplay; nonpenetrative, mastur-batory sex; and homosexual practices. In its most popular, pornographic, and strident forms fictional and visual sicalipsis often be-came an invaluable pedagogical and “moral” tool, because it taught women as well as men to enjoy rather than fear sex. A delightful an-ecdote about Primo de Rivera has the dicta-tor deciding between prohibiting a sicaliptic show and putting an end to the first eugenics course in 1928. We know he chose the latter, and, apparently, he even went to see the sic-aliptic show on the very same day he promul-gated the royal decree (Noguera 406). Like their dictator, Spaniards not only attended erotic shows, they avidly consumed sexological treatises, sicaliptic novelettes, and erotic magazines. These were published in unprecedented numbers and grew into an “ola verde” (an “erotic tide”) that forced its way through urban Spain and helped to “undermine” the moral infrastructure of the country. For example, sicaliptic popular culture frequently calls into question hetero-sexual bliss, and it seems intrigued by sterile forms of sex (homosexuality and onanism chief among them). Furthermore, it remains surprisingly indifferent to so-called “sexual differentiation” and doubtful about what clichés such as striving for hyperfemininity or hypermasculinity really mean. Finally, si-calipsis hungers for very young bodies and

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barely sexed anatomies. It suffers from the “Lolita effect,” or the “tobillera effect” in Spanish erotic jargon. To borrow from César Juarros’s comparison of Spanish love with uncomfortable furniture (El amor en España 55), sicaliptic culture shies away from such discomfort and seeks all things and bodies exotic and non-Castilian. Not surprisingly, the publication of a great number of sexology manuals, together with visual erotica and sicaliptic fiction, is one of the most relevant “sexual events” of the Silver Age. In his bibliography Literatura erótica en España: Repertorio de obras, 1519–1936 (2001), José Antonio Cerezo devotes a lengthy appendix to what he calls “His-toria de las costumbres: Obras divulgativas sobre sexología” (History of Mores: Popular Works on Sexology] in Spain. The appendix includes roughly 160 entries, although Cer-ezo is quick to note that this is only a mea-ger sample of a thriving publishing business (49). The listed works cover the period from 1843 to 1936, with the great majority of texts published in the 1920s and 1930s. The true identity and nationality of many of the listed authors (frequently posing as medical doctors) remains unknown since the use of pseudonyms was a common practice. This is true not only among authors but also among publishing houses. Cerezo, for example, dis-tinguishes between what he calls “real” and “false or imaginary” publishers and presses.10

As I noted in Chapter 1, Spanish sex-ology is a colorful enterprise that employed relentless hybridism, a steady flux of imported erotic knowledge, and fraudulent pastiche to compete with “serious,” original works. The borders between reality and fiction and between “scientific” sexology and fictional-ized sexual knowledge remained blurry. In any case, the voluminous bibliography of sexological treatises and popular sex advice

literature available in Spain during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century offers a reliable panorama on how Spaniards of the time conceived (and consumed) sexuality. It also indicates the extent to which their sexual self-esteem and sense of national identity depended on a constant, though conflict- ridden, dialogue with recently minted Eu-ropean sexology. Hence, popular sex advice literature became not only an invaluable tool in the process of sexual and national identity formation but also one of the major channels of communication with Europe and with Eu-ropean perspectives regarding sexual matters. Spanish sexology, at least in its early forms, began even before the Junta de Am-pliación de Estudios had the chance to offer its invaluable assistance to the national intel-ligentsia. Sex advice manuals and sexological treatises became popular around 1850 with the first publications of such soon-to-become best-selling authors as Pedro Felipe Monlau i Roca, Amancio Peratoner, Vicente Suárez Casañ, and Fernando Mateos Koch. Mon-lau was the first widely read hygienist. Clem-inson considers his work significant because “it combined a Catholic moral stance with modern medicalized precepts on [so-called] hygienic marriage” (65). Monlau’s first book on sexual matters, Elementos de higiene pri-vada (Elements of Private Hygiene, 1846), was followed seven years later by a second volume called Higiene del matrimonio o libro de los casados, en el cual se dan las reglas e in-strucciones necesarias para conservar la salud de los esposos, asegurar la paz conyugal y edu-car bien a la familia (Marital Hygiene or the Book of Married People, in Which Are Found Rules and Instructions Necessary to Preserve the Health of the Couple, Guaran-tee Conjugal Harmony, and Bring Up the Family Well, 1853). Higiene del matrimonio

H i s t or i c i z i ng E r o s 43

was reedited fourteen times (Amezúa, Cien años de temática sexual 136) and translated into French. According to Cleminson, Monlau’s best sellers consecrated him as “the first [in Spain] to provide a systematic, in-depth marriage and health guide for couples, similar to those that proliferated in Britain and other coun-tries in the mid-nineteenth century” (65). The sexual themes discussed in the book, as well as its general organization (from the scientific description of the sexual organs to children as the ultimate product of sexual in-tercourse), became the leading model of sub-sequent works on marital sex and hygiene. After a general introduction on the historical genesis of marriage and the ecclesiastic and civil legislation governing it, Monlau devoted an entire chapter to each of the following issues: “organs of generation, virginity, copu-lation, impotence, fecundation, conception, sterility, menstruation, pregnancy, abor-tion, birth, post-birth, lactation, hereditary transmission, the upbringing of children” (Amezúa, Cien años de temática sexual 137). Amancio Peratoner followed Monlau’s lead but dared to go a step further; he tres-passed the boundaries of sexual normativity (that is, of heterosexuality and conjugal eros) and introduced other, more daring subjects, known in the sexual terminology of the pe-riod as escabrosos (lurid), viciosos (depraved), fraudulentos (fraudulent), or just íntimos (private) (Amezúa, Cien años de temática sexual 138). The titles of his works (listed in the Bibliography) are an inventory of the sexual issues that became an obsession in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, including Spain. Many thought of Peratoner as a frivolous author and irrespon-sible demagogue. Others respected his work and considered his divulgence of sexual in-formation to be much needed. Yet a third

group bluntly dismissed his books as “cam-ouflaged pornography” (Amezúa, Los hijos 20). These three opinions would be heard again and again in relation to most subse-quent writers of sex advice literature. And, as always, the polemical nature of the subject only contributed to the growing popularity of sexology. Vicente Suárez Casañ, Monlau, and Pera-toner stand out among early sexologists for their prolific work, which bestowed sexual knowledge as well as erotic pleasure on their readership. The Spanish publishing industry became notably resourceful during these years. For example, Suárez Casañ’s sexual treatises were the first of their kind to be pub-lished as serialized pamphlets (Amezúa, Los hijos 22; for a list of Suárez Casañ’s works, see the Bibliography). As I noted in Chapter 1, the Silver Age witnessed a true explosion of mass-cultural publications in the guise of periodical collections and series of short novels. Erotica was likewise merchandised for periodical consumption, including both sicaliptic novelettes and sexological litera-ture. Suárez Casañ’s fascicles were sold on the streets, together with frivolous maga-zines and erotic fiction, and became an im-portant part of what is still called literatura de quiosco (kiosk literature). In view of the growing tendency toward the medicalization of sex, a number of au-thors of sex advice manuals decided to com-plement their work as divulgers of sexual wisdom with actual medical practice. Fer-nando Mateos Koch, another of the better-known early sexologists, produced a rela-tively short number of books on sexuality and sexual hygiene (for a list of his works, see the Bibliography). He became known, how-ever, as one of the first, if not the first, doctor to open a clinical practice entirely devoted to sexual issues. Founded in 1877, it was

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advertised as follows in almost all of Mateos Koch’s books: “Clínica de problemas sexua-les del Dr. Mateos Koch. Puerta del Sol–Arenal, Número 1, primero, Madrid” (Dr. Mateos Koch’s Clinic on Sexual Problems. Puerta del Sol–Arenal, Number 1, 2nd floor, Madrid). As expected, this first attempt at a “sexual clinic” located in the highly visible and popular Puerta del Sol, the very center of Madrid and Spain’s so-called kilómetro cero (kilometer zero), attracted many critics who prompted its founder to issue a writ-ten justification. Mateos Koch took pains to emphasize that the focus of his sexual clinic was not pornography, but the physiology, hygiene, and pathology of sexual relations (Amezúa, Los hijos 24). Although never as influential or para-digm changing as soon-to-come Freudian psychoanalysis and sexological empiricism in the mode of Havelock Ellis, early sex-ology nonetheless was the first step toward sexual progress. In Spain, normative sexual-ity, as described by Monlau in his manuals on marriage and sexual hygiene, quickly gave way to an increasing interest in non- normative sexual practices. The works of Peratoner, Suárez Casañ, and Mateos Koch were published on a relatively large scale, which for the first time offered a wide au-dience the opportunity to see and to read about a more complete and complex sexual reality beyond the erotic bliss of marriage. Early sexology, in conjunction with the si-caliptic novelette and the sexual clinic à la Mateos Koch, brought non-normative sex into the open and made it an accessible commodity. Hence, when Freudian theory reached the streets and popular venues of Spanish urban centers, and when Havelock Ellis decided to give the Spanish publishing market a try, the ground had already been prepared for them. A second generation of

sex researchers (Juarros, Marañón, Saldaña, Jiménez de Asúa, Torrubiano Ripoll, Gon-zalo Rodríguez Lafora, Àngel Martín de Lu-cenay, and the tragically famous Hildegart, among others) soon added to the early sexo-logical contributions of Monlau, Peratoner, Suárez Casañ, and Mateos Koch. Àngel Martín de Lucenay was probably the most widely read among post-Freudian sexologists. Despite the sustained efforts by contemporary sexologists and critics to learn more about Martín de Lucenay, he remains an elusive figure. We know that he lived in Madrid, that he worked as a medical doc-tor and psychiatrist, and that his practice was primarily devoted to sexual problems. He was the author of the series “Temas sexuales: Biblioteca de divulgación sexual” (Sexual Themes: Popular Library of Sexual Knowledge), a collection of sixty books pub-lished between 1932 and 1934 (for a list of his works, see the Bibliography). The books, around a hundred pages each and with nu-merous illustrations and photographs, came out every two weeks. “Temas sexuales” was part of an ambitious project put forward by the publisher, Editorial Fénix, who was in-terested in selling books in great numbers to a popular audience at affordable prices. The commercial strategy paid off, and “Temas sexuales” became an immediate and lasting success (Amezúa, Los hijos 111, 112). Martín de Lucenay’s series is representative of how sexuality was understood and categorized during the early twentieth century, both in Spain and in the rest of the Western world. Accordingly, the diverse sexual themes cover both “normal” manifestations of sexuality, as well as supposedly “abnormal” behavior. Martín de Lucenay, as part of a new group of Spanish sexual scientists, continued to resort to the same rather arbitrary mélange of foreign-born specialists (Krafft-Ebing,

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Forel, Jean-Marie Charcot, Pierre Frecher), to which he added the findings of second-generation European sexologists. Freud and Ellis were among the most influential and frequently quoted authors, as their complete works quickly became accessible in Spanish translation. Magnus Hirschfeld, however, was barely known in Spain. Although Mara-ñón, Saldaña, and Juarros often refer to him (Amezúa, Cien años de temática sexual 144), the archives at the National Library in Ma-drid, a source for assessing the reception of foreign materials during the Silver Age, con-firm that none of his works was translated into Spanish. Very likely Hirschfeld’s pas-sionate defense of homosexuality (the main goal of his works) failed to awaken the inter-est of an intensely homophobic country. Spain’s attitude toward Ellis, however, was remarkably tolerant. Even though the British sexologist also defended so-called sexual inversion, he never adopted Hirsch-feld’s radical stance. Ellis was in fact known for his conciliatory attitude, which Vern Bullough describes as “much less dogmatic and antagonistic” than Hirschfeld’s, and for popularizing “the concept of [sexual] indi-vidual and cultural relativism, in his Studies in the Psychology of Sex” (75). As Bullough further contends,

Ellis was a naturalist, observing and collecting information about human sexuality instead of judging it. Always cautious, he avoided unitary theories. Faced with the question of whether homosexuality was inborn or acquired, physical or psychic, he felt there was per-haps some truth in all views. Although he tended to believe that sexual differ-ences were inborn and nonpathological, he was willing to grant that perhaps there was a higher number of neurotics among

deviants than among other groups. This, however, he also qualified, by stating that the neurosis may be due to societal rather than biological factors. (76)

Eclecticism and relativism in the study of sexuality was also the preferred modus operandi among Spanish sexologists, which explains their natural affinity with Ellis’s method, as well as their lack of sympathy for sexual hermeneutics based on more rigid methods, such as Freudian psychoanalysis. But there are further reasons behind this strong Spanish-British liaison. For example, Ellis’s work had a very concrete impact on the eugenics movement in Spain, particularly on the work of Hildegart Rodríguez. Ellis, who developed an intellectual relationship with Hildegart, considered her one of the lead-ing figures for sexual reform in Spain. Ellis quickly became a popular figure among so-cialists, communists, and anarchists who were trying to implement family planning in order to improve the living conditions of the poor. Moreover, the British sexologist had traveled to Spain on numerous occasions and never failed to show his great sympa-thy for the country and its people. He even wrote a book called The Soul of Spain (1908), which became a best seller in Great Britain. The National Library in Madrid has a copy of the first edition in English (1908), as well as a translation into Spanish of one of the multiple reprints of the original (1928). While Ellis’s The Soul of Spain was widely read and republished in Great Britain, his books on sexuality encountered censorship. Naturally, the poetic dwellings on the soul of an exotic and remote Mediterranean coun-try were deemed less harmful by Victorian authorities than the graphic description of British sexuality. Bristow recounts, for ex-ample, how the “copies of one of the most

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detailed sexological studies, Sexual Inversion (1897) written by Havelock Ellis . . . in coop-eration with critic and poet John Addington Symonds . . . , led to the arrest of a London bookseller who sold a copy to an undercover policeman in 1898” (14). Sexual Inversion was translated into Spanish in 1913, and published with “special additions” from the author. Unlike the English original, Inversión sexual did not suffer the persecutions of cen-sorship, nor did any of Ellis’s other works on sexuality, very soon known and admired in their Spanish version (for a list of his works translated into Spanish, see the Bibliography). The year 1913 was particularly successful for Ellis in regard to the ample dissemina-tion of his work in the Spanish world. It was also the year the various volumes of his Stud-ies in the Psychology of Sex (translated into Spanish as Estudios de psicología sexual) were published by Editorial Marín (Amezúa, His-torias sexuales 7). Numerous sexual histories meant to support theoretical findings about normal sexuality (as opposed to the “clini-cal histories” documenting deviant sexual practices) were included in the appendixes of several of the volumes, to the utter de-light of the Spanish audience and, one must suppose, the complete chagrin of the British Crown. Spanish sexologists and endocrinol-ogists, among them Marañón, had always been against the suddenly fashionable trend of disclosing personal sexual histories (clini-cal or otherwise) to the public, a fact that made the genre of sexual biography a rara avis on Peninsular soil. The absence of na-tive sexual accounts, together with the in-creasing flow of sexual histories into Spain from England and Germany, once again reinforced the belief among Spaniards that sex—particularly its “perverted” forms—was altogether foreign and imported.

The Church and moral authorities cer-tainly benefited from and even fostered such fallacious beliefs. But even more-enlightened sectors of society (liberal intellectuals in-cluded) felt a certain superiority in the face of imported vice and took pains to highlight its foreign (non-Castilian) accent. The Ellis case was particularly flattering to the Spanish ego. The British sexologist and proclaimer of erotic mores not only richly exemplified for-eign sexual perversion but also specifically highlighted the virtue of Spanish women in The Soul of Spain, thus making explicit Spain’s sexual-moral superiority over other countries. Moreover, since Ellis’s censored and prohibited works for the most part were able to circulate freely in their Spanish ver-sions, Spaniards saw themselves as more enlightened and open minded about sexual matters than their British counterparts. Edi-tors of sexological works were perfectly aware of these rudimentary psychological mecha-nisms and compensatory strategies on the part of Spanish readership, and they used them to financial advantage. Accordingly, the publisher of Estudios de psicología sexual (Studies in the Psychology of Sex) included an epilogue for marketing purposes that made specific mention of the ban imposed on the English original (Carles et al. 35). Spanish Freudian psychoanalysts, now and then, were much less enthusiastic about Ellis’s legacy than was the general public. In fact, they even blamed the famous English sexologist for “having exerted a negative in-fluence on the reception of psychoanalysis [in Spain]” (Carles et al. 34). According to Fran-cisco Carles and his coauthors, Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex turned out to be par-ticularly harmful to Freudian theory. Ellis’s book frequently refers to and quotes Freud’s writings on the sexuality of children, on fe-male sexuality, and on the role sexuality plays

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in neurosis. But he does so in order to criticize psychoanalysis, particularly Freud’s findings on infantile sexuality. Ellis’s “global disquali-fication” of Freudian sexual theory was all too well received by Spanish intellectuals, who often resorted to those same arguments to further discredit psychoanalysis (35). Freud’s work was not readily available to the general Spanish public or even to the medical community until 1922, when the publisher Biblioteca Nueva embarked on the ambitious task of gradually publishing his complete works in Spanish translation (see Amezúa, Cien años de temática sexual; Glick; Carles et al.; Carpintero and Mestre). Before 1922, Freudian thought had reached the Spanish public only through mediation. Some of the interpretative efforts were well meaning and accurate (Juarros, Garma), yet most of them were openly skeptical (Ellis, Marañón, Ortega) or downright hostile (Fernández Sanz, Villaverde). However, even in its immediate form (Freud’s own words translated into Spanish), Freudian theory provoked adverse reactions for a multiplicity of reasons. To attribute Spaniards’ negative recep-tion of Freud to the conditioning bias of El-lis’s anecdotal references would be to grossly simplify a more complex reality. Freud’s theories were subversive enough to shake the dark, windowless edifice where Spanish sexu-ality was carefully kept hidden from view, as in Federico García Lorca’s claustrophobic play La casa de Bernarda Alba (The House of Bernarda Alba). Moreover, by compromising female virtue and male virility, Freud called into question the very identity of the nation, which rested on the strict dogma of sexual heteronormativity. The incursion of Freudian psycho-analysis into Spanish territory faced strong resistance during all its different phases and

attempts at assimilation. In fact, Spain’s jus-tified fear that a new sexual epistemology could very well transcend the sexual realm and affect the entire organization of the state did not show signs of abating until the ad-vent of the Second Republic. Freud’s work entered the Iberian Peninsula surprisingly early, via Granada and Barcelona. “Mecan-ismo psíquico de los fenómenos histéricos,” the Spanish translation of Freud’s and Josef Breuer’s “Preliminary Communication” (1893) on hysteria, was published the same year as the German original in the Gaceta médica de Granada (Medical Gazette of Granada) and Revista de ciencias médicas de Barcelona (Journal of Medical Sciences of Barcelona) (Glick 536). This precocious and probably accidental double entry into Spain of Freud and Breuer’s early communica-tion, however, did not generate any response among medical and intellectual circles (Car-les et al. 18). This first incursion set the pattern for fur-ther developments. Freudian psycho analysis never failed to visit Spain, but usually left as fast as it arrived. Or as Germán L. García puts it, “It is not as if psychoanalysis did not exist in Spain: it simply disappeared” (qtd. in Carles et al. 130). Unlike Ellis, Freud was not able to connect with the “soul of Spain.” Psychoanalysis therefore became an awk-ward tourist, feeling out of place and trying unsuccessfully to fit into the scientific land-scape and appeal to its medical inhabitants. This aspiration was unusually difficult, since Spanish turn-of-the-century psychiatry was dominated by an exclusively neurobiological approach to mental processes and patholo-gies. The overwhelming majority of the prac-ticing psychiatrists in early twentieth-century Spain were, in Amezúa’s words, “hijos de Santiago” (Santiago’s sons), meaning San-tiago Ramón y Cajal, the leading Spanish

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physician, neuroscientist, and Nobel laure-ate. According to Thomas F. Glick, Ramón y Cajal was “rigorously somaticist and opposed to Freudian psychology” (538). But psycho-analysis had two other powerful enemies be-sides neurobiological somaticism—namely, a strong spiritual tradition heavily influenced by Catholicism and the increasing popularity of so-called experimental psychology (Carles et al. 130). Carles and his coauthors identify a first “informative silence on Freudian progress” that spanned from 1893 to 1897 (18). Then, in 1897, Luis Dolsa referred to “Frend” in his article “Psiquismos histéricos” (Hys-terical Psychologies), published in Revista de ciencias médicas de Barcelona, thereby becoming the first Spaniard to quote Freud, despite misspelling his name (Carles et al. 19). After 1897, psychoanalysis again van-ished from Spanish medical publications and, with the exception of a few sporadic mentions in scientific journals, remained ab-sent until 1914.11 Interestingly, in the midst of the medical silence, Ortega published a “popularizing article” in 1911 titled “Psico-análisis, ciencia problemática” (Psychoanal-ysis, a Problematic Science) (Glick 539). He starts by briefly stating that “Dr. Sigmund Freud is a Jewish professor of psychiatry in Vienna” and immediately afterward presents two widely differing views on the polemical Viennese doctor. According to some, Ortega states, he is a prophet, a discoverer of cer-tain human secrets that will change not only science but society as a whole and even aes-thetic experience. Yet according to others, he is a charlatan: “After all, they say, what can one expect from a citizen who, among other things, devotes his time to interpreting the dreams of well-to-do neurasthenics, as that young boy from the Bible did with the Pha-raoh’s nightmares?” (“Psicoanálisis,” 220).

The article is roughly twenty pages long, oddly superficial, and full of digressions and asides. As it progresses, it reveals that the Spanish philosopher is not particularly con-vinced by psychoanalysis. He starts by call-ing it “a doctrine that is more untrue really than false, but certainly scientifically appeal-ing” (218). And after offering a simplified and necessarily incomplete version of Freud-ian thought, he dismisses it as a mere scien-tific imitation of the sacrament of confession: “Ultimately, psychoanalysis really just boils down to a purging technique or spiritual ca-tharsis, something that religious confession already is and has always been. We should say that it is by no means the smallest objec-tion one can raise against psychoanalysis to consider it to be simply a scientific justifica-tion for the confessional” (225). Historians of psychoanalysis in Spain (Carles et al.; Carpintero and Mestre; Glick) agree that—after this brief Ortegian inter-lude meant for a general audience—it was Enrique Fernández Sanz who in 1914 re-introduced Freudian theory into medical discourse in an article titled “Psicoanálisis” (Psychoanalyis). That same year, the article was republished as a chapter of his book His-terismo: Teoría y clínica (Hysteria: Theory and Clinical Practice), which reached a wider audience. According to Glick, the dis-cussion of psychoanalysis presented in that chapter “was the first exposition of Freud’s theories that many Spanish physicians read and, although it presented a full and objec-tive summary of Freudian theory, it reached decidedly unfavorable conclusions” (537). In Fernández Sanz’s own words, he devotes the final section of his chapter “to summarize in twelve paragraphs the most important argu-ments against Freudism” (Histerismo 226). He starts by denouncing the unoriginality of Freud’s doctrine, the lack of scientific rigor,

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and the arbitrariness of the symbols. But his harshest criticism falls on what he calls “the exclusivist interest in sexuality” and on “Freud’s opinion about the sexuality of chil-dren.” Finally, the Spanish psychiatrist de-clares psychoanalysis “a therapeutic method that is harmful to patients” and “has adverse effects on the ethical and social problems that Freud and his adepts attempt to solve via psychoanalysis” (226–235). In the con-cluding note to his “twelve commandments,” Fernández Sanz stresses again that

the ethical deductions of the psycho-analysts represent, then, a regrettable setback in the development of moral per-fection, since they allow for the complete satisfaction of sexual impulses, simply because they exist, without subordinating them to higher moral principles, which are, in the last analysis, the supreme and legitimate representatives of the true in-terests of individual and the race. In sum, the psycho analytic school will pass into history stigmatized by the reproof of im-partial thinkers. (235)

Presumably, the scientific community that read Fernández Sanz’s article had also been exposed to Ortega’s widely distributed essay. In any case, Ortega’s and Fernández Sanz’s pejorative evaluation of Freudian theory set the tone for the reception of Freud in Spain. Even after consulting Freud’s com-plete works in Spanish, doctors, scientists, and intellectuals, including novelists and playwrights, remained skeptical, with only a few exceptions, and repeated the same argu-ments against psychoanalysis. Ironically, although the sentiment against Freud was unremitting, his work once again entered Spain and firmly established itself for a period of almost twenty years. In 1917,

Ortega, despite his ambivalent attitude to-ward psychoanalysis, encouraged José Ruiz Castillo, the director of the publishing house Biblioteca Nueva, to publish Freud’s complete works. As Glick points out, “The series began publication in 1922 with The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, preceded by a short prologue by Ortega, and was the first collected works of Freud in any language. . . . Before the Civil War, each of Freud’s [fourteen] volumes went through three printings, for a total run num-bering 15,000, of which The Psycho pathology of Everyday Life and The Interpretation of Dreams sold the most copies—a pattern simi-lar to other European countries” (540). Ruiz Castillo was quick to acknowledge that his publishing house became a thriving business during the 1920s thanks to the publication of Freud’s complete works in Spanish and to the many new editions of Marañón’s Tres en-sayos sobre la vida sexual (Amezúa, Cien años de temática sexual 143). The fate of Freud’s complete works in Spain was heavily influenced by political de-velopments. When Francisco Franco came to power, Freud was banned, but Marañón’s Tres ensayos sobre la vida sexual was allowed to remain in bookstores. Although Tres en-sayos had been a faithful shelf companion to Freud’s complete works, Freud’s transgres-sive theory had very little to do with Mara-ñón’s teachings, which were reassuringly conventional under a facade of liberalism. For the next decade, Spaniards were stuck with Tres ensayos (despite the similarity of the title, so radically different from Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality) and Ortega’s Estudios sobre el amor (Studies on Love, 1924). Then in 1948, in the midst of postwar depression, saw the financial ad-vantages of maintaining an active publish-ing industry based on the enormous poten-tial of the Latin American market. Hence,

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Biblioteca Nueva was allowed to reissue Freud’s complete works in the original trans-lation by López Ballesteros, although only in a deluxe edition, which limited its distribu-tion to the very few that could afford it and ensured that the masses were kept in blissful sexual ignorance (Glick 571). Although Ortega’s skepticism about psychoanalysis never diminished (in fact, it seemed to grow with time), the Spanish philosopher was nonetheless instrumental in disseminating Freudian thought and keep-ing it alive in the medical community and among the general public. He even founded two periodicals during the Silver Age that revealed a steady interest in psychoanaly-sis, Archivos de neurobiología (Archives of Neuro biology) and El sol (The Sun). Archivos de neurobiología, which Ortega cofounded with Gonzalo Rodríguez Lafora and José María Sacristán, and another scientific jour-nal, Archivos de medicina, cirugía y especiali-dades (Archives of Medicine, Surgery and Specializations), became the main source of information on Freudian theory and clini-cal practice for a specialized medical audi-ence (Carpintero and Mestre 89). The daily newspaper El sol played a leading role in advertising Freud’s complete works in Span-ish. It also published a series of reviews of the different volumes by first-rate intellectu-als, including Ortega and Ernesto Giménez Caballero (Glick 540). Glick notes,

The launching of [Freud’s] Obras comple-tas [Complete Works] in 1922 initiated a new phase in the reception of psycho-analysis in Spain which lasted until the civil war, with perhaps a secondary mile-stone in 1931, the advent of the Second Republic. In the period 1922–31, we can observe a three-tiered process: (1)

the intensification of the medical debate; a decisive therapeutic shift, under the influence of Freud, in Spanish clinical psychiatry; the codification of Freudian ideas in manuals and courses; and the im-pact of Freudian ideas on nonpsychiatric medicine; (2) the development of a social debate over Freudian notions of sexuality, associated with the sexual reform move-ment; and (3) the creative integration of Freudian psychology in literature, theatre, and art. (543)

Glick considers this “three-tiered process” a positive sign and a step forward in the process of Spain’s assimilation of Freudian thought. However, a more careful analysis of how Spanish scientists, writers, and the intellectual elite in general reacted to Freud-ianism, even after the publication of the Obras completas, sheds serious doubt on this rosy picture. It is certainly true that from 1922 until the advent of the Civil War in 1936, Freudian psychoanalysis was no lon-ger a stranger to Spain. It is equally true that medical debate around psychoanalysis intensified. Psychoanalytical theory became part of the reform movement, and even en-tered Spanish literature and the arts. But it remains debatable whether such apparent progress effectively changed Spain’s broadly negative attitude toward a foreign psycho-medical theory that Fernández Sanz had no trouble calling a strange scientific aberration and Ortega dismissed as “untrue” (“Psico-análisis” 218). It is telling, for example, that another journal founded by Ortega, the prestigious Revista de occidente (Occidental Review), did not include a single article on psycho analysis during a period that, according to Glick and others, constituted a particularly intense phase in the reception of psychoanalysis in

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Spain. The Revista de occidente was certainly interested in sexual matters (Lázaro). In fact, during these same years (1922–1936), an impressive twenty-six articles were pub-lished about sexuality, covering a wide range of approaches and issues, including sexual zoology and anthropology, eugen-ics, sexual reform, sexual endocrinology and Don Juanism, the philosophy of love, and the biology, psychology, and sociology of gender. Both national writers (among them Rodríguez Lafora, Marañón, Cor-pus Barga, Ramón Pérez de Ayala, Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, Manuel García Morente, and Rosa Chacel) as well as foreign intellec-tuals (David Katz, Eduard Spranger, Ernst Kretschmer, Bertrand Russell, and Georg Simmel) contributed articles to the ongoing international debate on sexuality. The Revista de occidente was the public voice of the intellectual elite. Accordingly, and because of the sexual conservativism and social elitism of many of the most re-nowned so-called liberal thinkers, it never really welcomed Freudian thought amid its pages. Psychoanalysis was yet another dangerous foreign “invention,” along with socialism, communism, anarchism, suffrag-ism, and other imported trends, which could eventually wake up the “beast”: the popular masses, women, the subconscious. Moder-nity was terrifying to a postcolonial country still dreaming of restoring its former impe-rialist and patriarchal glory. Naturally, psy-choanalysis, another scary symptom that the world was changing rapidly and going in the wrong direction, was found to have many objectionable aspects, among them an usur-patory, confessional model; “pan sexualism”; a fixation with infantile sexuality; mech-anicism; determinism; a speculative, non-positivist nature; and debatable success as a diagnostic tool. In the best of cases, it was

utterly useless; in the worst of cases, it was dangerous as a therapeutic method. In ad-dition, the majority of Spanish intellectuals blamed psychoanalysis for its (quasi- religious) dogmatism, its imperialist expansionism, and its social elitism. They also criticized Freud’s “suspicious” Judaism. The fact of Freud’s Jewish origin surfaces again and again in Spanish texts on psycho-analysis. Ortega succinctly describes him as a “Jewish professor in psychiatry from Vienna” and immediately adds that “this is already [telling] enough,” thus instruct-ing the reader not to miss the relevance of Freud’s Jewish race and Austrian nationality (“Psicoanálisis,” 220). Lest we forget Spain’s and Ortega’s unabashed Germanophilia, “Jewish” should be read negatively as “non-Catholic,” and “Austrian” as “not-German,” “German” and “Catholic” clearly being the desirable categories. In fact, a great number of Spanish scientists (many of them medical doctors and neuropsychiatrists) and intel-lectuals in general saw psychoanalysis not as a “positivist theory” but as an “ideological speculation” (Carles et al. 43), or as a capri-cious ensemble of more or less ingenious hy-potheses and fantastic fictions born out of the mind of a distant and self-centered Vien-nese author of Jewish faith and at the service of the Jewish bourgeoisie and upper class in Vienna. Among these critics was Spanish psychiatrist Miguel Gayarre, who thought that psychoanalysis was a treatment particu-larly fitted for Jews. Gayarre assumes that al-most all of the clinical cases from Vienna are individuals of Jewish origin. He then points out that consanguineous marriages are quite common among Jews, which explains the abundance of “degenerative stigmas” and “sexual neuropathologies.” Consanguine-ous marriages, he concludes, “keep the circle of hidden incestuous, homosexual, and

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generally perverted thoughts going” (qtd. in Carles et al. 24). More than twenty years later, at a time when psychoanalysis had become widely known in Spain, the Spanish medical com-munity still tended to endorse Gayarre’s anti-Semitic “scientific” hypothesis. Even Marañón, who had a profound understand-ing of Freudian theory and whose own work on intersexual states owes a great deal to the teachings on infantile sexuality of his Austrian colleague, believed that the latter had committed the mistake of giving uni-versal importance to psychological factors that were common only among people of his (Jewish) race and class (“Los estados inter-sexuales” 170). Once again, early twentieth-century Spain viewed sexuality (in this case, sexu-ally based psychoanalysis) in topographic- expansionist terms, involving, as imperialist enterprises do, economic and religious factors. Psychoanalysis was born among wealthy Jews on Austrian soil. Later, it even traveled to North America in the form of an expensive imported commodity that only rich Ameri-can Jews and Protestants could afford, as José María Villaverde Larraz argued:

Psychoanalysis must be practiced for months and even years in order to dis-cover everything that the patient does not know and which, because it never comes out in its true form, must be brought to awareness by interpreting emotions, dreams, etc. This in itself, as will be easily understood, requires one to spend one’s life with only a few patients, which, if they are not the daughters of North American millionaires, will not be able to pay for the tremendous labor which is de-manded of the mentalist. (Qtd. in Carles et al. 131)

Spanish “Freudophobia” is not clear-cut; it is complicated by all sorts of aversions, many of them of a nationalist, fiercely “pa-triotic” nature. In fact, the crusade against psychoanalysis was a nostalgic reproduc-tion, in miniature, of Spain’s imperial wars against “infidels” (Protestants, Muslims, and Jews) and a heated defense of the Catholic cause. As if to stress the religious component of the anti-psychoanalytic stance, psycho-analysis itself was very often decried as being a kind of religion (the wrong kind), ruled by incontrovertible dogmas and demanding unflinching obedience from its believers. The prevailing view among Spanish leading intellectuals was that Freudianism as a “new” religious heresy seemed to agree more with the Protestant and Jewish faith than with Catholicism. Thus psychoanalysis as a clinical practice could be at home only in Protestant countries and in Jewish upper-class circles. Moreover, Villaverde’s sarcastic reference to the self-centered daughters of North American multimillionaires as the only ones in a position to squander time and money on psychoanalytic sessions empha-sized psychoanalysis as an example of Judeo-Protestant materialism and navel-gazing individualism. Catholic countries did not have the wealth (or the leisure) to embark on psychoanalytic probings and fantasies. Nor were their women so shameless as to volun-tarily submit their sexual intimacies to the voyeuristic gaze of the psychoanalyst, at the risk of soiling their virtue and endangering the honor of family and fatherland. In fact, a heavily gendered subtext per-sistently underlies Villaverde’s rhetoric and, in general, anti-Freudian discourses of the time. Hence the psychoanalytic scenario is built around the seemingly timeless sexual allegory of a male doctor/voyeur attend-ing to the spiritual suffering of a female

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(or feminized) patient/spectacle. The latter does what women usually do—namely, fall prey to weaknesses of all kinds, confess, rely on a male doctor or spiritual counselor to remedy their sins and ailments, and, ulti-mately, lie on the divan, helpless and beau-tiful, at the mercy of a man’s pleasure and power. In addition to being commodities, women and female patients of psychoanaly-sis were also avid consumers, a perfectly oiled and smoothly running piece of capitalist machinery. Protestant and Jewish daughters of American multimillionaires shed repres-sions and dollar bills with similar ease and at an equally fast pace. In the meantime, Span-ish women were expected to cling to inhibi-tion and to pesetas. Theirs was a religion of poverty and voluntary sexual and culinary fasting, where repression and restraint, as opposed to the submission to appetites and desires, formed the main path leading to vir-tue and heroic austerity. Thus psychoanaly-sis undermined the core of Catholic faith, and the Church was quick to denounce it. Freudian doctrine was shunned not only for being a pseudo-religious enterprise but also for the deterministic and mechanis-tic nature of its methodology. It reminded Spanish intellectuals of the still-fresh po-lemic around naturalism and Darwinian determinism. In fact, Spanish psychiatrists reacted to Austrian-born psychoanalysis and to Freud very similarly to the way in which realist writers had reacted with ironic detachment and irreverent playfulness to French-born naturalism and to Zola as its mighty creator. Ángel Garma, the only true Freudian in the midst of rampant het-erodoxy, specifically warned his colleagues about harmful deviations from Freudian dogma.12 According to him, the works of Freud could only be read after the period of “didactic analysis” and practice was over,

and even then only in the following order, suggested by Hans Sach: The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, Three Es-says on the Theory of Sexuality, and Totem and Taboo (“Cómo se estudia el psicoanálisis” 2–20). Moreover, and in strict observance of Freudian dogma, psychoanalysis simply did not tolerate the capriciously eclectic ap-proach that had become the rebellious land-mark of Freudianism a la española.13

Turn-of-the-century Spain’s persistent eclecticism vis-à-vis psychoanalysis can be interpreted in many different ways. Of course, Garma is at least partially right when he states that Spanish psychiatrists resorted to eclectic methods as a way of showing off their knowledge and their up-to-dateness regarding foreign scientific and medical in-novations. Also, and despite its conservativ-ism, Spanish psychiatry could not escape the influence of the times; it was enmeshed in multisided and rapidly changing moder-nity and its penchant for collage, montage, free (surrealist) associations, and, ultimately, collectionism as yet another popular form of consumerism. Thus psychiatrists also collected, consumed, and made their own collages with whatever clinical theories and methodologies were available to them and appealed to their particular taste. Finally, there is a peculiar gesture of rebelliousness in collage and eclecticism, always eager to turn reality upside down and to annul prior hierarchies. Spaniards reacted against Freudianism not so much by ignoring it as by carelessly mixing it together with other approaches to human psychology. We should not forget, however, that Spaniards rebelled against Freud for morally conservative rea-sons and that their seemingly capricious col-lage carefully excluded all the fragmentary components (Freudian and otherwise) that

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did not fit their reactionary agenda. The missing elements in the Spanish version of psychoanalysis are pansexualism, secular confession as therapeutic method, and in-fantile sexuality. Psychoanalysis was accused of pansexu-alism from the moment it entered Spain until the Franco period. In 1913, psychiatrist Rafael del Valle y Aldabalde concluded his ar ticle “El psicoanálisis de Freud” (Freud’s Psychoanalyis) by saying that “the most se-rious objection that has been made not so much to psychoanalysis but to Freud’s ideas is the exclusive importance the latter attri-butes to the sexual factor in the development of many psychopathic symptoms” (214). In 1914, Fernández Sanz included among his twelve arguments against psychoanalysis the excessive importance attributed to sexu-ality, and in a 1915 review of Fernández Sanz’s book, E. Gómez Merino stressed that “Freud’s theory is really extravagant and arbitrary because it attributes all hysterical phenomena to a psychic trauma of sexual origin” (qtd. in Carles et al. 49). Not surpris-ingly, when in 1919 Lafora offered a brief ac-count of the Spanish reception of Freudian psychoanalysis, he was forced to conclude that

although modern criticism has accepted many of Freud’s points of view (such as the importance of the subconscious, the intervention of childhood memories in the life of the psyche, the reality of repressed complexes and their symbolic manifestation in dreams, impulsive acts, jokes, slips, and psychoneurotic symp-toms) . . . , it rejects [however] the idea that the sexual is the final cause of all these psychological mechanisms. In other words, it opposes the psychoanalytic theory of Freud and his school. (Qtd. in Carles et al. 77)

Lafora himself felt that “psychoanalysis ex-aggerates the importance of the sexual” but nonetheless admitted that “it has done well in highlighting its importance” (qtd. in Car-les et al. 72–73). Marañón adopts a similarly cautious attitude: “Although with reserva-tions, we share Freud’s idea of the exten-sion of sexual functions to fields of human activity that do not have direct or apparent links to the reproductive moment per se” (qtd. in Carles et al. 77). The cathartic nature of psychoanalysis and its soul-probing sessions was another reason for concern among Spaniards, par-ticularly because it led to the embarrassing revela tion of sexual secrets. Ortega felt uneasy about Spaniards (particularly upper-class Spanish ladies) suddenly talking sex, and he therefore argued, apparently in accordance with the Jesuits, that Spain did not need psychoanalysis, since the Catholic Church already provided a similar service. Certainly, psychoanalysis competed with Catholicism in the delicate matter of confession, a holy sacrament according to the Catholic faith, and Freudianism dared to put it to mundane use. The divan (a highly frivolous object in itself, whose Oriental origin makes it even more alluringly sinful and suspicious) con-sistently defies the superego, while the con-fessional (little more than a narrow closet) attempts to reinforce repression and to keep desires and sins within its dark walls. The confessional is an undoubtedly sexual space, one whose erotic potential has been explored by Spanish writers, such as realist novelists Eduardo López Bago and Leopoldo Alas (alias “Clarín”), contemporary poet and fic-tion writer Ana Rossetti, and film director Pedro Almodóvar. Hence the explicit hori-zontality of the imported divan is particu-larly aggravating to Spanish morals because it is a reminder of the vertical/erect structure

H i s t or i c i z i ng E r o s 55

of the confessional and the fellatio position of a woman/sinner obediently kneeling in front of a comfortably seated man/priest. Not surprisingly, the confessional also ex-hibits Oriental-sensual features: the wooden lattice that barely separates the priest from his “victim” and the penetrating aroma of the incense gathering new strength in its narrow confinement. Still, the man in black, whose virility lamely retreats behind the priestly cassock, seems less threatening than the doctor and psychiatrist in white. Priestly concupiscence becomes neutralized into a literary and cultural stereotype; both the upper and lower classes saw it as a rather harmless and somehow avoidable nuisance, hardly a real menace to female virtue. But the entirely new and shocking scenario of a female patient at the mercy of a secular soul healer and his unquenchable thirst for sexual details upset Spanish patriarchy. Gayarre, who was the first Spanish scientist to write on Freudian theory in 1909, closed that ar-ticle with a cautionary remark. Although he concedes that the “cathartic method” has probably cured many cases of hysteria and neurosis, he believes it is necessary to prove that such a method is indispensable for recovery. In that case, one would have no choice but to apply it and to set aside any res-ervations, no matter how laborious it would be to listen to so many exhaustive confes-sions. However, Gayarre is not convinced that psychoanalysis is the only cure for psy-chic ailments. He deems it necessary to look for other venues first before following such a “perilous path.” According to the Spanish psychiatrist, the adoption of the psycho-analytic method would force neurology to get rid of all its ethical prejudices, in the same way in which gynecology, if needed, has to renounce any sense of modesty (Carles et al. 25).

Psychoanalysis’s confessional strategy, it seems, never stopped making medical au-thorities furious:

The people who with 10- or 12-year-old girls, and knowing well how the young ladies of the Spanish middle class are educated, do not hesitate to ask them if they masturbate, if they do it with the left hand or the right, if they dream about something long which, translated into the language of psychoanalysis, could only mean the virile member of their esteemed father—in reality these people are not even worth bothering with. I would like to see one of these psychoanalysts whose mother, or sister, or daughter, or wife was ill with symptoms of neurosis, en-trust them to another psychoanalyst who would prove to him that everything was due to the fact that she could not satisfy her sexual anxieties or desires with an in-timate friend of her husband. (Villaverde, qtd. in Carles et al. 106)

One could always argue that priests too have a strange fixation with the sixth command-ment, and do not flinch from regularly in-quiring whether little girls (and boys) have committed impure acts or have had impure thoughts, even systematically doubting the victims if their answer is in the negative. If psychoanalysis is pansexual, so is Catholi-cism. However, there are important distinc-tions to be made. First, the priest’s curiosity in sexual conduct (or misconduct) aims at consolidating repression for the sake of spiri-tual salvation, while the psychoanalyst’s in-terest in sexual behavior seeks the opposite goal of lifting repression in order to find the real cause of spiritual suffering. Second, sexual behavior according to Catholicism is always a matter of conscience, whereas

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psychoanalysis sees sexuality as inextricably enmeshed with the subconscious, thus free-ing humans from any direct responsibility for their sexual sins. Third, the priest has the ultimate power of bestowing forgiveness on the repenting sinner, whereas the psycho-analyst, a powerless and nonauthoritarian figure, cannot really “cure” the patient, but can only witness her self-healing through endless talk. Women have so often been criticized for talking too much and instructed to remain prudently silent that the “talking cure” must have appeared especially odd to misogynist detractors of psychoanalysis. Spanish patri-archy resented the passive (and thus femi-nine) attitude of the psychoanalyst in the face of the seemingly unstoppable logorrhea of the divan-ridden lady. Not only does the psychoanalyst miss the chance of authorita-tive (and authoritarian) intervention, but he himself has to play the disenfranchised role of a patient before becoming a doctor. Ángel Garma, one of the few unconditional fol-lowers of psychoanalysis in early twentieth-century Spain, specifically stressed that if prospective psychoanalysts really wanted to understand how the subconscious of oth-ers worked, they first needed to undergo psycho analysis themselves (“Cómo se estu-dia el psicoanálisis,” 218). Garma’s emphasis was deliberate, since he was only too aware of the reluctance on the part of his colleagues to depose their professional arrogance, even for a short time, and to humbly bare their (sexual) souls. Lying on divans and confess-ing to mental illness turned professional men into effeminate weaklings babbling away their most intimate (homosexual?) secrets in front of another male colleague. It was worse than having women—specifi-cally upper-class females—openly reveal their own perhaps not-so-clean sexual life

and, unavoidably, the sexual inadequacies of their male counterparts. Moreover, to tell a psychiatrist that in order to become a doc-tor he first had to be a mental patient would have been akin to telling a missionary that in order to spread the holy word he first had to be an infidel “savage.” Early twentieth-century Spanish intel-lectual, moral, and political authorities were particularly afraid that the blurring of well-established boundaries regarding class, gen-der and race would give way to an entirely new national landscape dominated by up-ward mobility and the rebellion of the masses. Moreover, Spanish intelligentsia feared that the increasing trend of defining normalcy through the lengthy description of what was considered deviant would result ultimately in the normalization of abnormalities of all sorts. In other words, it was self-defeating to stress sexual hetero normativity through the obsessive analysis of countless sexual perver-sions, just as it was to define wealth through the fastidious depiction of poverty and squa-lor. It was similarly counterproductive to underscore whiteness/Castilianness through folklorist emphasis on non-whiteness and Andalusian exoticism, or to feature hyper-sexual childhood as the suddenly relevant erotic threshold to adulthood. As I noted above, Ortega was eager to preserve his own privileges, which is to say the prerogatives of the ruling Spanish patri-archy. He repeatedly warned against what he considered a typical product of nineteenth-century ideology—namely, endlessly dwell-ing on the abnormal, while neglecting to describe normalcy. According to sexologi-cal and psychoanalytical findings, sexual normalcy already contained small doses of what would ultimately result in perversion if found in greater quantity or intensity: “Every human individual has a disposition

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toward perversion. . . . The only thing that sets perverts apart from normal people is the greater intensity of their abnormal passions” (Garma, “Consideraciones psicoanalíticas” 545). But how much is too much? Where to draw the line ultimately becomes a furiously subjective and often arbitrary decision. As a result, the originally narrow territory occupied by sexual normalcy tends to expand and grow, until it barely leaves any room for perversion. Suddenly, homosexuality becomes a nor-mal occurrence. Moreover, children become sexual beings, a “shocking” development that Spanish society was quick to denounce.14

Sexology and particularly psycho analysis took sexuality out of the confessional and into the open, and allowed sexual intimacy to enter the public domain via “science.” The

increasing medicalization of multifaceted non-heteronormative sexual behavior (the sexuality of children included) contributed to its popularization and hence legitimiza-tion. No longer under the exclusive authority of the Church, sexuality became a matter of serious concern to the state, particularly in a country where national and individual honor remained tied to heteronormative sexuality. What Villaverde, looking to explain Span-ish hostility toward psychoanalysis, euphe-mistically calls “the sense of ridicule, which is quite developed among Spaniards,” is nothing more than sheer terror at having the nation suddenly deprived of manhood, female virtue, and the innocence of child-hood through “public” confession of sexual shortcomings and deviations.

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3Sex at a DistanceAmatory Elitisms

Early sexology and psychoanalysis claimed to be sciences devoted to the study of

human sexuality. Thus they dealt with sex as if it were a universal category, seemingly untouched by cultural specificity, social dif-ference, or historical change. In the case of psychoanalysis, as Rita Felski puts it, sexu-ality “was deemed ahistorical and asocial, an archaic impulse welling up from the dark realms of the unconscious” (2). In the case of early sexology, sexuality was considered to be the natural result of certain physiological factors. However, Spanish intellectuals were not fooled. They immediately identified the cultural specificity of German and French sex ology and cast a suspicious eye on danger- ously foreign eros. Once confronted with alien sexual wisdom, Spanish thinkers tended to identify with José Ortega y Gasset’s skeptical attitude toward all things imported: “Today we are all francophiles, anglophiles, and germanophiles. By fault of our own fatal in- attentiveness, we allow bits and pieces of other civilizations to invade our national body. We adopt cultural products; but culture itself—which is cultivation, work, a very conscious and private activity, and not an object, such as a microscope, train, or law—remains out-side ourselves” (“Nueva revista” 145). Ortega also said, “We must create: we want a Spanish interpretation of the world” (138). Thus instead of accepting the suppos-edly universal nature of individual sexuality,

Spanish intellectual leaders became worried about the very specific sexual health of their own nation. They only concerned them-selves with individual (foreign-born) sexual behavior inasmuch as it became a danger to the country as a whole or a telling symp-tom of an ailing Spain. Against the back-drop of imported and supposedly scientific and international sexology, Spanish high- cultural forces tried to preserve and, as Ortega suggested, even create Spanishness.

Sexuality as Ghostly Presence: Ramón y Cajal’s Cuando yo era niño

National honor and proud Spanishness rested not only on vigorous manhood and female purity in the present; it also re-quired a “clean” past. Both psychoanalysis and regenerationism attribute fundamental importance to preterit times, but here the similarities abruptly end. While the former goes back to an intensely sexualized, gender- indeterminate, intrinsically bisexual and therefore impure childhood, the latter be-lieves in a historical past unblemished by sexual flaws and defined by resolute gender differentiation, in which women are naturally virtuous and chaste (and thus unequivocally feminine) and men exhibit unquestioned virility and a “healthy” sex drive sublimated into expansionist energy. Not surprisingly, Ortega situated such a memorable past at

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the heart of the Spanish empire and believed that modern Spain as an ailing (female) or-ganism could heal only if it took therapeutic solace from its imperialist golden age:

From 1580 until this day, everything that happens in Spain is decadence and disintegration. The process of incorpora-tion thrives and grows until Philip the Second. The twentieth year of his reign could be considered the dividing line in Peninsular destinies. Spain’s history is ac-cumulative and follows a rising trajectory until it reaches its peak. From there to us, Spain’s history is decadent and dispersive. The process of disintegration advances in a rigorous order from periphery to center. First the Low Countries and the Duchy of Milan break loose, then Naples. At the start of the nineteenth century the great overseas possessions separate from Spain, and at its end, the minor colonies of America and the Far East. In 1900, the Spanish body is back to its native Peninsular nudity. (España invertebrada 128–29)

Despite his transcendental and spiritual approach to all things human and political, Ortega could not refrain from using a sexual-ized metaphor in his patriotic outcry about the tragic fate of the nation. The paragraph above is a striptease of national proportions, reminiscent of the many stripteases (in thea-ters and in print) that became so immensely popular in early twentieth-century Europe and America. Spanish sicaliptic magazines, no less than other frivolous reviews from abroad, were very fond of including photo-graphic vignettes whose rudimentary plots and capricious titles—“La visita de la modelo” (The Model’s Visit), “Desnudándose” (Get-ting Undressed), “Nuestras criadas” (Our

Maids), “¡Por fin solos!” (Alone at Last!), “Gutiérrez, fotógrafo” (Gutiérrez, Photog-rapher), “El momento de acostarse” (Bed-time), “La noche de la boda” (The Wedding Night), “El ‘camerino’ de las artistas” (The Showgirls’ Dressing Room)—added little variety to the ritornello of a woman slowly baring her body to the pleasure of the male voyeur, and invariably proceeding, as Or-tega points out, “from periphery to center.” Moreover, according to the philosopher and political analyst, Spain’s disrobing ceremony continued well beyond the shedding of its last colonial garments. With Catalonia and the Basque provinces aggressively pushing for independence, very soon Castile would have no clothing left to cover her shameful nakedness. And this, of course, was her own fault. As Ortega writes in España invertebrada (Invertebrate Spain), “Castile has made Spain, and Castile has unmade it” (132). The predominantly male readership to which España invertebrada was addressed was equally familiar with popular erotica and thus able to understand the humiliating implications of a stripping nation. It meant not only that Spain/Castile had become a woman of loose morals but that her male in-habitants had been unwilling or unable to de-fend her virtue. The nakedness of a woman/country is ultimately the fault of her men. Disrobed bodies and exploited geographies are only a source of pleasure when they in-volve someone else’s women and homeland. The ultimate irony of Ortega’s nationalist striptease lies in the fact that Spain, after her colonialist shopping spree, looked more like a well-nourished and even better-dressed lady (or cocotte, perhaps) than like an ema-ciated, naked body. According to popular wisdom, Queen Isabella the Catholic prom-ised not to change into a fresh camisole until Spain was united and reconquered and the

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Jews and Moors at last expelled from Chris-tian soil. In fact, when she triumphantly put on new clothes, symbolically speaking, they had oversized pockets attached to them in which to place the gold of the Indies. If one were to search for naked and raped ladies, dishonored countries, and hungry bod-ies, one would have a better chance finding them across the Atlantic. Ortega’s reactionary imperialist nos-talgia and anti-autonomist stance appears wrapped in fashionable modernity. He is familiar not only with Parisian striptease and vaudeville but also with freshly invented cinema. The Spanish philosopher admired cinema’s ability to picture processes other-wise invisible to the human eye, such as the unfolding of botanical growth:

Among the new emotions created by the cinema, there is one that would have fascinated Goethe. I am referring to the films that reduce the whole generative process of a plant to a brief moment. Between the germinating seed and the flower that opens on its stem like the crown of plant perfection, too much time goes by in Nature. . . . The fact is that cinema adapts our vision to the slow growth of a plant, thus making it possible that the development of the latter acquires the continuity of a gesture. (España inver-tebrada 127, 128)

He then applies the same cinematographic technique, and the same image of a gesture standing for condensed time, to Spanish history:

I imagine that cinema could be applied to History, so that the last four centuries of Spanish life would pass before our eyes, . . . condensed into brief moments.

With these innumerable events squeezed up against each other and melded into a curve without gaps or discontinuities, the history of Spain would acquire the expres-sive clarity of a gesture, and the contem-porary occurrences with which that broad gesture concludes would become self-explanatory, like cheeks contracting in anguish, or a hand falling in defeat. (128)

When Ortega plays with the idea of Goethe’s probable delight in cinema and its time-condensing talents, he is of course refer-ring to the German writer’s Über die Meta-morfose der Pflanzen (On the Metamorphosis of Plants) and, implicitly, to the heated po-lemics that the sexual life of plants provoked among eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century scientists and botanists, from R. J. Camerarius, the true discoverer of sexuality in plants in 1695, to Carl Linnaeus, Johann Georg Siegesbeck (Linnaeus’s infamous de-tractor), and Wilhelm Hofmeister. In 1922, the year España invertebrada was published, plants had ceased to scandalize the Church and church-abiding scientists with their sexu ally active lives. In fact, and as anecdotal evidence, Francoist pedagogy found plants to be a perfect means of sexual education (and miseducation). The resemblance of their reproductive organs to those of humans was so remote that both the knowledge and the obscenity born out of “excessive” wisdom could be avoided. As students of that era, we all watched in utter confusion boring docu-mentaries of the unfolding flowers and leaves that Ortega so much admired, and learned nothing sexual from them—precisely what the Francoist school system intended. Ortega found botanical eros particularly useful in explaining historical development. He points out with patriotic enthusiasm that any sick organism (Spain included) can regain

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its health if it comes from a “good” seed and returns to it (Castile—proud, chaste, poor, and manly—is the good seed of Spain as a nation). Cinema not only concentrates time but also rewinds it. The sinking hand Ortega employs as a metaphor for a sinking country can always be played back to its former tri-umphant gesture, and wrinkles of anguish can miraculously disappear to disclose a radiant face. Individual lives and nations both require healthy seeds to sprout from and to come back to. Thus, just as regenerationists, noventayochistas, and later Francoist ideo-logues resorted to the passionate idealization of a glorious past as the most effective way to inject new life into the en feebled iden-tity of a country, individual identities also needed to treasure memories of past purity and perfection if they wanted to regain their original vigor. This faintly (proto)fascist and eugenicist discourse (a prelude to full-blown fascist propaganda during Francoism), in which nations are considered bodies and living organisms and bodies become impli-cated in the health (or lack thereof ) of the nation, permeated Spanish sexual rhetoric at the beginning of the twentieth century. Ac-cording to such rhetoric, childhood as the past of adulthood must be kept as pure and free from any sexual undertones as in Or-tega’s idealized Castile. Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s succinct ac-count of his childhood, Cuando yo era niño . . . La infancia de Ramón y Cajal contada por él mismo (When I Was a Child . . . Ramón y Cajal’s Childhood Told by Himself, 1925), is a textbook example of a painstakingly desexualized childhood as an unquestion-able requisite to austere and spiritual Nobel Prize–winning adulthood. If there was ever any sexual energy during Ramón y Cajal’s early years, it was sublimated into activities of a higher order, such as painting (which he

did against his father’s wishes) and passion-ate nature-watching escapades (which kept his mother in constant fear for his safe re-turn). According to his account, the illustri-ous Spanish scientist was born the first day of May 1852 in Petilla de Aragón, a poor rural enclave of the province of Navarre sur-rounded by a harsh and unforgiving land-scape. From the church, one sees an impos-ing mountain, so big that it fills up almost the whole horizon, its summit crowned with colossal rocks and the ruins of a castle. The bare slopes of the mountain, the only arable land available to the people of Petilla, seem to be striped with endless, narrow fields laid out in terraces and laboriously protected from the floods by thick buttresses. The peasants live in miserable hovels, and they spend their whole lives struggling just to survive. Ramón y Cajal stresses that, unfortunately, his na-tive village is not an exception. The great majority of Spain’s peasants live in similar dire conditions. Their ignorance is only one of poverty’s consequences and their struggle is truly heroic: “Oh, the heroic peasants of our unforgiving tablelands! We should love them dearly. They have done the miracle of populating sterile regions from which other more comfort-loving people would have run away as if from the plague” (14). The scene Ramón y Cajal describes is a mise en abyme, very much to the taste of leading intellectuals at the end of the cen-tury, of a childhood reduced to the “mascu-line” essentials of an epic hero: proud aus-terity, quixotic chastity, valiant tolerance of adverse circumstances, heroic determina-tion, and unflinching perseverance. Later in the autobiographical account, Ramón y Cajal adds the unappealing moral silhou-ettes of authoritarian teachers, stern men-tors, and a particularly merciless father to the harsh landscape and dire living conditions.

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Ultimately, these obstacles to happiness turn out to be blessings in disguise, setting the boy on the “right course” toward virility and the moral integrity of his adult life. The father in particular showed no patience whatsoever with early signs of “effeminate” weakness, such as the boy’s intense plea-sure in beauty and form, so evident in his passion for nature and painting and in his later fascination with photography. Instead, the father vigorously fostered his son’s eager interest in “dry” science and, being a doc-tor himself and an autodidact of sorts, put particular emphasis on teaching his son anatomy. These lessons on anatomy turned out to be a particularly gruesome episode in Ramón y Cajal’s autobiographical account, a telling proof of the degree to which any childhood aiming at true exemplarity had to be cleansed of sexual underpinnings. In modern Western culture from the Renaissance onward, anatomy lessons soon spilled over from science to visual art and became a pictorial convention often tinted with explicit sexuality and misogyny. From Vesalius’s Fabrica in 1543, which depicts the dissection of “the abdomen of a woman within a great (probably imaginary) theatre” (Kemp and Wallace 23), to the many ana-tomical wax figures of the eighteenth cen-tury kept in the “collezione ceroplastica del Museo ‘La Specola’ ” in Florence (Düring and Poggesi), to Brouillet’s famous pictorial ac-count of Une leçon de clinique à la Salpetrière (1887), to Helnwein’s contemporary ironic revision of the genre in his large-scale paint-ing Epiphany III (Presentation at the Temple) (1998), artistic versions of anatomy lessons from the sixteenth century to our days show an overwhelming preference for the female body. As Jonathan Sawday succinctly puts it, “Anatomia was a woman. We [can see] her allegorized and enthroned on the title-page

of Julius Casserius’ Tabulae anatomicae of 1627 . . . where she sits flanked by Diligentia and Ingenium, holding a mirror and a skull: an elaboration on the traditional vanitas fig-ure” (183). The morbid abundance of dead female flesh (and spirit) skillfully cut and rearranged in front of a predominantly male audience became a modern spectacle, in which the dissection table simultaneously and dis-turbingly reminded the viewer of torture chambers, birthing rooms, deathbeds, wed-ding nights, sumptuous bordellos, and even psychoanalytic divans. Anatomia was a vain woman indeed, eager to display her disquiet-ing beauty in public. According to Martin Kemp and Marina Wallace,

Dissection of the human body . . . was for much of its history not primarily a techni-cal process conducted for teaching, re-search, or autopsies. Nor were dissections most commonly undertaken in the pri-vacy of dissecting rooms in medical insti-tutions. Rather, the opening up of a body was a ritual act, a performance staged for particular audiences with carefully moni-tored frameworks of legal and religious regulation. The most prominent dissec-tions were staged as public or semi-public performances in specially constructed “theatres.” . . . The audience was as likely to consist of curious non-specialists as of aspiring or actual members of the medi-cal profession, and the interior wonders of the body were rendered open to view in sequence according to a pre-determined choreography. The professor acted as the master of the performance, which was generally conducted according to the plot of a set text that was being read out loud to the eager press of spectators. The actual acts of cutting might well be performed

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by a practical dissector rather than by the august professor himself. . . . Such staged events, exuding an exciting aura of won-der and morbid fascination, are a far cry from the low-key privacy and professional exclusivity of the modern dissecting room in a medical school. (23)

They are also a far cry from the sui generis anatomy lesson staged by Ramón y Cajal as a child with his father as the “august profes-sor” and “master of the performance”:

The summer of 1868 is of great impor-tance in my life, since it is closely linked in my memory to my initiation into the study of anatomy. My father . . . was a skilled surgeon, precisely because he was very competent in dissection and in the study of human anatomy. He used to say that successful surgeries owe more to the exploration of cadavers than to the read-ing of books. “You will find the study of bones tiring and dry,” he would say, “but you will discover in it a clear introduction into the knowledge of medicine.” . . . My father thought that to study the bones on paper, that is, to memorize them, was not a good method: it was necessary to study them directly, in real life. But how could one acquire the materials necessary for study? One night, when the moon was full, master and pupil [Ramón y Cajal and his father] sneaked out of the house and assaulted the walls that surrounded the lonely cemetery. In a hollow on the ground, they saw several skeletons stick-ing out of the ground, a jumbled chaos of bones half-buried in the grass. The discovery of these human remains made a huge impression on me! Under the faint moonlight, these skulls partially covered with gravel, and with thistles and nettles

irreverently climbing on them, somehow reminded me of the ribs of a wrecked ship stranded on the beach. Taking a hold of our emotions, we started col-lecting out of that repository of human shells skulls, ribs, pelvises, and the most intact femurs, pearly and shiny. While climbing the walls of the cemetery again, with the funereal load on our backs, fear made me quicken my steps. But nothing marvelous or fantastic happened during that macabre episode. In fact, to make it all perfectly ordinary, not even the red-dish glow of the will-o’-the-wisp made its appearance. It took us little time to start with the inventory and study of the fune-real remains. (139, 140, 141)

Ramón y Cajal, who in his own words would later become “dissector in Zaragoza [and] professor of anatomy in Valencia,” likes to think that these achievements owe a great deal to “that basic knowledge on osteology acquired in a barn” (140). Furthermore, a photograph of “Santiago Ramón y Cajal en una clase de anatomía” (Santiago Ramón y Cajal during an Anatomy class) circa 1915, taken by the famous photographer Al-fonso, is a confirmation that Ramón y Cajal wanted to be remembered as a dissector (Fig. 3.1). It also shows that the Spanish scientist and Nobel Prize winner felt part of a great scientific-theatrical tradition—that of dis-sections as public performances—endorsed by art (Kemp and Wallace). Apparently, Ramón y Cajal’s anatomy lesson was not a real event but a staged occurrence, inspired by Rem-brandt’s famous Anatomy Lesson of Professor Tulp (1632, Fig. 3.2). Thus from beginning to end, Ramón y Cajal’s dealings with anatomical dissection were surrounded by a puzzling aura of ille-gitimacy. Dissection is either “faked,” as in

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Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.2

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Alfonso’s photograph, or a crime committed during adolescence and later acknowledged in an autobiography. Ramón y Cajal never questioned the strange nature of his first les-sons of anatomy, which led to the desecra-tion of funerary tombs in the darkness of night and took place in a barn, reminiscent of sexual activity and erotic bliss. Popu-lar sicalipsis frequently resorted to barns as the appropriate background for sexual ex-perimentation. For example, in Julio Abril’s erotic novelette La virginidad de Juanita (Juanita’s Virginity), Juanita, the main char-acter, routinely hides behind a haystack to read erotica and masturbate (see Fig. 6.55). Not only is the barn the stereotypical scenario of countless literary and filmic love scenes, particularly in popular culture, but real people of the period also liked to frolic amid haystacks, according to the confessions Havelock Ellis compiled in his “sexual histo-ries.” As one man recounted, “My experience of sexual matters began early. When I was about 10 years of age a boy friend who was staying with us told me that his sister made him uncover his person, with which she played and encouraged him to do the same for her. He said it was great fun, and suggested that we should take two of my sisters into an old barn and repeat his experience on them” (qtd. in Amezúa, Historias sexuales 43). Interestingly, the same circumstances that surround these first experiments in the sexual anatomy of flesh—the warmth of summer, the darkness and secrecy of the night, the routine visits to a barn as the per-fect place to hide and to acquire (forbidden) knowledge—also accompany young Ramón y Cajal’s first incursions into the chaste anatomy of bones. The semantic formula is the same (barn + night + summer + secrecy + pedagogy), its erotic potential so charged that even skeletons acquire sex appeal.

Ultimately, both the adult Ramón y Cajal (writing about his life as a boy) and his father fail miserably in their heroic and combined effort to desexualize childhood. Sexuality shines eerily through bones and death. Compare this guilty secrecy over a bunch of dry bones with the utterly uninhibited and public nature of bodily dissections described by Kemp and Wallace. Open exercises in dissection gave the (female) body and flesh a new sense of legitimacy. The public acknowl-edgment of its value as an object of scientific inquiry forced the audience to see beyond its nakedness and overt sexual meanings. Con-versely, Ramón y Cajal’s guilty sequestering and secretive handling of bones and skulls makes it look very much like a shameful act of obscenity. He was, at that time, fifteen or sixteen years old and undoubtedly much more intrigued by sexuality and flesh than by death and bones. His father, clearly aware of this fact and probably scared by it, used “inverse anatomy” as a sexual deterrent. Instead of cutting through skin and flesh to finally reach the bones, young Ramón y Cajal was forced to start with the bony struc-ture and go no further than muscles, nerves, and arteries. Flesh and skin were literally left out of the picture: “Guided by my father, who dedicated all his free moments to me, I devoted myself with ardor to the meticulous study of bones and their particular configu-rations. My pencil delighted in instilling life in the inert shells of the human organism by drawing schematically the muscles that had moved them and the veins and arteries that had nourished them” (141–42). Most fathers would have not cared to de-vote their free time to their adolescent sons, aside from the fairly common custom of tak-ing them to whorehouses to facilitate their first sexual encounters. But exemplary child-hoods had to showcase exemplary fathers.

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Desecrating the dead was considered less im-moral than making love to the living. Hence parental authorities should be willing and able to keep their offspring as ignorant of sexual- ity as possible and more knowledgeable about bones than flesh. Accordingly, Ramón y Cajal could not have made his father prouder than when, at the tender age of sixteen, he answered the following—and, given the circumstances, outrageously ridiculous—questions in front of a congregation of medical experts: “What organs go through the sphenoidal sinus and the posterior jugular foramen? At what point on the face is it possible to touch, using the point of a needle, five different bones? What bones form the orbital process of the palate? How many bones are inserted into the iliac crest and the linea aspera of the femur? And many more questions of this nature, that I would answer out at great speed, astonishing those gathered round” (143–44). Sensualitas nonetheless thrives even on bones, sphenoi-dal crevasses, iliums, and femurs for the lack of more fertile ground. With only bones to fantasize about, young Ramón y Cajal en-dows them with the alluring texture of flesh and the sensual coloring of skin. Among the many bones the pillaged cemetery holds, he only picks “skulls, ribs, pelvises, and the most intact femurs, pearly and shiny.” The priority of bones over flesh is more important philosophically than anatomi-cally. It reveals a transcendentalist (Spanish- Catholic) preference for inner, robust truths that are hard and straight as bones, as well as an inborn mistrust of exterior appear-ances and of the natural weakness and sinu-ous imperfection of the flesh. Moreover, in typical noventayochista fashion, it points toward the ultimate superiority of thanatos over eros and the importance of always ex-perimenting with life from the perspective of death, rather than from the distorting

angle of seasonal love. In view of so many bare bones, young Ramón y Cajal certainly learned the basic (and oh so baroque!) lesson of death outlasting desire. Ramón y Cajal’s childhood proudly stands for the perfect prototype of a national past strong enough to support a truly virile national identity. Its limpid asexuality and complete lack of bodily awareness opposes Freud’s hypersexualized children going through obsessive self-exploratory phases and long-lasting sexual indeterminacy. It is not surprising that Spaniards could stomach neither Freudian pansexualism nor his hy-pothesis on infantile sexuality. To attribute even a small degree of veracity to the latter would have been to renounce a dream of na-tional proportions—namely, the grandiose delirium of Spain as an ailing adult organ-ism whose complete recovery nonetheless was still possible because it had a “healthy” (austere, valiant, restrained, starved of food and sex, and radically gender-differentiated) childhood/History (with a capital H) to re-turn to. Still, sexuality is impossible to erase, even from chaste Spanish childhoods like Ramón y Cajal’s. Its ghostly presence (to recall Jo Labanyi’s concept) hides in filmic- botanic unfoldings. It gives dry, brittle bones a pearly hue and the aliveness and texture of flesh. It even adds special luster to boots meant to adorn (and sexualize) the feet of very young ladies. As a paternal punishment for his poor performance in school, Ramón y Cajal was forced to enter the shoemaking business, where he soon showed great skill in manufacturing female boots. The former cobbler’s apprentice recounts how

one day that summer a pretty fourteen-year-old lady entered my boss’s shop. She was the daughter of the Counts

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[of Parcent]. In the midst of the confusion of a recent hunt one of her elegant and tiny ankle boots had come apart at the seams, and she entrusted me, an uncouth cobbler’s apprentice, with the task of mending it. . . . My new boss praised my work highly, and he promised that, if I were to keep making progress like that, he would pay me a day’s wage of two reales, in addition to my food and clothing. In the meantime, and as a way of honoring and praising my dexterity, I was entrusted with the ankle boots of the most vain and finicky ladies, and I took time to work fine decorations into the high and slender heels of their boots. (110, 113).

Ramón y Cajal uses outmoded narrative genres to further desexualize childhood. In his story, awkwardly placed between the Spanish picaresque novel and the north-ern European fairytale, even high-heeled shoes and female boots—sexual fetishes par excellence—lose part (though not all) of their sex appeal to archaic literary convention. Once again, sexuality rarely erupts with full force on the surface, but it does not entirely vanish. A phantasmic presence, it casts its pale shadow on all things vital. It falls upon young Ramón y Cajal’s hands, devotedly working on a shoe and carving arabesques into its heel, suggesting the image of male hands caressing female feet and leaving an indelible imprint on a woman’s body. This scene sublimates sexuality into work. Such work was often recommended (especially by Marañón) to young Spanish males. But in an unintended boomerang effect, the image unveils sexuality and eroticizes work. The old-fashioned literary mannerisms coupled with strategies of sublimation in Ramón y Cajal’s childhood have nothing in common with the unabashedly straight-

forward manner and uninhibited style of the increasingly popular sexual histories. Ellis had made the important shift from clinical sexual histories to nonclinical sexual histories—and thus from erotic anomaly to sexual normalcy—when he decided to col-lect and later publish the sexual biographical accounts covering the childhood and adoles-cence of what he termed “really healthy and normal” individuals of both genders (Histo-rias sexuales 11). Ellis’s sexual histories were soon translated into Spanish and published in 1913 in the different appendixes to the five volumes of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex (Estudios de psicología sexual ). The introductory pages of his compila-tion emphasize that, although much time and effort has been devoted to the analysis of the “psychology of sexual perversions,” little or nothing has been done to study the “normal development of sexual emo-tions”—despite the fact that, according to Ellis, “normal” sexuality is surprisingly rich in its manifestation, to the point that it is impossible to find two individuals whose sexual memories are completely identical. Ellis gives two main reasons to justify this effort to compile “healthy” sexual histories. First, normal phenomena are the key to abnormal manifestations, and second, it is impossible to know what is “normal” unless supposedly normal cases have been studied in sufficient numbers (Historias sexuales 11). Ortega, who as we know was a strong ad-vocate of studying normalcy over abnormal-ity, would have liked the new turn Ellis was giving to sex ology, if these newly compiled sexual histories had not looked dangerously similar to the old clinical histories of sexual perverts. Ironically enough, normative sexu-ality turned out to be an endless string of sexual perversions, including obsessive mas-turbation (the most quoted sexual practice),

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fellatio, cunnilingus, homosexual inter-course, and even pedophilia and bestiality. Moreover, Ellis’s argument is based on the democratic principle of quantity: goodness and normativity are measured against what the majority does and wishes. Hence, if per-version is widely spread across society, it sud-denly becomes a healthy and perfectly normal practice, a fact that Orteguian elitism found particularly abhorrent. Two related factors of such findings, however, mitigated the possibly demagogic effects among the masses. First, the sexual histories compiled by the British sexolo-gist were all from non-Spaniards. In fact, even clinical sexual histories only sparsely popu-lated Spanish medical books and sexological treatises, and when they did, more often than not they described the case of a foreign-born individual. Second, the Spanish intelligentsia had the “good sense” not to encourage a simi-lar experiment on Peninsular soil.1

Sexuality as Tragedy: Marañón’s Tres ensayos sobre la vida sexual

In “Educación sexual y diferenciación sexual,” Gregorio Marañón’s epic story of sexuality and one of the three essays in his best-selling volume Tres ensayos sobre la vida sexual, first published in 1926, the well-established en-docrinologist develops his far-reaching con-cept of sexual differentiation in the human species. Marañón’s point of departure is not sexual differentiation but its exact opposite, which he refers to as “intersexuality,” “the intersexual state,” and also “the initial bi-sexuality of the [human] organism” (144). According to Marañón, and to numerous foreign experts whose influence he only par-tially acknowledges,

Today, of course, we know that almost no one is absolutely a man or absolutely

a woman. . . . It is evident that every human being is bisexual at the beginning and that it is only afterward that the spe-cific sex we will belong to for the rest of our existence is decided. But this specific sex is almost never absolute, as we have just said: there is no masculinity without its female element, nor femininity without a male element. It is always a mixture of the somatic and functional characteristics of both sexes, although with an enormous predominance of one over the other. (145)

Clearly, Marañón agreed with early sex-ologists, for whom bisexuality is the pres-ence, in the human body, of both male and female components, and disregarded Freud’s interpretation of bisexuality as a psychic rather than biologic occurrence.2 Marañón was an endocrinologist by career and be-lieved in biology as the main explanation for both “normal” and “deviant” sexual be-havior. Moreover, and somewhat contradic-torily, Marañón loved to construct complex biological edifices, only to see them crumble later. A staunch moralist and faithful Catho-lic at heart, despite his liberal facade, Mara-ñón thought that the human will and moral sense could always bend scientific evidence and let certain traditional values, such as monogamy, the “absolute” maternal female, and true virility (firmly based on austerity, sacrifice, and work), win over biological de-terminism and “perverted” mutations. In fact, Marañón’s theory of sexual differentia-tion reads as a monumental epic where, after an initial phase of intersexual hesitation, a dominant sex triumphantly emerges. The “other” sex appears to lose the battle, yet it remains as a pale but insidious ghost, a dor-mant menace, within the body. Hence, the victor ultimately never rests, and struggles to keep his “prisoner” at bay. The loser, in turn,

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never renounces his dream of revenge and ultimate rebellion:

The prevalent sex takes control of the whole organism and leaves its seal on every function and on every organ, in addition to shaping with radical differ-ences the primary sexual characteristics and the reproductive organs. The other sex, the conquered one, atrophies, hides itself; perhaps in some cases it ends up disappearing altogether. But generally it is only sleeping, waiting to catch its rival in a moment of weakness in order to make itself present. We might compare the organism influenced in this way by the two sexes to a nation in which a powerful army subdues a weak people and imposes its own laws and customs on it. The enemy has been destroyed and dominated and lives a precarious existence without any personality. One would say that it is completely extinct, but in reality it still preserves in its obscure catacombs a trace of life, an enduring flame that will tumul-tuously explode in uprisings and protests each time the effectiveness of the tyrant wanes. (Marañón, Tres ensayos 145)

The depiction of human sexual experi-ence as a painful, even tragic, and unfailingly violent epic remains a constant in the three essays of Marañón’s Tres ensayos. In fact, the first paragraph of the prologue to the first edition bluntly refers to sexuality as a pain-inducing “problem,” and to the book as a sort of moral-medical remedy to sexual pain. Marañón’s third essay, “Educación sexual y diferenciación sexual,” takes the belief in sexuality as tragedy to its extreme. Marañón begins his reflections by asking himself and the reader “how and why the noble reproduc-tive instinct becomes, in the hands of man, a

source of endless misery” (136). His answer to these questions becomes a condensed ac-count of what he considers the prototypical sexual biography of any human being who is not “frivolous through and through” (23):

Let us consider our own life, and the lives of those closest to us starting from our childhood. For nearly everyone, the appearance of the sexual instinct is like an unexpected force that propels us and drives us on like an imperious appetite, but it cannot be satisfied like other ap-petites. We turn to our parents, to our teachers, only to receive a vague explana-tion, full of errors that comes to us in the guise of sins, which we did not know about before. Then come the adolescent years, when the instinct has developed and acquired its own organ, whose call causes the entire organism to tremble. The general response to the youth’s anx-ious questioning is a moral maxim or a piece of hygienic advice, both full of ter-rifying threats to the health of the body and the soul. All of this, however, is rarely enough to contain the overflowing impulse that imposes itself on the will by the same law of physics that makes bodies gravitate toward each other. Thus, neither religions nor pedagogical methods offer effective solutions, and one must take as mentor a more precocious friend, a secret book, or one’s own confused instinct, and launch oneself to sail with these uncertain pilots into the lagoon of clandestine love, which bristles with dangers and possibly with debasement. Perhaps, soon after, comes the discovery of a woman who is both lover and friend, and the conflict resolves itself in an environment of physical and moral well-being. However, to say that this solu-tion is the norm for humanity would be

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equivalent to assuming that the indigent masses can get rich playing the lottery. Chance only provides isolated and excep-tional solutions, and it is only by chance—infinitely diluted by opposite cases—that we find the solution to the sexual problem through monogamous union, as demanded by our laws and our religious precepts. The fact is that the large majority of men always remain outside this happy solution. And so comes the daily fight against the rebel instinct or against society, which opposes instinct. Such a man stumbles between asceticism and deceit or a more or less shameful illegality, unless some philosophy, or intense and constant oc-cupation, or a frigid temperament steps in to calm the tempest. Eventually old age comes and with it the sadness of physical decline and of the forced separation from an active sex life by the younger genera-tions, even though the flame of desire may not have gone out yet or still burns with uncommon ardor. (137–38)

This condensed sexual biography of-fers a particularly eloquent portrait of how sexuality was officially viewed and quite fre-quently lived out (by males) in turn-of-the-century Spain. But most important, it shows how leading and highly influential intellec-tuals, considered liberal and even danger-ously subversive thinkers by many, did actu-ally comply with prevailing prejudices and thus contributed to their perpetuation. In accordance with patriarchal views on sexu-ality, Marañón writes at length on the sexual life of the male, from the onset of puberty to old age, but only devotes a brief paragraph to female sexual existence. Under the head-ing “La modalidad femenina de la trage-dia sexual” (The Female Version of Sexual Tragedy), Marañón concedes that

for the women, the [sexual] problem is just as difficult as for the male. It is true that in many cases the lesser impulsive-ness of her instinct and the ease with which, for this very reason, she can divert herself into other social activities which sublimate sexuality—such as teaching, caring for children and the sick, and in a certain sense, even the exaltation of reli-gious fervor—serve to protect her from these problems. However, she has against her the flagrant inferiority which her sex’s biological conditions provide her for confronting love and in addition to these circumstances, which must be accepted as inalterable, she must contend with all the social circumstances, which male egotism and prejudice have gone along creating. (138–39)

In accordance with widespread thinking in early twentieth-century Spain, Marañón believed that female sensuality was less im-petuous than male desire and hence could easily be sublimated into a series of activities (teaching, nursing, praying) from which the male establishment and society at large con-veniently benefit. He also considered female sexuality unavoidably tied to and limited by biological constraints, although he was quick to acknowledge that (male) egoism and social prejudice made matters worse. Despite his sometimes harsh criticism of so-cial injustice and even sheer stupidity, Mara-ñón ultimately relieved society of any lasting sexual responsibility. His final conclusion regarding sexuality was that it would always remain a tragic and painful burden to the human spirit, even if social dogmatism and puritanical close-mindedness were to be removed. As he puts it, “Although much [sexual] disharmony has been created by man and can equally be made to disappear

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by man’s will . . . , it is also true that there are infinite sufferings born under sexuality’s shadow that will never disappear as long as man is man, or in other words, as long as his trunk, so similar to that of a gorilla, supports a head filled with an almost satanic yearning for knowledge” (140–41). Marañón’s view of sexuality as a somber curse and diabolic thirst for knowledge that will forever plague human nature once again falls well within Judeo-Christian sexual pes-simism. By adhering to Judeo-Christianity’s unrelenting essentialism regarding eros, the Spanish thinker condones the wrongdoings of Spanish society. Although unsupportive parents, defective pedagogy, and, ultimately, social hypocrisy do not help, they are only partially to blame for sexuality’s inherent wickedness. Moreover, essentialism ulti-mately deprives Marañón’s sexual theory of any historical, international, or trans-national perspective. Sexuality, it seems, re-mains the same across time and space: “In their essential qualities, the sexual conflicts of a great modern city are scarcely distin-guishable from those of the pre-Christian city, nor do those of a contemporary Euro-pean society differ from those of an African tribe” (140). It never occurred to Marañón (although it did to his contemporary Wen-ceslao Fernández Flórez) that sexuality else-where, or maybe at a different time, could be less somber (and patriarchal).3 He could not conceive of sex as a permanent source of happiness or gender equality; he saw it only as an unrelenting cause of pain and gender discrimination. The Spanish endocrinologist dismissed as “frivolous,” “un-Spanish,” or “un-Castilian” whatever joy could be found in (non-normative) sex within Spanish bor-ders, such as in sicaliptic novelettes, frivo-lous magazines, erotic postcards, and the colorful sexual life of urban bohemia.

In 1929, as a scientific backup to his still best-selling Tres ensayos, Marañón published an extensive and fact-laden medical volume titled Los estados intersexuales en la especie hu-mana (The Intersexual States in the Human Species), later reedited as La evolución de la sexualidad y los estados intersexuales (1930) and translated into English as The Evolu-tion of Sex and Intersexual Conditions (1932). One of the central chapters of the book, “La homosexualidad como estado intersexual” (Homosexuality as Intersexual Condition), starts off by harshly condemning the fact that homosexuality is still considered a crime in many European countries. Mara-ñón is quick to stress that against such a dark backdrop, Spain’s much more clement laws proudly stand out. In an extensive footnote, he states that “our former penal code did not punish homosexuality specifically. Ar-ticles 453 and 454 referred to violation and to indecent assaults, but without specifying whether the sex was homologous or heter-ologous” (Evolution of Sex 164).4 Such a pro-gressive “attitude of [Spanish] legislation,” according to Marañón, “contrasts with the incomprehensible obstinacy with which the theory of homosexual crime is maintained by the codes of Switzerland, Germany, and England.” Of all these unforgiving (and overwhelmingly Protestant) countries, the United Kingdom is by far the worst: “In the latter country [England] the punish-ment inflicted on homosexuals ranges from two years imprisonment with hard labor to penal servitude for life. The harshness with which it is applied was made clear to the whole world in the famous trial of Oscar Wilde, when not even the distinguished international reputation of the accused was accepted as an extenuating circumstance.” Later in the same paragraph, Marañón re-minds the Spanish audience that “not very

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many years ago, a judge in London ordered the destruction of Havelock Ellis’s book on Sexual Inversion.” Furthermore, in the same footnote, Marañón admiringly refers to Luis Jiménez de Asúa’s Libertad de amar y derecho a morir (Free to Love and to Die, 1928) and his account of recent European develop-ments regarding the rights of homosexuals: “In a recent fine book of Jiménez de Asúa is to be found a detailed record of the attempts, hitherto without success, which enlightened men like Gautier and Hirschfeld have made to react against the similar state of things in Switzerland and Germany.” He adds, “This campaign was pressed forward at the Elev-enth International Congress on Sexology and Sexual Reform held in Copenhagen in July 1928. At this congress Pasche Oserskic referred to the suppression of punishment for this offence in the new code of Soviet Russia. On the other hand, Italy under the fascist regime has separated herself from the point of view hitherto common to the Latin countries, and since 1927 homosexuality is regarded as an offence” (164–65). These statements show that Marañón, among other intellectuals such as Jiménez de Asúa, was remarkably well informed about recent international developments regarding homosexuality and the different legislations and attitudes toward it in a variety of Euro-pean countries. They also seem to point to a remarkable open-mindedness on the part of the Spanish doctor, who not only denounces European intolerance but also has harsh words for the Spanish police and their crimi-nal disregard of Spain’s more lenient penal code regarding homosexual behavior: “Un-fortunately in Spain—and it is probably the same elsewhere—police proceedings do not respect the lofty outlook of the law. The po-lice inflict, if not severe punishments, at least degrading and quite useless mortifications

upon homosexuals caught in the raids which are organized from time to time” (165). As one continues to read Marañón’s chap-ter on homosexuality, however, a very differ-ent and less optimistic picture of his sup-posed sexual tolerance emerges. He argues, for example, that “while signs of intersexuality exist in so many human beings that some authors have gone to the point of declaring pure sex to be entirely mythical, neverthe-less, homosexuality is fortunately of rela-tively rare occurrence in the human species” (176). Marañón’s reasoning coincides with the commonly held belief among the inter-national medical community that homo-sexuality, although not a crime, certainly was an illness or, at best and according to Freudian interpretation, an arrested state in normal sexual development. As such, it was not a desirable state. Rather, it was one that needed to be cured or, even better, prevented. Moreover, it was an “ailment” that danger-ously transcended individual pathology and, if found in sufficient numbers of people, jeop-ardized the health of the nation. Here Mara-ñón’s apparent sexual open-mindedness be-comes homo phobic, narrowly patriotic, and “Castilo-centric.” In a footnote he states,

Hirschfeld gives for Germany the figure of 5% of homosexuals in proportion to the total population. Havelock Ellis gives a similar proportion among the ‘liberal, educated, and middle classes of England.’ I can state that in the Latin countries (certainly in Spain) the proportion of homosexuals is much lower than this, as I have already pointed out in my intro-duction to the Spanish edition of Bloch’s book; and since that date a longer experi-ence confirms me in this assertion. Madrid Police Headquarters has been good enough to supply me with the

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official figures of the number of inverts registered in the police records, and the number amounts to only 687 for the whole of Spain. This, of course, is a figure remote from reality, based, no doubt, upon cases of scandalous character. In any case statistics for several provinces are lacking. The official figure of homo-sexuals in Madrid is 298, or .02%. The figures are principally furnished by the following cities: Madrid, 298; Barcelona, 172; Seville, 30; Malaga, 29; Valencia, 23; Cadiz, 15; Murcia, 13; Cartagena, 12. In any event, even with the reservation, which I have made above, the smaller number of inverts in Spain by comparison with Central European countries is noto-rious. This superiority of the Latin races is recognized by all writers on the subject. Bloch has a very curious commentary on the point. “The proof”—he writes—“that homosexuality is not a degeneracy is that it is more frequent among the vigorous German and Anglo-Saxon races than among the Latins.” To start from one’s own superiority, as an incontestable fact, in order to measure universal virtues and defects by this standard is a proceeding not without it humorous aspects. (176)

Humorous or not, the use of the “index of homosexuality” as a way of measuring the health and superiority of a nation or race was a common practice from which Span-iards were not excluded, as this quotation indicates. Bloch construed the following syllogism: Germans and Anglo-Saxons are superior, and there are more homosexuals among them; ergo, homosexuality cannot be degeneration. Marañón’s reflections invert the logic: homosexuality is degeneration, and Latin Countries (Spain, at least) have considerably fewer homosexuals per capita

than their northern European counterparts; ergo, the Latin race (specifically the Spanish race) is morally superior. Within the Spanish national territory, there are further (homo)sexual-racial-geographical distinctions to be made. Although once again Marañón does not say so explicitly, he (together with police authorities) implies that homosexuality is highly noticeable in certain provinces and curiously absent from others. Homosexuality is rampant in Spain’s two sprawling urban centers, Madrid and Barcelona. But it also appears in certain provincial towns, such as Seville, Málaga, Cádiz, Valencia, Murcia, and Cartagena. In other words, sexual degeneration, according to Marañón, is prevalent and visible in the following locations: big cities (foreign and national, contemporary and pre-Christian), African tribal communities, the countries of northern and eastern Europe (Germany, Swit-zerland, England, the Soviet Union), and the Spanish towns of Andalusia (Seville, Málaga, Cádiz) and the Levantine coast (Valencia, Murcia, Cartagena). Within this sexual-topographical map, rural areas, southern European countries (with the exception of “fascist” Italy, as Marañón specifies), and the central and northern regions of Spain remain invisible. Such invisibility is anything but odd; in fact, absence works as a means of highlighting the presence of moral fortitude. Nonrepresented locations—rural enclaves, non-fascist countries of southern European, and, first and foremost, Castile—would in turn become the shining points of an alterna-tive map foregrounding heterosexuality in-stead of homosexuality; mature and “superior” sexual differentiation instead of immature and “primitive” bisexuality; productive mo-nogamy, made possible by an ever-nourishing mother and a tirelessly working paternal fig-ure, instead of sterile promiscuity and sexual

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dissipation in all its multiple forms, includ-ing prostitution, masturbation, same-sex intercourse, and Don Juanism; and, finally, Catholic faith and compassionate regard for the “sick” homosexual instead of puritani-cal Protestantism and its unrelenting cruelty toward the “criminal” sexual invert. According to Merl Storr, early sexolo-gists, Marañón included,

faced the dilemma on the role of perverse sexuality in relation to “race” and “civi-lization”: during the period 1860–1918 there emerged an ambiguous image, representing “homosexual deviance” as both a degenerative syndrome away from an original, heterosexual drive, and a regression into an original, “polymorph” sexuality. On the one hand, perverse sexuality could be seen as a “primitive” phe nomenon which “civilized” people had left behind; on the other, it could be seen as the outcome of industrial modernity’s ill effects upon natural sexuality, and hence as something to which “civilized” people were particularly prone. (14)

This is exactly the attitude of modernist Spain toward civilized/primitive perverse sexuality. In its fervently moralistic nation-alism, it becomes the staunch advocate of sexual virtue, proudly located (like the Ibe-rian Peninsula itself) at an equidistant point between a too-civilized Europe (spoiled by modernity and its highly refined sensual degeneracies) and an excessively primitive Africa, brimming with polymorphous sexual atavisms. This middle stance was later used by the Franco regime to proclaim itself and its country as “the spiritual reservoir of the West.” To reinforce such a difficult and “he-roic” geographical/moral position and to put

emphasis once again on the ultimate for-eignness of too-primitive and too-civilized sexual inversion, Marañón adds scientific visual proof to his hypothesis in Los estados intersexuales. Already in Tres ensayos, Mara-ñón had made a careful distinction between “transitory” and “permanent” bisexuality. The former occurs during transitional phases of sexual development, such as prepuberty and menopause, and therefore is considered a relatively normal phenomenon, even in its more pathological manifestations: “This type of bisexuality presupposes a transi-tory stage in the evolution of a living spe-cies. It is not, therefore, a monstrosity, as previously thought, although socially and clinically speaking it can adopt monstrous forms” (151). According to the Spanish endocrinologist,

In the years that precede puberty, it is not uncommon to see . . . this or that child acquire a peculiar, truly effeminate, obesity that coincides with a sudden halt in the development of its specific organs, perhaps accompanied by the hypertrophy of its rudimentary mammary glands, the raising of the pitch of the voice, and a demonstrated tendency toward the op-posite sex, evident in the gestures, affect, and in the entire psychology. (148)

If prepubescent boys are affected by “feminine pseudo-hermaphroditism” or its attenuated version, “effeminacy,” menopausal women, in return, suffer from “masculine pseudo-hermaphrodism” or, if lucky, from a lighter form of “virilism” (184). Marañón says, “In many [women], femininity appears suddenly to exhaust itself during menopause, and masculine characteristics reappear: fa-cial [and body] hair, corpulence in the torso, the deepening of the voice and hardening

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of the temperament. All of this reveals, in sum, the sleeping male who is awakening” (149). He includes photographic examples of this phenomenon in Los estados intersexuales (Figs. 3.3 and 3.4). Since both transitory prepubescent ef-feminacy and climacteric virilism are nor-mal, Spaniards can easily go through such developmental phases without compromis-ing their own normalcy and hetero sexuality (or, for that matter, the normalcy and het-eronormativity of their country). To get this important point across, Marañón re-sorts to his visual archive, which contains a vast array of pictures of Spanish medical cases that exemplify temporary pathologies. However, when it comes to picturing “per-manent” homosexuality, Marañón includes an image from the Hirschfeld archive, thus

deliberately stressing the fact that Louis II, notorious for his homosexuality, is a foreign king stored in a foreign archive (Fig. 3.5). Because of the graphic nature of many of these photographs and images, Marañón published them in Los estados intersexuales, his scientific volume, but left them out of Tres ensayos, his best seller. He refused to turn science and pedagogy into pornogra-phy. Thus he deliberately tried to distance himself from his “lesser” cousin, pseudo-scientific and obscenity-prone sex advice literature. It remains debatable, however, whether such a distancing effort is even pos-sible.5 Both the sexological manual and the supposedly scientific treatise resort to very similar, if not identical, visual parapherna-lia to make their (not so different) points. Moreover, they engage, via photographic and

Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4

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illustrative materials, in the same propagan-distic, nationalist-moralist rhetoric. Martín de Lucenay, for example, follows Marañón’s example of including only foreign homosex-uals in his sex advice manuals. The visual materials in Los estados inter-sexuales show that Spain is not completely free from temporary and transitional inter-sexuality. But they also emphasize that lasting intersexuality and therefore homo-sexuality and inversion do not fare well in Spain. They are only to be found abroad, in “overcivilized” northern Europe (Fig. 3.5) or in “ultraprimitive” Africa, as demonstrated by the erotic postcard genre (Fig. 3.6). Sexual historical and geographic contin-gency all too often succumb to unchanging mythology in Spain. Certain sexual ideals in Marañón’s thought, such as monogamy

and sexual differentiation, reveal a timeless quality and a long-standing debt to Span-ish tradition. Not surprisingly, Ramón Pérez de Ayala, in his introductory essay to the third edition of Tres ensayos (1927), compares the work to Fray Luis de León’s marriage manual La perfecta casada (The Perfect Wife) and even considers it a neces-sary addition to the sixteenth-century work: “Up until now, Fray Luis de León’s The Per-fect Wife was placed in the hope chests of wives to be. From now on, next to it, we must tuck in Marañón’s book” (22). Pérez de Ayala’s comparison was in-tended as a compliment, but today it seems less positive. Indeed, it indicates that Mara-ñón’s assessment of “the sexual problem” is very much like Fray Luis de León’s in its staunch conservatism and patriarchy-abiding

Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6

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recommendations. As with La perfecta casada, Tres ensayos not only defends heterosexuality and monogamy but also insists on the sepa-rate roles men and women play within mar-riage. While men’s highest goal should be work (and to a lesser degree, sports), women should strive only for maternity. Sexuality thus only loses part of its tragic flair when channeled into production. “Real” women “produce” children in order to give citizens to the homeland and legitimate meaning to their own lives. “Real” men produce mate-rial wealth and spiritual validation through work. Only sexually undifferentiated and therefore inferior or sexually immature be-ings (such as homosexuals, childless women, and promiscuous, philandering, and hence sterile seducers, like Don Juan) fail to put sexuality to good use. Despite Marañón’s enthusiastic solidar-ity with the Republican cause and the ex-plicit sexual content of some of his texts, his Tres ensayos as well as his works on Don Juan as an effeminate weakling were widely read and never really censored during Fran-co’s dictatorship. Thus, there is an uninter-rupted tradition of sexual regulation con-necting Fray Luis de León with Marañón that thrived during Francoism and that even continues into certain aspects of contempo-rary democratic Spain. Tradition, particu-larly the so-called Spanish tradition, is an important concept in Marañón’s thought. Even when he introduces liberal ideas in his works (such as a certain tolerance toward homosexuals and single working women), these are firmly embedded in the purpose and language of Spanish/Castilian tradition. Marañón is always mindful that Spaniards have to distinguish themselves from the rest of the “civilized” world (Europe) by adopt-ing a certain heroic attitude toward sex. Very much in the spirit of regenerationism, he

also refuses to forget Spain’s glorious imperial past or to acknowledge that the colonial ven-ture was anything less than the achievement of spiritual fortitude and moral bravery. If the savage unknown abroad—the feminized American continent, Andalusia as Castile’s Moorish and erotic-exotic hinterland—could be conquered, why not apply the same tools and rhetoric to conquering this savage un-known—namely, the equally female and dangerous “dark continent” (in Freudian terms) of sexuality? Not surprisingly, the belligerent style Marañón uses to narrate the triumph over sexual tragedy and the victory over sexual undifferentiation appealed with equal force to the masses and the intellectual elite (and later to the Francoist intelligentsia). Collec-tive memory retained the notion of Spain as an empire, with Castile as its brave leader, and Spain still mourned the recent loss of its last colonies. Hence, to hear about sexu-ality in the vigorous, nostalgia-fueling, and politically relevant terms of battles, con-quests, tragic defeats, and heroic victories restored Spain’s patriotic pride. It reminded Spaniards that Indians, Muslims, Jews, and sexual perverts were all alike: they existed to be valiantly repressed. In the sexual arena, only a strong race and nation, with sufficient proof of a heroic past and spiritual stamina, could repeat the superb feats that profusely embellished its military, political, and reli-gious history. As expected, the same epithets that were traditionally applied to the valiant soldier and Spanish/Castilian hidalgo also adorn Mara-ñón’s sexual hero. He is austere—clear proof of his strong virility and sexual differentiation—and stands in sharp contrast to Don Juan, who embodies the modernist, Europeanized city’s “effeminate” love for material excess and sensual energy:

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Don Juanism is just that, scaling convent walls, fighting, getting drunk, and steal-ing your friend’s woman. It is everything that there is in love in our cities of fri-volity, of a superficial sensuality, of weak-ness in the struggle for life and, in sum, a lack of austerity, which is the essentially masculine virtue. We emphasize the para-dox that, in general, austerity, a virtue of continence, is the virtue that presupposes, precisely, a greater will, a greater strength. In the same way that nearly all vices and outrageous forms of conduct, which seem to be the result of an overflowing viril-ity, actually indicate a meager supply of energy. This is particularly applicable to love. The men or women who are austere in their sexual lives are the ones who pos-sess the greater treasure of specific sexual-ity. (Tres ensayos 175)

Like Don Quixote, Marañón’s sexual hero is monogamous and forever in love with only one woman. Also like Don Qui-xote, he is intensely spiritual and austere; he constantly sublimates sexuality to higher goals, such as the well-being of the family and the nation. Most important, he fights unrelentingly against his inner sexual enemy (the “other,” dormant sex), just as Christians fought against the Muslims and the Jews, who remained only partially subdued and still living within Spanish territory, and just as later the victorious Francoist regime would remain conscious of silenced but nonetheless ever-present rojos (reds, or communists). Thus sexual heroes, no less than Christians and Francoists, constantly remain on their guard against insurrection and insidious betrayal:

[Nothing] can free us from the com-pany of a representation of the other sex that, as we now know, accompanies us,

permeating our very selves, and like an in-visible spirit lays a trap at every step for the integrity of our instinct. Every man, or the great majority of them, carries a phantom woman—not in his imagination, which perhaps then would be easy to expel—but circulating in his blood; and every woman carries a more or less concrete phantasm of a man. This internal sketch of a man or woman, not the outer ones made of flesh and bones, is the one that leads us to suf-fering and sin. (Marañón, Tres ensayos 142)

All these “manly” virtues or strategies—austerity, monogamous love, and, particularly, spiritual fortitude against the phantasmic sexual other—perfectly fit old-fashioned Spanish/Castilian morals. Marañón only reinforces their value through scientific le-gitimization: “This notion of the other sex within that alters the purity of the legitimate sex is a transcendental achievement of mod-ern science” (Tres ensayos 142). Moreover, he cleverly refashions imported sexual “science” into a political and nationalist discourse by turning contemporary foreign-born medical hy potheses and debates on bisexuality, her-maphroditism, and sexual differentiation into an epic tale strongly reminiscent of the old military feats of the Spanish empire. Marañón also adds work ethic to the concoction of recycled sexual science and revived imperialist epics. Work was consid-ered a despicable activity among the Spanish nobility of the Golden Age. Work’s negative connotation, anchored in class elitism, lin-gered in the collective memory during the first quarter of the twentieth century. The idealization of work that arrived with the so-cialist ideologies in the late nineteenth cen-tury was another imported commodity and was thus looked upon with suspicion. Like sexology, it was the product of eastern and

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northern Europe and one of the ideological cornerstones of Protestantism and nascent capitalism. As the cradle of the Counter-Reformation, Spain had little regard for the work ethic, a situation that contributed to its belated modernization as a capitalist state. Like so many liberal thinkers of the time, Marañón deplored these circumstances and tried to change the long-standing negative attitude of Catholic Spain and its social elites toward work in order to effect social and eco-nomic progress. Accordingly, he fought the remnants of the old noble leisurely way of life and the related “Don Juanist” amatory practices. He vigorously promoted the fig-ure of the “hard-working man” (a capitalist, Protestant, socialist, communist, and also fascist ideal that became one of the icons of modernist culture) as the only prototype of true virility:

What will be the practical formula for the pedagogy of instinctual differentiation? Without doubt, in the male, it is the stimu-lus of work. . . . It is evident that . . . the social activity of man, sometimes in its legitimate and creative form—which is work, and sometimes in its secondary and sterile variant, which is sports—represents the physiological equivalent of sexual ac-tivity. . . . Intense labor is the road that leads a man to monogamy, and thus to the affirmation, we could say the sublimation, of his sexuality. (Tres ensayos 176)

In accordance with the misogyny and discriminatory sexual politics of the period, Marañón did not consider work the “ideal practical formula for sexual differentiation” where women were concerned. For women, maternity substituted for work and was the only viable way toward sexual dis morphism: “The sexual progress of woman solely depends,

as it does for man, on her sexual differen-tiation, that is, on the accentuation of her feminine qualities. . . . [Women, therefore,] should be mothers first and then everything else and renounce, if necessary, everything else in order to be mothers” (Tres ensayos 178). Thus in “Sexo, trabajo y deporte” (Sex, Work, and Sports), the first essay in Tres ensayos, Marañón presents the following “ideal” picture of male and female radical sexual differentiation, which, according to him, enjoys the double blessing of biological science and biblical wisdom:

And so, just as the masculine libido—the desire for a woman—is opposite to the female libido—the desire for a man—so too the instinct for motherhood and childcare, innate in the normal female, is opposite to the instinct for social ac-tivity [work and sports], in the physi-ological male. We see, therefore, work directly linked to sex as a male activity that borders and parallels female activity of maternity. Biological analysis confirms the symbolism written in the first page of Genesis: Adam is born for labor at the same moment that Eve, the mother of all living, is born for sexual life. And God marked with great clarity two parallel roads for them: You, Man, shall toil; You, Woman, shall give birth. (37)

Marañón, a liberal Republican, was as concerned as the fascist Franco regime later would be about sexual and gender-role un-differentiation. Keeping the sexes and their social roles as pure and as far apart as possible became a true obsession in Francoist Spain, but it had been equally prevalent in early twentieth-century Spain, even among sup-posedly progressive thinkers. Marañón’s first imported and then cleverly “nationalized”

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tactics of reducing the “other” sex to a sub-dued (although still menacing) shadow re-inforced the idea that radical differentiation was indeed feasible, although not always easy to reach. More important, with the invaluable help of vigorous epic narration, such tactics allowed the “dominant” gender to appear in the role of undaunted warrior and valiant victor, thus reminding Spaniards of their former imperial glory and making them believe that true Spanish (male) hero-ism, so evident in the political and military arena, could be replicated on the sexual front—indeed, it had to be in order for Spain to recover from its present decadence and effeminacy. Marañón does not stand alone in this neoimperialist view of “conquered” sexu-ality. He shares important beliefs with Or-tega in his meditation on Spanish love. Both high-modernist intellectuals begin from the assumption that love in Spain is troubled: “In regard to sexuality, the national soul is pregnant with dull stupidity” (Marañón, Tres ensayos [4th ed., 1929] 2); “Love is now in a very confused state, especially on our Peninsula” (Ortega, On Love 114). They both adopt a soul-searching rhetoric very similar to the regenerationist discourse on Spain as a problem. They also stress the somber nature and ultimate “sadness” of love. According to Ortega, “Love is sometimes sad, as sad as death—a supreme and mortal torment. It is more: true love best recognizes itself and, so to speak, measures and calculates itself by the pain and suffering of which it is capable” (13). To illustrate his idea, Ortega quotes the letters of Mariana Alcaforado, the famous Portuguese nun, to her “unfaithful seducer,” in which she begs him to “love me always and make me suffer still greater tortures” (14). As we have seen, Marañón also calls sexuality a tragedy. And, like Ortega, he also

resorts to literature as a way of pinpointing the painful nature of sexual revelation:

Even for those men or women whose sexual lives have developed normally, the same anguish begins anew when their children begin to grow and to approach the inevitable moment when they “begin to know it all.” It reminds us of the con-fusion, astonishment, and nearly physical pain we felt when our more precocious friend or the erotic manual purchased at the kiosk brutally revealed to us the half-guessed truth. In his novel [Los trabajos de Urbano y Simona (The Trials of Urbano and Simona, 1924)], Pérez de Ayala tells how a priest was given the task of reveal-ing the mystery of sex to the protagonist, Urbano, who had been kept in a state of absolute physical and spiritual virginity that has been conserved by his mother’s vigilance. His mother awaits the results of their confidential conversation in a neigh-boring room. And the moment of revela-tion is marked by a sharp cry of physical pain from the boy, a cry of physical pain such as a virgin lets out when she is sud-denly deflowered. (Tres ensayos 139)

The scene Marañón refers to is painted in vivid, somberly expressionist colors. The priest and “learned theologian” Hermógenes Palomo, Urbano’s harbinger of sexual revela-tion (and hence a deflowerer of sorts), is de-scribed as “tall, thin, hairy and gloomy,” and Palomo’s bedroom, where the sexual enigma is tragically lifted, as “a dark room, unventi-lated, and an unmade bed; a penetrating epi-cene odor came from out of there, of sweat, tobacco, sandalwood, and uric acid” (Pérez de Ayala, The Trials of Urbano and Simona 180, 182).6 Furthermore, when Doña Mi-caela hears her son’s anguished cry, “a small

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choked cry, a cry almost animal-like and urgent,” emanating from that room, she is suddenly reminded of the following episode from her youth:

Why did there suddenly spring to mind from the depths of the past an indecorous and ridiculous phrase, which as soon as she heard it many years back she had forgotten? By what malignant associa-tion did that phrase now make an echo in her memory? [Micaela] was a child, just becoming a woman; a traveling gypsy girl bade her hello and said, “Ay, blushing little rose; a splendid gentleman will de-flower you; you’ll shriek like a rabbit; but then you’ll be at ease and very pleased.” It wasn’t as if she thought it, but rather as if she heard another person—though inside, a stranger—apply that phrase of gypsy cant to the cry that she heard from behind the false door. Urbano had just lost his soul’s virginity, that rarest treasure which she, in a sublime undertaking, had succeeding in preserving intact, fighting alone against the world, nature, and the devil, conquering them. . . . She quickly recovered from this momentary weakness and regained her unruffled and rigid char-acter. “So it will be and so it must be,” she articulated with her lips. (188–89)

“So it will be and so it must be” means, in other words, that sexual revelation should come from the sanctified knowledge of priests, rather than from the dirty mouths of gypsies. It should also be a moment of sad solemnity, not of sensual beauty. Hence dark, bad-smelling rooms and ugly theolo-gians are more appropriate than the “sinful” and more amiable alternative of perfumed Andalusian gardens and pleasure-seeking/producing lovers.

Marañón seems oblivious to Pérez de Ayala’s acrid irony and unabashed contempt for sexual obscurantism and ignorance, so obvious in this specific novel and through-out his entire narrative work.7 Marañón takes Urbano’s hysterical outburst seriously and even calls it “admirable.” Furthermore, he does not question the mother’s consistent and astonishingly successful effort to keep her son blissfully ignorant of sexual knowl-edge. And he has no comments about the role of the priest as the ultimate harbinger of sexual truth. Marañón’s references to the scene make it seem like a realistic proposal of how Spaniards behave at the moment of sexual revelation. He tacitly suggests that this is what Spaniards should expect for their children when the dreaded moment arrives. The future, it seems, will not unburden love and sexual revelation from this traumatic nature:

This admirable symbolism makes us think of a similar day when we lost our innocence—we still don’t know whether it was appropriately or erroneously maintained—the day on which we re-turned home, pensive, seeing everything and ourselves differently than before. How can we avoid this same difficulty for our children, who are still full of divine purity? Should we leave the duty of violat-ing their innocence to the hazards of the street? And what if, in order to prevent this, we take it upon ourselves, or ask a professional we trust, to subject them to the coldness and sterility of a scientific explanation? Would we not be interfering with the natural progression of things? And more important, where is this ef-ficient and beautiful explanation which pedagogues and moralists search for but never find? (Tres ensayos, 139–40)

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Marañón remains convinced that teach-ing sex with the necessary “efficacy” and “pulchritude” is impossible because sex is by nature incurably “messy,” disharmoni-ous, and “dirty”: “Man . . . stumbles, time and again, against the problem of sexual disharmonies and against the basic intent of teaching about them. Neither pedagogy nor medicine nor religions have been able to resolve this problem” (140). Even so, and despite the ultimate impossibility of convey-ing sexual knowledge in a non-traumatic, aseptic manner, there are certain methods in sexual enlightenment that he deems superior to others. Marañón’s deadly serious inter-pretation of Pérez de Ayala’s “sexual story” suggests that the priestly lesson is preferable to what can be learned through precocious friends, or erotic manuals and sicaliptic nov-elettes bought at kiosks. Ortega wholeheartedly agreed with Mara-ñón. He also found that sexuality is better understood, and therefore better taught, by “detached” higher beings, such as the philoso-pher and the priest, whose main contact with and interest in sex is supposedly purely intel-lectual. Thus, according to his hypothesis, the least knowledgeable person about love is the lover, especially Andalusian Don Juan, king of lovers:

It ought to be made clear, therefore, that neither the Don Juans nor those in love know anything in particular about Don Juan or love. Probably the only person who can speak with precision on both matters is he who lives at a distance from both, but is yet, like the astronomer in regard to the sun, attentive and curi-ous. Knowing things is not being them, nor being them knowing them. In order to see an object it is necessary to be de-tached from it. Separation converts it

from experienced reality into an object of knowledge. Any other view would lead us, for example, to believe that the zoologist, in order to study ostriches, must himself become an ostrich, which is exactly what Don Juan becomes when he speaks about himself. (On Love 184–85)

“Know thyself” does not apply to os-triches. Nor does it apply to lovers, Andalu-sians, women, and other “sexotic,” or foreign- erotic, creatures. The voice of staunch pater-nalism and Castilian imperialism powerfully resounds in Ortega’s and Marañón’s high-modernist endorsement of (sexual) knowl-edge as a fundamental exercise in power- exerting distance and controlling detach-ment. Both Ortega and Marañón apply several distances as they proudly parade as “non-ostriches” and dissect ostriches (and love birds). They welcome the ancient Judeo- Christian tradition of sexual pessimism as an opportunity to contemplate sex from the double distance of pain magnified and transcendentalized into sin. And whatever variants of modern sexual science they em-brace, they do it for the sake of detachment. Early sexology and psychoanalysis were both foreign born and merchandised as science. Hence, to Spanish high-modernist thinkers they offer the double advantage of scientific and geographical distance, allowing them to view sexuality as if it were a detached, alien entity. Thus conveniently “elevated” by reli-gion and science, Marañón and Ortega only need literature and art as a third strong pillar upon which to build a solid sexual Foucaul-dian panopticum, an eclectic architectural hybrid of church, pedagogical institution, psychiatric ward, and cultural atheneum. Naturally, they chose only those liter-ary texts (Pérez de Ayala’s novel, the ama-tory epistles of Mariana Alcaforado) that

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convey pessimism and detachment regard-ing sexual matters. They avoided excessively personal sexual accounts and also literary or artistic attempts to celebrate sex. Mara-ñón, for example, made it abundantly clear in Los estados intersexuales that he would not resort to the fairly extended practice of compiling and publishing individual sexual histories. The Spanish doctor shows regard, even outspoken admiration, for homosexuals who, because of social circumstances, “play out the tragedy of their perverse inclina-tion alone, without ever arousing the least suspicion.” He further acknowledges hav-ing known “many of these heroic beings, especially since the publication of my Three Essays on Sexual Life. Most of them have de-scribed their cases to me by letter.” But then he immediately adds, “Unlike other authors, such as Havelock Ellis and Bloch, however, I prefer not to publish these documents in which abnormal humanity bares itself to the light of day” (Evolution of Sex 195). “Ab-normal humanity” should be repressed with heroic determination. Repression makes it a “distant” occurrence. Confidential letters addressed to the doctor and confessions to the priest contribute to the required secrecy and detachment, as do literary versions of “real” cases. Although Marañón found the publication of sexual epistolary biographies utterly unacceptable, he seemed to accept that “the number of novels, plays, etc., that have appeared in recent years in which homosexuality is the principal theme, or one of the most important themes, is very large indeed” (193). Furthermore, he had noth-ing but praise for Alfonso Hernández Catá’s novel El ángel de Sodoma (The Angel of So-doma, first published in 1928), a novel about dark, homosexual fate. He even wrote a pro-logue for the novel’s second edition (1929), although a remarkably elusive one.

The somberly pessimistic, even apoca-lyptic tone of Hernández Catá’s novel must have appealed to Marañón and his firm con-viction that, ultimately, human sexuality is tragedy, all the more so if it diverges from the heterosexual norm. Accordingly, Mara-ñón had no comments about more optimis-tic and joyous literary representations of sex, regardless of the fact that eros-celebrating fictions spectacularly outnumbered the som-ber, sex-decrying variety that was clearly favored, and to a great extent created, by high modernism. The number of popular erotic novelettes certainly was so large and readily available that Marañón and Ortega could easily have quoted one of them. For example, they could have chosen Álvaro Re-tana’s Currito el ansioso (Currito the Eager, 1920) instead of Pérez de Ayala’s Los trabajos de Urbano y Simona and described an entirely different first sexual (orgasmic) experience:

Currito ran his hands up María Teresa’s delicious thighs, and when he believed he had found, well guarded between them, a rosy apricot split in half with its corresponding almond, he received this exquisite discovery with such jubilation that María Teresa had to beg the young man to restrain his excitement. But, living up to his nickname, Currito the Eager did not tire of tasting her tender apricot—that was like snow, velvet, and rose coral—and he smothered it with delicate kisses that obliged the girl first to request and then to implore him for a brief truce. . . . Currito, overcome by an unexpected surge of sexual appetite, became excited again and obsessed with the idea of possessing María Teresa once again. But a compassionate feeling took hold of him and in order to satisfy his vehement lust, he sat on the edge of the

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bed and had recourse to those techniques, which he used, and even abused, in the lonely hours. With blazing eyes gazing upon María Teresa, he proceeded, sought to achieve spasm, and when he was about to come, in a fit of erotic perversity, he let the essence of his pleasure fall onto the lips of the young girl. (97, 104)

For high-modernist puritanism, this randomly chosen passage of epidermic “cheap sex” and joyous physical epiphany could not compete with Urbano’s profound and tragically spiritual awakening to the sexual enigma. Sicalipsis actively engaged with progressive modernity. It detected and generally applauded many of its phenomena: the increasing role played by women in the political and public arena, tied to greater sexual and economic liberation; the serious exploration of female sexuality and the right to sexual pleasure; the open acceptance of alternative and polymorphous sexualities; Spain’s embrace of capitalism and consum-erism; the ironic dismissal of Spain’s “he-roic” and imperialist past in favor of a less authoritarian, openly multicultural, demo-cratic, and secularized modern state; and the perceived urgent need to reinforce Spanish ties with European modernity. High-modernist thinkers were disturbed by these unruly factors threatening to fur-ther shake the already crumbling edifice of Spanish imperialist glory. Thus to tackle the new sexual conflict, neutralize its disrup-tive agenda, and preserve the solid virtues of traditionalist Spain (among which chastity, penetrative sexual intercourse, and female sexuality sublimated into maternity and mo-nogamy were paramount), conservative in-tellectuals adopted regenerationist methods for dealing with the Spanish dilemma. They felt an urgent obligation to teach the masses.

And since sexual education was considered a primordially private and domestic matter, women as mothers became the first and most important subjects of the national, sexual-pedagogical project. Pérez de Ayala registered this fact when he deemed Marañón’s Tres ensayos the legitimate continuation of Fray Luis de León’s La perfecta casada and thus the perfect gift for the bride and soon-to-be wife and mother. Marañón hoped to interest scientists and “serious” readers in his books, while fearing at the same time that the books would become objects of morbid curiosity. But the Spanish doctor probably wanted his female compatriots to have unlimited access to his sexual pedagogy, for in all his books on human sexuality he insists on women’s duty to be mothers, and only mothers. Moreover, Marañón ultimately concludes that men thrive and reach their true masculinity only under appropriate feminine guidance and motherly supervision. Hence, if men degen-erate into effeminacy, it is mainly because women and mothers have failed to comply with their sacred duty.

Sexuality as Intrahistory: Ortega’s Estudios sobre el amor

Ortega’s Estudios sobre el amor (published in 1924, and reedited in 1928 by the Revista de occidente), with its similar emphasis on female responsibility regarding the “sexual rhythm” of Spanish “intrahistory,” is equally geared toward a female audience.8 As if to prove this point, the collection of essays on love opens with what he calls an “epilogue” to a book by Argentinean intellectual Victo-ria Ocampo, written in the form of an epistle to the book’s author.9 Ortega starts his letter with a gallant pirouette: “the excursion was delicious,” he compliments, as if the reading of Ocampo’s book, De Francesca a Beatrice

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(1924), were comparable to a leisurely stroll in a lovely landscape in the company of an equally lovely damsel/writer.10 In fact, Ortega was a friend of Ocampo’s and on several oc-casions had been a guest at her summer villa on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Thus, the “intellectual” excursion Ortega refers to can very well be a courteous reference to the real outings that took place during his stay in Ar-gentina. The spatial metaphor Ortega uses to introduce the subject of love and the sexual pulsation of culture again reminds us of the persistent links among geography, sexuality, and the nation/empire. Moreover, since a Spanish male philosopher is reading/explor-ing/conquering the text of an Argentinean fe-male intellectual, one must acknowledge the postcolonial/patriarchal context in which this cultural exchange takes place. Ortega himself explicitly hints at it when, in a grand gesture typical of the benevolent and flirtatiously Don Juanish patriarch and colonizer who just lost his colonies/lovers, he indulgently declares Argentinean women fit for influenc-ing the historical course of a newborn nation:

Eight years ago, as I was about to end my stay in Argentina, I had the honor of meeting you and your friends. I will never forget the impression left upon me by that group of essential women, set apart from the background of a young nation. . . . That such exquisite feminine forms would appear within an ancient and refined culture is understandable, but in-frequent. . . . However, that such creatures would suddenly sprout from a new race still in gestation holds an organic secret that causes one to think. The ascending vi-tality of a new race created these egregious figures in its rich interior with the inten-tion of exemplariness. They are models that initiate a perfection of the norm. The fact that you appeared to me, flowering in

the hour of a great nation’s germination, caused me to develop these thoughts on women’s influence on history. (23)

Ortega’s faith in women’s influence on history, however, is a double-edged sword. As he takes pains to explain to Ocampo, “History progresses according to a sexual rhythm.” For that reason, “certain ages are dominated by masculine values, and oth-ers reigned over by feminine values.” By “masculine values” Ortega means the values that, according to him, characterized the so-called first Middle Ages: “The first Middle Ages were a masculine time. Woman did not intervene in public life. Men took up the task of war, and far from the ladies, they en-tertained themselves with barbarous celebra-tions of drink and song” (7). He continues,

The second Middle Ages—to my taste, the most attractive age of the European past—characterizes itself precisely by the rise of the feminine star over the histori-cal horizon. . . . The first Middle Ages are like man, completely excessive. The law of courtly love proclaims a new empire of “moderation,” which is the element that nourishes femininity. . . . If, in the age of mere sexual instinct [the first Middle Ages], man’s attitude is predatory, throw-ing itself upon passing beauty, then in the stage of spiritual enthusiasm [the second Middle Ages], it places itself at a distance, directed toward the feminine counte-nance, from afar, in order to capture her approval or disdain. The culture of “cour-tesy” [of the second Middle Ages and courtly love] initiates a new relationship between the sexes, in which, deservedly, woman educates man. (9)

“Distance” (and therefore the “distant” nature of courtly worship), “women as

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educators of men,” and female responsibility in the making of history become key con-cepts in Ortega’s amatory philosophy. All these terms go beyond Ortega’s epistle to Ocampo and acquire new meanings and nu-ances as Estudios sobre el amor progresses. In an article titled “Nota sobre el ‘amor cortés’ ” (Notes on “Courtly Love,” 1926) included in the final pages of the volume, Ortega reflects upon courtly love, but this time he is more explicit. He situates it within the amatory context of early twentieth-century Spain. Ortega starts by declaring himself a great ad-mirer and follower of “romantic love”: “Our love, with one or two modifications, belongs to the 19th century. . . . It is enough to com-pare ourselves to the younger generation in order to feel the historical pull that keeps us bound to our romantic grandparents” (133). But the “historical pull” Ortega refers to goes even further back in time: “Romantic love! I have here an example of what I used to call ‘amatory fashions.’ [Romantic love] succeeded 18th-century gallantry, which in turn was nothing but another fashion sub-sequent to the ‘esteem’ of the 17th century, ‘platonic love’ of the 16th century, ‘courtly love’ of the 15th century, and finally the ‘gentility’ of the 14th century” (134). All of these amatory fashions share one essential trait Ortega calls “distance” and therefore are variants of what the Spanish philosopher refers to as “spiritualist eroti-cism.” Ortega says the following about dis-tance as the requisite of courtly love and its related amatory modes: “Distance is essen-tial . . . to this [type] of love. It is visual or nostalgic love, distant in space and time. A lover puts everything into this love, living off its enthusiastic power. It is not even neces-sary for him to have met the beloved” (135). As Ortega is quick to acknowledge, to tell the story of distant, disembodied, spiritual love is only to tell part of the truth about eros:

It should be taken into account that the human being is a polarized entity, com-posed of body and soul, whose extreme forms constitute the two poles of his per-sonality. This allows for human beings to be taken for only one of the two, situat-ing one as primary, underlining it, while the other remains faded, half-hidden or latent. There are, in effect, materialist epochs that focus above all in man’s flesh, while others see nothing in his body ex-cept the mirror of his soul, its material expression. The inclination to put the body or the spirit first is one of the most radical traits that define a historical moment. It is understandable that this double perspective yields two distinct types of love. (134–35)

Not only do Marañón and Ortega construct their philosophical and scientific systems well within the traditional Western bi polarity so harshly criticized by Jacques Derrida and deconstructionist thought, but, more im-portant, they both share an unshakable and superstitious belief in ghosts. They are anx-ious thinkers who live in constant fear that the phantasmal and semi-hidden other (the repressed gender within one’s body, in the case of Marañón, and the corporalist times during which carnal desire prevails, in the case of Ortega) will unexpectedly resurface and prevail. Both Ortega and Marañón, as scared, self-centered boys, urgently invoke the assistance of women. Marañón wants women to be mothers while Ortega expects them to be the spiritual educators of men. In both cases, the “distanced” and some-how alienated sexuality of women (either sublimated into motherhood or turned into sheer platonic spirituality) has the additional advantage of losing its threatening proper-ties: there will be no more vaginas dentatas, as spiritual love does not have a vagina and

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motherly vaginas do not devour penises but instead expel children in bountiful num-bers. Female destiny is forever tied to male welfare; women only “are” as long as they “are there” for men. Female Dasein and (sexual) distance clearly needed special reinforcement at a time when sicalipsis and “real” women, often per-ceived as masculinized females, were enter-ing the sexual and literary scene, the public sphere, and the professional market. In such circumstances, the invocation of the “ideal” (and over-feminized) woman becomes all the more necessary. However, Ortega, probably less naive and certainly better traveled and more of a lady-pleaser than Marañón, soon began to suspect that stressing women’s role as wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters was an already losing battle. Aware of the “instru-mental” and therefore contingent nature of what he called “this quadruple emotive role” (what if women, as was happening already, got tired of being wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters?), he looked beyond historical con-tingency in search of a truly female essence and found Goethe’s Ewig Weibliche (The Eternal Feminine). In Ortega’s words,

The true historic mission of the human female seems to be unclear, because we forget that woman is not a wife, a mother, a sister, nor a daughter. All of these things are precipitates of femininity, forms that woman adopts when she ceases to be a woman or is not yet one. Without a doubt, the universe would be horribly altered if we eliminated the marvelous spiritual power of wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters—in its way so honorable and exquisite that it seems impossible to find anything superior. However, it must be said that with them alone the category of femininity is incom-plete. They are inferior and secondary

when compared to a woman who is a woman and nothing more. (10)

The Spanish philosopher is addressing Ocampo, a woman famous for her indepen-dence, childless existence, material wealth, and refined culture. Obviously, none of the four “precipitates of femininity” Ortega refers to apply or appeal to her. What both applies and appeals to her instead is her own sexual attractiveness and availability, to which so many male intellectuals of the time have given testimony. She is a perfect and very desirable example of a woman at the zenith of her sexual maturity, in contrast to those women who, according to Ortega, are not women yet (daughters and sisters) or have ceased to be women already (wives and mothers). Despite his claim, Ortega is clearly not writing an epilogue to Ocampo’s book. There is barely any reference to the book in his text.11 Instead, Ortega is writing a camouflaged love letter, in which sexual attraction is subli-mated into an emulation of courtly love and garden-variety philosophy.12 Ortega’s ama-tory epistle is ultimately an insult to women. According to him, “The role of woman, when she is nothing but a woman, is to be the con-crete ideal (‘enchantment,’ ‘illusion’) of man. Nothing more. Nothing else” (11, 14). Ortega is not the first widely recognized thinker whose intelligence and originality become monotonous repetition in the face of a woman as a philosophical subject and object. Arthur Schopenhauer is a particu-larly cogent example and is widely quoted by Ortega and other Spanish intellectuals of the time on the subject of female intelligence (or lack thereof) and the necessary and le-gitimate subjugation of women. Ortega attempts to “flatter” Ocampo by making her the true agent of not only male desire (sublimated, of course, into “illusion” and

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“enchantment”) but also the historical course of a nation. According to Ortega, “There does not exist within the human condition a biological means as accurate or as efficient as the faculty of attraction that woman holds over man. It has become the most powerful tool of selection: a sublime force to modify and perfect the species” (15). The historical mission of women, accord-ing to Ortega, is to be superior females, so as to attract superior males and, even more important, to force average males to strive for more ambitious spiritual goals. Women’s fundamental purpose is to demand more and better things from men: “Be more demand-ing! In my opinion, this is woman’s supreme task on earth: to demand perfection from man” (19). In addition, Ortega constantly re-minds us that women do not need to “do” anything, since their real value and histori-cal influence lies in simply “being”: “Female influence is rarely seen, precisely because it is diffuse and finds itself nowhere in particular. It is not turbulent like that of a man but static like that of the atmosphere. There is, evi-dently, an atmospheric essence in women that operates slowly, in the way that the climate does. This is what I wish to suggest when I affirm that man’s value is in what he does, and woman’s value is in what she is” (18). On the next page Ortega becomes even more em-phatic and falls further into love-letter clichés when he compares women to roses. Ortega tells Ocampo that she is “enchant-ing,” silent, as at peace as a rose attached to its stalk, and as diffuse and morose as a climate or an atmosphere. He also informs her that while women’s highest mission is to be—and to always be at a distance—man’s progress is measured by his actions: “Man strikes with his fist in battle, gallops through the world on adventurous explorations, places stone upon stone for a monument, writes books and whips

the wind with his discourse. . . . Woman, meanwhile, does nothing” (18). The irony of writing, in an epilogue to a woman’s book, that while men are busy writing books, women are not doing anything at all, seems lost on Ortega. The ultimate message is that women should prefer to not be writing books. If such an oblique recommendation escapes Ocampo and perhaps the wider audience, both nonetheless will learn other insights about womanhood. Although Ocampo’s des-tiny and essence as woman transcends even the importance of being a mother, nothing can prevent her from getting pregnant.13 If not her body, her soul will be impregnated with the “figure or profile of a male.” Of course, she will not know it, for women would rather “feel” than “know.” Like the Virgin Mary, Spanish women are penetrated and become pregnant with no apparent harm to their virginity. Needless to say, they subsequently require the loudly proclaiming wisdom of a male authority—archangel or philosopher—to confirm their obscure intuition. Ortega must have been very pleased with his epilogue, and I am sure that Ocampo—always a lady—thanked him profusely (but we cannot know how sincerely) for it. No doubt Ortega wanted to make her feel pla-tonically desired, valued as the essence of superior femininity on the other side of the Atlantic, and instrumental to the history of a newborn nation. What Ortega—always a gentleman—did not tell her, however, is that he considered history the unavoidable prod-uct of mediocrity, and a result of women’s doing. Ortega acknowledges the decisive im-portance of Unamunian intrahistory. Echo-ing Miguel de Unamuno’s En torno al casti-cismo (The Return to Love of Purity), Ortega seems surprised that “historians, until re-cently, occupied themselves exclusively with extraordinary facts and freak events and were

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unaware that these possess merely anecdotal or, at most, partial value. Historical reality is rather to be located in the everyday oc-currence, the immense ocean in whose vast dimensions everything unexpected and out-standing is drowned” (On Love 124). Meanwhile, women happily swim in the quotidian ocean and play with its monoto-nous waves. According to Ortega,

Wherever the everyday occurrence gov-erns, the woman, whose soul is formed to a great extent by daily events, is always a factor of majority importance. The man always leans more toward the extraordi-nary, at least he dreams of adventure and change, with tense, difficult, and unique situations. The woman, on the other hand, feels truly strange fulfillment in the details of everyday life. She is comfortable amid inveterate habits, and to the best of her ability, she will make a yesterday out of today. (125)

It is these quotidian woman-waves of an unaltered ocean and intrahistorical under-current that ultimately drowns all that is outstanding and extraordinary: “What can we do about it? History is, irremissibly, the rule of the mediocre. The only capital quality Humanity possesses is the ‘H’ with which we adorn it typographically. The greatest ge-nius is shattered against the unlimited force of vulgarity” (123–24). Even so, Ortega is quick to acknowledge that history and the quotidian are unavoid-able. And so, it seems, are women and their tenacious influence on the intrahistorical course of the nation: “When one reads be-tween the lines of daily life the dominant force in history, one begins to understand the gigantic feminine influence on ethnic destinies” (126).

Ortega clearly deplores the force of such feminine influence. But, since there is noth-ing that can be done about it, the only so-lution is to aspire to an ideal and superior femininity as a means of increasing the standards and quality of the male “every-man.” Yet the extraordinary man, as Ortega has also made abundantly clear, “fortu-nately” remains outside the realm of fe-male and historical influence. Genius “hap-pens,” and it does so precisely against and despite history and women: “Let us say it, in all crudity, that women have never been interested in geniuses. . . . It is distressing to observe the dearth of feminine warmth amid which the poor great men have usually lived. One would say that genius horrifies a woman. . . . She tends rather to eliminate the best individuals, speaking from a mas-culine viewpoint—those who innovate and undertake loft enterprises—and she mani-fests a decided enthusiasm for mediocrity” (130, 131, 133). According to Ortega, love, an extra-ordinary event, also occurs despite history and women, although it is important to dis-tinguish between “Love” as a relatively rare occurrence and the act of “falling in love” (enamoramiento) as a frequent and even mechanical circumstance.14 Superior Love is masculine, while falling in love is feminine or, worse still, effeminate. Accordingly, spiri-tual eroticism, of which romantic bliss and courtly love are important variants, is much closer to Love, while corporal sensuality seems dangerously close to falling in love. According to Ortega’s classification, Currito, in Retana’s novelette Currito el an-sioso, simply “falls in love” and into bed with someone (neither the first nor the last in a long list of lovers); while Urbano, in Pérez de Ayala’s novel Los trabajos de Urbano y Simona, was clearly very much in “Love”

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with Simona and only with Simona, despite (or because of) his obliviousness to matri-monial consummation and sexual bliss. Once again geography is important. Cur-rito migrates from Seville to Madrid, while Urbano’s love takes place in the northern re-gion of rural Galicia. Currito’s beauty is an-drogynous and stereotypically Andalusian:

[At twelve and a half years] Currito was a pretty doll: prematurely developed, with well-turned flesh, aristocratic manners, and with an enchantingly ambiguous and pale face, whose principal attraction was two enormous, shining, jet-black eyes, like two big jet beads, placed below the perfect arches of his eyebrows. His olive-colored skin had iridescent tones, as if currents of fire circulated in the child’s veins, and all of this fire seemed to gather in his eyes, which truly burned with am-bition and desire. (24)

There is no physical description of Urbano. However, we learn that when he was ap-proximately Currito’s age, he had a spiritual mentor revealingly called “Don Cástulo,” who was his faithful companion and with whom he even shared the same bedroom. In fact, Urbano “never left home, except to go to mass early on Sunday mornings with his mother and on occasional afternoon walks to the village with Don Cástulo” (43). We also know that Urbano was exposed only to fairy tales appropriate for children (“Don Cástulo told Urbano fairytales and fantasies, but only the more infantile ones allowed by Doña [Micaela]” [43–44]), while Currito’s favorite book was A Thousand and One Nights: “For Currito, A Thousand and One Nights was one of the most effectively unsettling books. . . . The succession of fan-tastic episodes that so masterfully combined

the strange and the sumptuous, the beautiful and the unexpected, in an orgy of colors and lights where, irresistibly, love and pleasure triumph filled Currito’s head with mysteri-ous ambitions and stoked in him the flames of sexual desire” (24). Finally, Currito is of very humble origins (the son of a doorman), while Urbano’s family is noble, although impoverished. His paternal grandmother’s family is described as “blue-blooded and lu-natic” (27). The fundamental differences in class, ethnic origin, geographical location, sexual orientation, and even reading preferences confirm Ortega’s hypothesis on what type of human being would just fall in love, and what type would render homage forever to spiritual Love. Anyone who is poor, Andalu-sian, an urbanite, bisexual (with a strong penchant for homosexual practices and other forms of sterile love), and endowed with un-bridled sensuality, a superb body, and a de-clared passion for Oriental sexual wisdom cannot possibly reach the amatory height of spiritual Love. Conversely, an individual who is of noble origin, comes from northern (non-Arabic) Spain, leads a rural existence, and is firmly heterosexual and perhaps still a virgin will never commit the lowly mistake of just falling in love. Álvaro Retana was very much aware that his novelettes on homosexuality would have been censored had he dared to picture a homo sexual character not born and raised in Andalusia. Modernist Spain “knew” that there were no homosexuals to be found on Castilian soil. Retana, of course, played along and used andalucismo and extranjer-ismo both as a defense against censorship and as an ironic reflection on Castilian prud-ishness and sexual intolerance. As an added protection from and act of defiance against geographically confined heteronormativity,

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Retana even performed andalucismo in real life. He bought a house in Torrejón de Ardoz, then a small, rural enclave at the out-skirts of Madrid (now the site of the Barajas airport and a U.S. military base), and con-verted its yard into an Andalusian patio. He later refers to this episode in the prologue to his erotic novelette El tonto (The Fool):15

Your mouth would drop wide open if I were to take you to my country house in Torrejón. Right now, I am transform-ing it into a real-life episcopal palace. They have put in an ironwork gate from Seville at the entrance, with an artistic lock made in the 17th-century style that is just perfect. My Andalusian patio—with its ironwork, tiles, lattices, pond, fountains, and benches—is gorgeous. I put a mosaic of the Virgin of Macarena, also made exclusively for me, on the facade, and it is the best thing in the world and makes you want to shout Long Live Seville! My entire estate is overflowing with an Andalusian spirit, because, although unfortunately I was not born in the land of Most Holy Mary, I am so much an Andalusian in my soul that it as if I were born in the heart of that marvelous region. (7)

This passage represents what Ortega and other high-modernist intellectuals feared most: that Madrid and Castile, the heroic heart of Spain, would become an “Andalu- sian patio,” brimming with ambiguous danc-ers, folkloric transvestites (as depicted on the cover of Retana’s novelette Los ambiguos; Fig. 3.7), señoritos rumbosos (dissolute youths), and shameless gypsy women foretelling and actively promoting the loss of innocence.16 An Andalusian patio is the perfect environ-ment for falling in love, turning sex into a colorful performance, and trying out certain

gender-bending costumes. It is also the worst imaginable scenario for spiritual Love, which needs morally healthier surroundings to outgrow enamoramiento. Ortega repeat-edly designates the latter as “an abnormal state,” “an inferior state of mind, a form of transitory imbecility,” “a state of mental mis-ery which has a restricting, impoverishing, and paralyzing effect upon development for our consciousness,” and “a number of me-chanical automatic processes possessed with little true spirituality” (On Love 51, 55, 44, 56–57). Furthermore, he compares the lov-er’s soul (“el alma de un enamorado”) to a room that “smells of the closed-up room of a sick man—its confined atmosphere is filled with stale breath” (56–57). Although as a rule Ortega speaks about the process of falling in love without explic-itly referring to gender, he nevertheless re-sorts to a series of oblique strategies to stress

Fig. 3.7

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its feminine and even effeminate nature. The first strategy is the use of certain epi-thets (“inferior,” “automatic,” “mechanical,” “imbecile,” “nonspiritual,” and “pathologi-cal”) as synonyms for “female,” “feminine,” “woman,” “woman-like,” and “effeminate.” The second strategy illustrates the falling-in-love process with certain anecdotes in which the “victim” of the process or psychological state is always a woman (73, 77, 79), and usu-ally a proletarian woman, thus doubling her subalternity: “The mistress of a house knows when her maid has fallen in love when she begins to notice that the maid is distracted. The poor servant’s attention is not free for the things about her. She lives in a daze, drawn into herself, contemplating in her inner self the image of her ever-present lover” (60–61). To convince the reader that to be in love is ultimately an inferior (and therefore feminine) state of mind, Ortega compares the state of enamoramiento with the very similar states of hypnotic trance and mysti-cal ecstasy, and stresses “woman’s propensity for mysticism, hypnosis, and love” (79).17 According to the Spanish philosopher, lov-ers, usually female, hypnotized patients, and ecstatic mystics all share the experience of “being outside themselves” and thus embrace different forms of the “orgiastic”: “The desire to ‘get out of oneself ’ has been the cause of all forms of orgiastic expression: drunken-ness, mysticism, love. I do not mean to say by this that they all have equal ‘merit’; I am only insinuating that they belong to a com-mon branch and that their roots are steeped in orgy” (73).18

Ortega is not the only one to obsess about ecstatic and orgiastic behaviors. Salva- dor Dalí, Jacques Lacan, Ángel Garma, Josef Breuer, and Georges Bataille, among others, also reflect upon the “natural” link that ties mysticism to sexuality. Garma, for example, is the first Spanish psychiatrist who dared to

offer a psychoanalytical reading of ecstasy, particularly of Saint Teresa’s mystical trans-portations. While talking about the psy-chosexual urges and psychic mechanisms of Saint Teresa’s pathological states, he is quick to suspect hysteria, or a type of epilepsy similar to hysteria (“Cómo se estudia el psi-coanálisis”). (Breuer, in fact, called Saint Te-resa “the holy patron of hysteria.”) Dalí and Bataille, as opposed to Ortega and Garma, see ecstasy in a more positive light and ac-knowledge its sexual nature. Erotic popular culture also celebrates ecstatic orgasm and the aptness of mystical union to sublimate sexual intercourse. Sex advice literature also resorted to the stereotyped “ecstasy = or-gasm” equation. For example, Àngel Martín de Lucenay includes a painting in his volume La vida sexual (1933) and, guided by the subject’s ecstatic expression, immediately de-scribes her as “a woman whose sexual yearn-ings are fully satisfied” (49; Fig. 3.8). Gianlorenzo Bernini’s famous sculpture Saint Therese in Ecstasy (1647–1652, Fig. 3.9) was on everybody’s mind. It was not only Lacan who read Bernini’s “literal” interpre-tation of one of Saint Teresa’s mystical trans-portations as a purely sexual experience. Ortega, certainly, suspected something in that direction, although he would have never dared to openly “accuse” Saint Te-resa of having orgasms and later describing them. In any case, the Spanish philosopher felt an instinctive repugnance for orgies, ec-static episodes, and anything that implies “losing oneself” by losing rational control. Accordingly, he favors what he calls “being in control of oneself” over “being outside of oneself” as is typical of the orgiastic/or-gasmic mood.19 Drunkards, lovers, mystics, and hypnotics fall within the orgiastic vari-ant, while philosophers and warriors remain in control (On Love 88). The disagreement between these two lifestyles is so profound