Evita, Inevitably: Performing Argentina's Female Icons Before and After Eva Perón
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Evita, Inevitably: Performing Argentina's Female Icons Before and After Eva Perón
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472120550 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 10/23/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
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Evita, Inevitably
Performing Argentina's Female Icons Before and After Eva Peron
By Jean Graham-Jones
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2014 University of MichiganAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-12055-0
CHAPTER 1
Camila O'Gorman and the Making of an Argentine Femicon
Argentina's Past Present — the Curious Cases Of Soledad, Camila, and Manuelita
It's difficult to shake off the image of a shaven-headed, handcuffed, hunger-striking twenty-four-year-old María Soledad Rosas flipping the double bird to the journalist's camera while three Italian carabinieri work to restrain her slight body. After Sole's death in 1998, the defiant likeness was reproduced seemingly everywhere: appearing in multiple versions in all the major Argentine and European presses, gracing the cover of her single biography, and circulating on the Internet (where it can still be found at multiple websites). Her brief life ended on July 11 of that year, when she allegedly hanged herself while under house arrest in a communal home three and a half months after the presumed suicide of her thirty-five-year-old lover and longtime squatter, Edoardo Massari (nicknamed "Baleno" — Flash or Lightning in Italian) on March 28. Soledad was a middle-class girl who didn't finish college, preferring instead to earn her way as one of Buenos Aires's many dog walkers. Traveling through Europe with a friend, she stayed on to join Italy's anarchist movement and cofound with Massari and Silvano Pelissero a Turinese okupa-squat. Within the year, she would be in prison, accused with co-okupas Massari and Pelissero of ecoterrorist acts on excessive, inflated charges. The proof obtained through the use of GPS, tails, hidden microphones, and spying satellites to video- and audiotape the three squatters in their environs pointed to an obviously larger government campaign to incriminate and destroy the entire okupa movement. It might be easy to dismiss Soledad's actions as those of a girl in love caught up in a conflict exceeding her experience. However, her comportment in prison and refusal to take on the role of an impressionable young woman under the sway of two older men suggest a commitment to and consistency with her professed anarchist ideals. Her death ostensibly triggered a series of protests, pickets, burnings, letter-bombs, and even other deaths, lending Sole's act a symbolic weight far heavier and more urgent (to use her biographer's apt term) than her ten-week romance with Edoardo might suggest. Soledad Rosas's story acquires even greater urgency when regarded within a distinctly Argentine history of castigated female rebellion in the face of a male-dominated authoritarianism extending back to the mid-nineteenth century and Camila O'Gorman.
INDEED, NOT ONLY does Soledad's "urgent" life stand as yet one more example of young romantic rebellion excessively punished at the hands of a state; her ancestry links her to this chapter's subject and Sole's rebellious predecessor — another young woman who paid with her life for choosing to circumvent the laws of society and the state and, before Eva Perón, perhaps the country's most femiconized figure. In 1848, the twenty-year-old Argentine bourgeoise Camila O'Gorman was executed by firing squad, together with her lover and confessor-priest, the twenty-four-year-old Uladislao Gutiérrez. It was the scandal of the era: the couple had fallen in love and run away to the rural littoral, where they assumed other identities, lived as a couple, and cofounded and taught at the town's grade school. Discovered by a visiting priest and acquaintance of Uladislao, they were arrested and transported to a military headquarters, where they were summarily executed. It is popularly believed that Camila was pregnant at the time of her execution, and the couple's elopement and subsequent punishment provoked strong reactions in all social and political spheres. Essays, poems, and novels were published nationally and abroad, portraits and engravings were created, plays were staged and censored, and throughout the following century Camila's story would figure in films, novels, plays, poems, and other artistic works. These myriad cultural products inspired by Camila O'Gorman's short life provide the raw material for this chapter's investigation into the making of arguably the first in a long line of Argentine femicons.
By a strange quirk of historical coincidence, Soledad Rosas was a direct descendant of the nineteenth-century Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793–1877), the man who infamously gave the orders to execute Camila and Uladislao. During his 1830s "Conquest of the [Pampean] Desert," Rosas had had a child with an indigenous Mapuche woman; he recognized their daughter, named Fénix, as his own, and in turn Fénix, who lived for more than one hundred years, had several children to whom she gave her father's surname, thus assuring the survival of this branch of the Rosas lineage. One of Fénix's offspring, Pascual Rosas, was Soledad's great-great-grandfather. In strikingly ironic contrast to the rebellious Camila and Sole, Rosas's only legitimate daughter (with Encarnación Ezcurra y Arguibel) would end up exemplifying the very image of stultifying filial piety. Manuelita (Manuela Robustiana Ortiz de Rosas y Ezcurra, 1817–1898) — bearing her great-grandmother's name but with patronymic echoes (like her older brother Juan, 1814–1877?) — was born long before her half-sister Fénix. Like most Argentine girls of her class and time, Manuelita received only rudimentary education in reading, writing, and arithmetic. However, early on she was interpellated into her father's political world, confirmed in at least one artistic rendition of the very young Manuelita accompanying her parents to view a celebration by one of Buenos Aires's Afro-Argentine "nations." This supporting role would increase in importance when, after her mother's death in 1838, twenty-year-old Manuelita became the leading lady of her father's Palermo mansion and of the Confederation — Rosas's federalist organization and the bitter enemies of the centralist unitarios (most of whom by then were living in exile in Uruguay or Chile) in the power struggle over a recently independent Argentina.
Manuelita played an active role in Rosas's international diplomacy, entertaining at their home and engaging in correspondence with visiting foreign dignitaries while her father ruled the country with a brutality often enforced by his "irregular" police force, called the Mazorca. So critical was Manuelita's position to her father that he continued to postpone her marriage to her long-betrothed fiancé, Máximo Terrero, one of Rosas's comisarios in his provincial army and resident at the Rosas's Palermo mansion. It was only after her father's 1852 defeat and renunciation and the family's subsequent flight to England that Manuelita, at age thirty-six, would finally get to marry her Máximo, and only then after agreeing to her melancholic father's conditions that he not have to attend the wedding and that she move out of his house. She returned to her native Argentina only once, in 1886, spending the rest of her life and raising her two sons in South Hampstead, where she died in 1898 at the age of eighty-one. Her importance to her father's professional and private lives is perhaps best exemplified in her 1851 official portrait. The painting, which was commissioned by the family and overseen by a select committee, was produced by the young Prilidiano Pueyrredón (1823–1870) — not yet established as one of nineteenth-century Argentina's great artists — and featured a thirty-four-year-old Manuelita in full Federalist crimson, from her dress and flower to the surrounding curtains, carpet, and chair. Art director and historian Fermín Fevre interprets Manuelita's hand resting on the sheet of white paper (ostensibly a letter to her father) as representing her role as Rosas's "intercessor." Her standing posture and slight smile speak to her elevated position and kindness for which she was well known. Yet even the privileged Manuelita did not enjoy sufficient sway over her father to intercede successfully on behalf of her childhood friend Camila O'Gorman, as we will see.
SOLEDAD, CAMILA, MANUELITA: not unlike Evita's own tale (recalled in the next two chapters), all three women's stories have been mythologized in the press, in historical fiction and nonfiction, and in artistic renditions. And the resulting versions blur easy distinctions between historiography and mythologization. For example, two weeks after Soledad's death, a Buenos Aires daily newspaper's "youth" supplement devoted multiple articles to her case and interviewed members of the Argentine and international anarchist movements in an effort to answer the question: "why must [Soledad Rosas] be converted into a rebel icon for posters and t-shirts?" One hypothesis was that "her story is ideal for myth":
A sort of turn-of-the-century "love story"; a beautiful occupied morgue-turned-house in Turin; a middle-class girl who studied hotel management in a private university and in under three months gave herself over to a cause, lived in a commune, and followed a rigorous [vegan] diet in keeping with her ecologist principles. And, of course, the tragic end: jail and suicide in solitary confinement, three months after her boyfriend, 38 [sic]-year-old Edoardo, had done the same thing in a high-security prison. Perfect.
Whereas Soledad's story, as illustrated in the above excerpt, has been mythologized into the tragic love-story model, Manuelita's is typically rendered as a cautionary or exemplary tale of submissive femininity: mother, daughter, wife, and social secretary all in a single, self-sacrificing woman. Thus María Sáenz Quesada, in her 1991 book on Rosas's women, finds in Manuelita "something more" than simply the daughter of Rosas:
... the country's collective memory has elevated her to the category of myth; she is the angel of goodness; the beneficent fairy who, during a difficult period, fulfilled the feminine role par excellence: mercy, compassion, limitless supporter of the family's male figure ... the most celebrated Argentine woman of her age ... Halfway between legend and history, the Restorer's pleasant daughter has awakened few polemics among historians, be they supporters or opponents of her dictator father. This is because she somehow synthesizes the essence of traditional feminine virtues, of the self-sacrificing daughter, exemplary wife and mother, incapable of generating her own ideas, and faithful pillar of those [ideas] sustained by her clansmen. She thus becomes the antithesis of today's feminist conception of women, that privileges one's personal life project over the submissive adoption of outside values and projects.
Historians, journalists, and novelists have portrayed both Manuelita and Soledad as women who sacrificed themselves for love, one out of devotion to her father and the state, the other for romantic love and state-condemned ideals. Their stories seem ready-made for a genealogical saga of the complex and controversial Rosas family: Manuelita, the legitimate offspring of the region's most notorious nineteenth-century dictator; Soledad, the distant descendant of one of his likely numerous "illegitimate" liaisons. Manuelita's submission easily juxtaposes itself to Soledad's rebellion, just as her polished official portrait seems to epitomize the polar opposite of the "in-yer-face" photo of a scrawny, shackled Soledad. Manuelita's exemplary life stands in undemanding contrast to Soledad's resistant death. Yet Manuelita ultimately challenged her father's wishes by marrying her longtime betrothed, while Soledad would typically spend her Sundays with Massari visiting his parents. Soledad's commitment to her principles — including a strict veganism that disavowed any animal products and incorporated the matutinal practice of urinotherapy as well as yoga — might strike us as far more monastic, even more "pure," than Manuelita's nineteenth-century lifestyle in a mansion that housed her fiancé as well as her father's lover (who bore him at least five unacknowledged children) and that was rumored to welcome prominent leaders, including clergy, and their mistresses.
Such seemingly facile contrasts are rendered more complex in the case of Camila O'Gorman. It is Camila, and not her childhood friend Manuelita, who has sustained the imaginative attention of Argentines since the time of her arrest and execution. O'Gorman's romantic elopement with her confessor-priest has frequently been reinterpreted as symbolic of youthful resistance in the face of authoritarian repression, and their passionate story has inspired many artistic works, including poems, novels, plays, an early twentieth-century film, a recent musical, and even an Oscar-nominated movie. After an initial examination of early Camila-inspired historiographic practices, illustrated in memoirs, historical accounts, and theatrical versions of O'Gorman's life, this chapter traces her impact on the Argentine national consciousness and creation as a national femiconic figure by pairing different versions of her story created within the last forty years, a particularly difficult and violent period in Argentina's history. Enrique Molina's 1973 novel, Una sombra donde sueña Camila O'Gorman [A Shadow where Camila O'Gorman is Dreaming], and Griselda Gambaro's 1982 play, La malasangre [Bad Blood], frame the country's latest and most repressive military dictatorship (1976–1983). Molina's lushly poetic novel purports to respect the available historical data, yet it makes a fetish of the female body and ultimately victimizes Camila as sexual object; in contrast, Gambaro's harshly unromantic play, often narrowly read as historical dramatization, stages the reclaiming of the Argentine populace — through the onstage female body and a controversial original production — of its theretofore silenced resistant voice in the final years of military dictatorship. Such important politics of recovery and resistance notwithstanding, each artistic project participates in the ongoing national mythologizing of Camila O'Gorman. On the other hand, both María Luisa Bemberg's 1984 Oscar-nominated film, Camila, and Ricardo Monti's 1989 play, Una pasión sudamericana [A South American Passion-Play], restaged in 2005 at Argentina's national Cervantes Theatre (and the source of his 2002 Finlandia [Finland]), attempt an alternative telling of Camila's story. While Bemberg's film ostensibly reworks the Latin American romantic tradition of melodrama to condemn the immobile patriarchal structure for its continued oppression of women and female eroticism, Monti's plays subvert the romantic tradition entirely by telling the story from the executioner's point of view and taking audiences inside what has been called the shared subconscious of victim and victimizer. All these artistic versions of Camila O'Gorman's "tragic romance" (or, as I will argue in the majority of cases, romantic tragedy) challenge easy distinctions between mythologizing and historiography, between fact and fiction — precisely what this chapter's analysis of the ongoing creation of one of Argentina's earliest femicons attempts to demonstrate.
Camila O'Gorman: A Political, Moral, and Historiographic Rorschach's Test
"Camila's crime wasn't what she did; it was that everyone found out what she did."
Camila enjoys this brief but poignant defense in Marcos Carnevale's Mercedes, one of twenty-five short films commissioned by Argentina's Secretary of Culture on the occasion of the country's 2010 bicentennial celebration. In this film, femiconic Uruguayan actress China Zorrilla portrays Mercedes, a 212-year-old witness to the country's history who, if not among the country's great male figures, has "had tea with many of them, been the girlfriend of some of them." During her historical romp, Mercedes briefly mentions her dear friend "Camila" (no surname required) and pointedly repositions her friend's crime away from any individual moral transgression and toward society and its politico-moral judgment. In so doing, Mercedes brings her interlocutor back to one of the key questions surrounding Camila's story and its multiple interpretations: "Who (or what) executed Camila O'Gorman?" The answer to that question tells us more about the respondent than it ever will about Camila herself.
The daguerreotype purported to be the only image of Camila O'Gorman produced in her lifetime reflects the young Argentine woman's class, background, and moment. Camila's December 24, 1847, "wanted" bulletin [filiación] (circulated throughout the country and likely based on her own father's description included in a letter dated December 21) describes her as twenty years old, very tall, slim, and "well proportioned," with white skin, black eyes with a pleasant gaze, "average" nose and mouth, and dark brown hair. Her only distinguishing trait was a front tooth with cavities. She was said to be wearing "decent" clothing, among it mourning black.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Evita, Inevitably by Jean Graham-Jones. Copyright © 2014 University of Michigan. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
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