The Masquerade as Experiment: Gender and Representation in Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera's El Conspirador.

Autobiografa de un hombre pblico

Mathews, Cristina.
Hispanic Review, Volume 73, Number 4, Autumn 2005, pp. 467-489 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press DOI: 10.1353/hir.2005.0041

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The Masquerade a s E xperiment

Gender and Representation in Mercedes Cabello de Carboneras a de un hombre pu blico El Conspirador. Autobiograf

Cristina Mathews
Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania

Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera begins her 1892 novel, El Conspirador. Aua de un hombre pu blico, with a lament that suggests the double voice tobiograf we might expect from a womans rendition of a mans autobiography:
o, seis meses ha que vivo encerrado en esta prisio n!......Seis meses Dios m bajo la vigilancia de estos gendarmes que me miran de reojo y me atisban n me esta matando......Que hare para ocupar mi sin cesar!......La inaccio ritu?......Esta vida mono tona, inactiva, en completa oposicio n con mi esp cter y mis costumbres, se me hace cada dia ma s insoportable. Diaz ha cara que se me presenta un proyecto con halagadoras esperanzas de libertad a en la necesidad [. . .] de alejarme de Fugar!......pero una fuga me colocar n, y quedar ma s tarde a merced de mis enemigos. (5) mi centro de accio

On the page following this opening passage, the narrator identies the one solace that makes this constrained life bearable: Felizmente mus carceleros no me niegan pluma y papel, y puedo dedicar todas las horas del dia, a meditar (6). The novel identies the speaker of these lines as one escribir o

I am grateful to Benigno Trigo and Sandy Petrey for their careful readings of this paper.

Hispanic Review (autumn 2005) Copyright 2005 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania

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Jorge Bello, a political conspirator writing his memoirs from jail, but the passage evokes a second voice: Bellos complaints sound like the lament of a woman with limited access to the public sphere. The prison calls to mind the private house designated as the only sphere of inuence appropriate for latenineteenth-century upper-class Peruvian women like Cabello; the vigilant guards recall social conventions about propriety; the monotony evokes the routine of domestic obligations. Writing seems the only solace and the only form of escape. This double-voiced opening, one which conrms the promise of a mans autobiography written by a woman, points to the masquerade that is a signicant component of El Conspirador. The opening and the masquerade it evokes are also linked to Cabellos theoretical comments on literature, her historical context, and her biography, all three of which foreground questions about mens and womens socially designated roles. A brief summary of the novel may be helpful. El Conspirador is divided into two parts, both written in Jorge Bellos voice and from his jail cell. The rst traces Bellos rise to power as a caudillo, beginning with his provincial childhood and continuing through his adolescence, his participation in armed uprisings, his amassing of a fortune through abuse of a government post, and his creation of a party, newspaper, and political platform. He insists upon the randomness and total corruption of politics in general. Finally, he loses the election to the government candidate. da,1 outlines what Bello considers to be his fall The second half, La Ca from the glory that was his political career, despite the fact that he had already lost the election by the end of part one. Bello connects his demise to his relations with Ofelia Olivas, a young woman estranged from a despicable husband. The two live together, and she joins him in working to rebuild his party. He is then arrested, escapes prison with the help of Ofelia, and lives in hiding supported by Ofelia, who, unbeknownst to him, earns a living as a prostitute. Bello is arrested again, at which point he begins writing the narration we have been reading up to this point. He is released on the condition that he go into exile, and visits a dying Ofelia before his departure. On her deathbed, Ofelia shares wise exhortations, such as: remember that others are also human; always have a principle behind your actions; justice, reality, and goodness exist, and are in fact social laws; be loyal and honorable in your public life, honest and generous in your intimate one. Furthermore, she con-

1. The rst section is not titled.

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fesses that, despite her intentions to be virtuous, she was a prostitute, and the lover of Bellos purported supporters. Having seen the error of his ways, Bello leaves Peru repentant of having been un mal ciudadano (290), and hoping that his story will help others avoid his mistakes.

Positivism, Nature, and Gender

Women who were also intellectuals in late nineteenth-century Peru faced the challenge of opening a space for a woman intellectual. The social context permitted a circumscribed role for women writers. There was a community of women of letters at the time, and Cabello participated actively in the intellectual life of Lima from approximately 1876 to 1893 (Torres-Pou 247). Nonetheless, social norms delimited narrow parameters for the nature of writing by women and the topics it could legitimately address. Cultural mores like those designating the home as the appropriate sphere for women served, in a sense, as Cabellos jailers, and while it was indeed true that they might not deny her pen and paper, she was nonetheless constrained in what she could n: express on that paper without alienating herself from her centro de accio her audience. Cabello gives herself a mans voice by writing a male autobiography, and this voice permits her to enunciate concerns about state politics, an arena upon which womens commentary was essentially proscribed, and about gender politics, an area of concern all but inaudible in anyones voice, but particularly in a womans. Cabello also challenges gendered behavior constraints through her exploration of a masquerade that allows the novels characters to challenge their socially appropriate roles. A commonsense answer to the question of what is being masked in a masqueradewhat is being masked is the truthts uneasily with Cabellos deployment of this recourse. Positing a true self from which the masquerade departs implies the existence of a stable substratum of meaning, one whose existence makes such manipulations of representation falsications. Cabello seems to nd this foundation missing, a surprising move in a writer with explicit ties to the positivism of Auguste Comte.2

2. Masiello notes an unambiguous critique of positivism in Cabellos workat least in her earlier work (Civilization 97). Nonetheless, in 1892, the same year El Conspirador was published, Cabello declares that realism can look to Comte, positivisms founder, as its model (La novela 23).

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In Comtes thinking, nature provides the guarantee of authenticity against which deviations can be noted and then remedied, and formed the basis for nineteenth-century positivist optimism about humans abilities to nd the natural solutions to human problems. And, indeed, in some ways Cabello does seem to conceive of nature as the touchstone from which the masquerade departsa perfect arbiter of appropriate human behavior. Cabello asserts, emphatically, that the link between nature and social reality must be reestablished. She, like other Comtean positivists, believed in the progressive character of the human spiritit is esencialmente progresivo, she explains in La novela moderna, a well-received essay published the same year as El Conspirador (29). For human society to progress, as it should, rather than stagnate or deviate randomly or willfully, Cabello argued that human behavior must follow la moral, based on rm principles: [la moral] pera, siolog a e principios inquebrantables de sociolog higiene moral, tenece a elevar el nivel del ser humano, asegurando su felicidad, los cuales, tienden a nico desenvolvimiento de sus facultades morales, en completo con el armo acuerdo con la sociedad y la naturaleza (8). That is, Cabello saw natural consequences for a failure to adhere to moral principles. The natural world will reassert itself; progress will be thwarted by behavior that does not take natures inherent moral order into account. As Bello puts it in El Conspirador, from this disregard:
el mal en progresio n hasta llegar al u ltimo extremo, para que de seguira nazca una de esas reacciones violentas, que son verdaderos cataclismos all semejanza sociales, y que reestablecen las leyes de justicia y moralidad, a gicos, que reestablecen las leyes del equilibrio y de de los cataclismos zoolo la pesantez de los cuerpos. (38)

Nonetheless, Cabellos deployment of natural morality and progress in both her essay and her novel suggests a exibility about nature rarely associated with positivism. She suggests that the weight of bodies is negotiable, under human rather than zoological control. She accuses Naturalist writers of failing to see the constructive role of writers in establishing where s del desenfreno roma ntico, and how bodies of what weight will fall: Despue do como un cuerpo pesado, hundiendo el platillo no con el la realidad ha ca hombre, sino con el animal (La novela 5; emphasis in original). Implicit in this claim is the assumption that realitys weight is under human control. While in Naturalism reality falls como un cuerpo pesado, this is an animal-

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istic fate unworthy of the dignity of humans, as are los cataclismos zoolo gicos Bello talks about and suggests we should avoid, catastrophes que reestablecen [. . .] la pesantez de los cuerpos. As scientists with soul and passion, then, we have the obligation to uncover a dignity that is both fully human and fully natural, and to determine for ourselves the natural weight of bodies. Cabello suggests that ascertaining the real weight of bodies is not simple. Society occludes recognition of nature: we do not even know what natural principles might look like because we have never seen society in accord with o de la vida es una nature. In 1890 Cabello wrote in her diary, El desengan noche profunda que se forma alrededor de todas nuestras facultades, y que no nos deja percibir ese tesoro de goces innitos y de benecios que guarda n sus leyes (qtd. in Tala naturaleza para el hombre sencillo que vive segu mayo Vargas 74). Cabello is pointing to a perceptual failing which she sees as the double bind of the human condition: life offers innite pleasures to those who can live according to its laws, but life also deprives us of the perceptive capabilities needed to discern what those laws are. While in La novela moderna she expresses faith in the possibility of a morality which is in completo acuerdo con la sociedad y la naturaleza (La novela 8), El Conspirador presents a world more like that of Restoration France in the Balzac novels Cabello saw as a model for Latin American writers (La novela 16). In the Lima of El Conspirador, as in the Paris of Balzac, nature and society are themselves at odds, and thus morality might be in accord with one or the other, but cannot square itself with both. Representation, in El Conspirador, emerges as a social operation with little inherent connection to nature. In the novel, as in her diary, nature is a perennially absent judge, one unavailable to those interested in winnowing natural from unnatural. What passes as nature for the citied elite falls short: tiLimas ruling class frequents a resort graced with cuatro arbolillos, raqu s que despertar[le al narrador] el cos, and these pathetic trees no hacen ma buscar el verdadero campo (182). Desired but unavailable, deseo de ir a nature is the object of our search rather than our roadmap to it. On a battleeld early on in the novel Bello sees (and seems to fall in love with) a man he believes is in perfect harmony with nature: Contemplaba la campin a, y me ver en su semblante esa idealidad, esa emocio n propia, ma s que parecio del soldado, del poeta (68). National politics promptly kills off this exem lo quedo un cada ver (69). In the plar, and de aquel hermoso jinete [. . .] so novels nal scene, the narrator again sees the natural world, and, again, a

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man in harmony with it; symptomatically, he sees it only through the win pida carrera del tren, alejo me hasta perder de vista dows of a train, and La ra tico jinete (288). A Rousseauean return to nature is impossible aquel simpa when there is no sure way of nding nature. Nature, elusive if essential, must be approached in new ways. Comte favored what he called indirect experimentation, careful observation of the naturally-occurring deviations that he saw as natures own laboratory (244). [P]athological cases, he asserts, are the true scientic equivalent of pure experimentation (244). In assessing such cases as instances of a natural order gone wrong, Comte calls upon a normative model: he laments the fact that deviations are so common. Experimentation, however, garners Comtes highest praise, for this rst fruit of positive philosophy gives us the knowledge of the general rules suitable for that object (81). Cabello takes seriously Comtes emphasis on experimentation, but suggests in her novel that deviations are not necessarily pathological. Cabello opens up a space between the normative ethic that overdetermines Comtes object of study from the start, and Comtes simultaneous praise for the positive method, founded on principles of open-minded observation.3 Cabello offers a model of positivism that loosens its traditional conservatism, a skeptical positivism which seeks a heterogeneous nature entombed beneath many layers of social life. Cabellos investigation of the concepts of nature in El Conspirador permits, from within the parameters of the positivist thought of the time, an exploration of the possibility that societys deranged deployment of nature serves only to limit its subjects possibilities for action and pleasure in accord with their natural selves. The novel proposes the masquerade as the means by which our perceptive faculties might be reinvigorated, and during which we might stumble upon nature. Investigation, that is, rather than a priori knowledge, provides the starting point for reinvigorating our knowledge of the natural world. Experiments with different roles offer a method for recovering ones lost true nature. The novels characters, and its readers, may elucidate occluded

3. Like other women of her period, Cabello attempted to build bridges between women and the sciences, arguing in 1877 that woman can enter the eld of experimental science without ever being a materialist. Her imagination, which tends to idealize everything, and her heart, which loves the good and beautiful, will forbid it (qtd. in Masiello Civilization 96). Fifteen years later, in El Conspirador, Cabello is equally interested in experimentation, but far less certain of an essential femininity that will determine the results of such inquiry.

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natural laws through this experimental practice, one which may lead in negative directions (one may, in performance, abandon nature), but which may offer the only chance for nding the natural equilibrium of a social order wildly out of true. In El Conspirador, Cabello applies herself to the observation of cases that Comte would undoubtedly have dismissed as disturbances (244). Cabello seems to present these aberrations as themselves experiments, undertaken by those who enact them, and to view them as a means of obtaining a glimpse of a natural law that might otherwise remain obscured by social life. When tona, inactiva is en completa oposicio n Bello asserts that his vida mono cter y [sus] costumbres, Cabello is amplifying an antinomy con [su] cara cter and such social categories between such ontological categories as cara as costumbres, and questioning the use of either to restrict human beings in their efforts to live a fullling life. Only through an experimental model in which no role is proscribed for any particular person may we stumble cter that can then reveal as arbitrary and socially constructed upon a cara the constraints that deny its expression.4 Cabellos exploration of these issues in El Conspirador questions both the gendered categories applied to actors in the social eld, and the gendered contours ascribed to distinct public and private spheres.

Theatrics
A representational disorder reigns in Cabellos Lima, its dishevelment so absolute as to put into question the connection to reality of any of societys terms. In the Lima the novel presents, word and object rarely line up, and the primary mode of social advancement is precisely the manipulation for personal gain of this disjunction between signier and signied. The novels characters oat above the real in a phantasmatic structure that, for all its unreality, has material consequences: deaths on the battleeld, societal conicts, the impoverishment of the nation for the benet of a few. Titles are invoked in inverse proportion to their antiquity (171), and communism is

4. Cabello made this point in her nonction as well. For instance, in 1896 Cabello urged women to counter the sexist theories of Cesare Lombroso through the examples of their own lives (Masiello Civilization 215n).

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the self-preserving strategy of an aristocracy sustaining itself through el citamente establecido (124). comunismo ta The card games of Limas corrupt politicians exemplify the depth of this societys disregard for reality. The men who run the country, whom Bello tico-bursa co-pol til (189), play characterizes as ese traqueteo chismogra for chino apunte, continuing a tradition begun, Bello claims, among the cada cha la salesmen of Chinese bonded laborers, slave dealers who gave a n de un chino: de un hombre! (186; emphasis in original). Even representacio Bello is scandalized: [U]n hombre convertido en una cha! [. . .] (186). Just as chips can become people, so can people become what they are not: role-playing on a literal level also pervades the novels thematics. In the novels rst half we hear of Bellos mentor, an earlier conspirator who teaches Bello what he needs to know. This conspirator focuses on the costumes associated with his chosen role, spending the night before battle en cambiar los vivos rojos de los vestidos de los ociales por vivos azules (64). Despite having no money for ammunition or uniforms for his soldiers, he has a gold helmet made for himself in preparation for his anticipated triumphal march into Lima (64). In the novels second half, Ofelia, whose very name evokes a character from drama, exploits the power of representation to bring about changes in her material reality. She acts like a widow en venganza de las infamias cometidas por su esposo (172), ourishing a fan color ala de cuervo (153, emphasis in original) and discussing the hardships of some unnamed widow l en vida (172), that Bello assumes to be Ofelia herself. Le enterraba a e Bello exclaims in admiring surprise when he hears that her husband is, in fact, still living; the cadaverous spouse remains dead for most of the narrative. Bello, speaking from his jail cell, mocks the previous Conspiradors sartorial preoccupations (just as he evinced horror at the scoring system of the elites card game), but play-acting is at the heart of his own politics as well, which may help to explain his admiration for Ofelias (mis)representational talents. In addition to making use of disguises as a means of escape, Bello relies on the power of role-playing as the primary route to political success. cuBellos political rallies are procesiones carnivalescas (128), farsas rid las (128) which nonetheless function smoothly because nos pagamos de apariencias mejor de realidades (129). By acting like a political boss he be s fo rmula que la de mandar yo y obedecer ellos, quede comes one: sin ma tulo de jefe del partido (98). investido del t

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Bello is aware of his reliance on the power of performance. The historical antecedent he names as an inspiration underscores this understanding. Bello nces, yo takes his cues from Louis Napoleon Bonaparte: Por aquel ento a le do y rele do la historia de las u ltimas ruidosas intentonas de conspihab n, llevadas a cabo por Luis Napoleo n Bonaparte [. . .]. Y yo entusiasracio s, son mado con esas atrevidas aventuras del conspirador france aba con ser su imitador (106). Karl Marxs 1852 analysis of Louis Napoleons rise in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte focuses, precisely, on the state of representational chaos he sees in the France of that time, a period in which acting, rather than any accurate representation of material interests, provided the means of taking control of the state. As Marx put it, the adventurer, who took the comedy as plain comedy, was bound to win (76); Louis Napoleons success was an overthrow at the touch of a mere hat; this hat, to be sure, was a three-cornered Napoleonic hat (34). The importance of the hata costume only, since Louis Napoleon had nothing to do with his uncle Napoleon Bonapartes successesis at the center rather than the edges of Marxs analysis, one in which he considers the ways the material determinants of consciousness may be attenuated when representational schemas fail to account for the material world. Cabellos allusions in El Conspirador to Louis Napoleon coincide neatly with Marxs analysis. The following assertion by Bello encapsulates his strategy:
n quise imitar pie con pie , el desembarco de Napoleo n en En esta expedicio me botas granaderas, y cale me sombrero de Gran MaBoulogne, y calce riscal. Si de los simples ciudadanos se improvisan coroneles, que mucho que tulo de Gran Mariscal. yo me diera el t n so lo puede concederla el Congreso; pero un Verdad que esta distincio Mariscal, fa cilmenre alcanza conspirador que viste los arreos de General o s tarde al dos cosas; imponerse primero al pueblo que lo aclama, y ma Congreso que lo nombra. (106 7)

That is, in Marxs words, the adventurer, who took the comedy as plain comedy, was bound to win. Bello does not ultimately succeed in becoming the Grand Marshall, or, rather, a copy of the imitator of the Grand Marshall, but his posing before and during battle, despite his ight from it at its most heated moment, do gain him recognition, just as his previous military activi-

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tiesmeaningless as they had actually beengained him a lucrative government post. His posing gets him the support he needs to build a political party. Cabello implies that such false representations pervade politics, and that while Bello may not have gained the presidency, it is only because some other, more skillful actor managed to outmaneuver him.

The Masquerade as Experiment

Role-playing does much for the scoundrels of El Conspirador. It also places the nature of representation in the foreground: while in some sense things are what material reality makes them, these masquerades can also disturb any connection between reality and representation; thus delusional (and shrewdly self-serving) theatrics can also become reality. Cabello judges most of these performances harshly, since their performers have created the reigning disorder by disregarding the imperatives of the real world. However, the masquerade is not simply scandalous. While it may perpetuate disregard for the real world, toying with representation may also provide our only access to it, giving us the freedom to investigate alternative forms of representation which may more closely accord with human realitythat is, with nature, which, ignored for so long, must be sought rather than simply consulted. By illustrating the attenuable relation of reality and representation, Cabello is calling attention to a space for change. Cabello implies that humans, so prone to perdious misrepresentation, are also able to change the shape of representation so that it does accord with natural (moral) laws. The weight of bodies, which is and should be established by human intervention but is also naturally given, may have beenindeed seems to have beenelided, miscalculated, or based on a false depiction of reality, but it need not remain this way. Cabellos skeptical positivism guides the search for this new morality. In place of the certainties that drove other positivists, Cabello proposes that ongoing experimentation, rather than prescription, will provide the information we need in order to make informed assessments of what principles are natural to humans, and what that implies about how society should be organized. Cabellos approach robs its practitioners of the certainty of knowing what is and what merely seems, a certainty even readers of Balzac can take for granted. Playing different roles offers a method for discovering rather than recoveringa real body, and, in fact, it is impossible to know

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beforehand whether masquerade is indeed masquerade or rather the revelation of the naked self. In El Conspirador, the masquerade is not a masking of ngel Rama charactera true self. In El Conspirador, playacting is not, as A izes it in his discussion of its practice by the Latin American bourgeoisie of this period, an arbitrary and alien fetish which can provide desire with the cauces y acicates (89) it requires for achieving pleasure, but rather a means of gaining access to a true self that social representations may have obfuscated.5 Ofelia is El Conspiradors case in point. Ofelia the actress, successful in the role of widow, also plays the part of a man. When Ofelia comes to visit Bellos jail cell dressed in mens clothes, she is hermosa y sonriente, radiant with pleasure: she places his hand on her breast so that he can feel her racing bitas impresioheart (224). Bello comments, Estos lances novelescos y de su ritu semi-roma banla, pues que daban pa bulo a su esp ntico y nes encanta este ge nero de aventuras (224). muy dado a The sexual and asexual senses of aventura, both coded male, seem to be equally appealing to her. Ofelia apparently nds pleasure in prostitution, which she explicitly links to adventure. Bello reports that in Ofelias view las an de noche solas a an n que sal la calle [. . .] deb mujeres de cierta condicio lo a buscar aventuras (254). She revels in the benets prostitution ir so brings her, privileges and pleasures usually reserved for men, such as venturing out alone after dark, working, paying bills with money she has earned, and sexual gratication. No shame mars her enjoyment. She returns from one of her paid assignations with el color encendido, el cabello descom a[l lado de Bello] sin mirar[le a e l]; she calls the butler so that puesto; paso she can give him money to pay the butcher and grocer, and as she delivers the money she breaks into an estrepitosa carcajada (258). Her ebullience and the color in her cheeks seem to derive from a combination of erotic and worldly fulllments, both perhaps even more delightful for their commingling. The verve with which she engages in political work suggests that it offers a similar fusion of pleasures, particularly when we later hear that most of the partisans were also her lovers (21112). For Ofelia, part of the attraction of

a solo u a 5. Rama claims that masks were a point of departure from uno mismo: la energ a construido (89). I argue scara que se hab cuando se dejaba de ser uno mismo para ser la ma that Cabello questions the clear uno mismo from which, in Ramas analysis, one departs when indulging in theatrics.

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Bello from the beginning is the possibility that she might be able to participate in public life through him. Si yo pudiera, she claims at the meeting a por la candidatura de usted (181). which launches their romance, trabajar Again, her interest in his work seems almost erotic: Ah, Si supiera Ud. tica, cuando se divide en partidos! Yo me muero como me entusiasma la pol por esas agitaciones, esas impresiones de los partidos en lucha (181). In fact, the primary attraction of moving in with Bello later comes not from the thought of enjoying the intimacy of living with her lover, but from the possibility that their cohabitation might give her the chance to work: es preciso s deseo que vivamos solos, es por trabajar yo, que sepas, que por lo que ma junto contigo (195). In a world in which the only occupations deemed appropriate for women are asexual and domestic, the yearning for access to the public sphere already constitutes a gender transgression, as Ofelia herself felices son los hombres, que todo pueden! Nosotras las recognizes: Ah, que mujeres nada podemos, por eso nos morimos de fastidio (181). Ofelia welcomes the conversion of their house into a public space through the verda n (211) of Bellos partisans, and quickly becomes Coronela dera invasio Bella (213), and the effective head of the party. While Ofelia delights in the hybrid spaces and new roles her life with Bello affords her, Bello nds nothing naturally compelling in domestic life as he experiences it. The nido de amor he shares with Ofelia echoes the opening scene in which Bello complains about the narrow connes of his prison. After a period of domestic bliss far from the public sphere, the enchantment disappears and Bello becomes desperately bored, nding himself caught in cycles of depression and rage. While it is possible to normalize this litany of complaints as those of a man reluctant to be domesticated, it resonates more powerfully as a characterization of a womans attempt to adjust herself to married life lived completely within the home:
s de estas reexiones, daba de mano a todos mis proyectos, y Y despue a a ser el amante carin s aspiraciones que cultivar el amor volv oso, sin ma de su amada. n seguro de lo que yo me Y cuando me consideraba casi tranquilo, y bie a con nuevos br os a reclamar su empen aba en llamar mi felicidad, volv an mis ambiciones de mando, puesto el yo egoista, abatido y olvidado; volv reclamar sus fueros, y a pedirme la consagracio n y mis suen os de gloria, a a dedicado a una mujer. (204) el tiempo, que yo hab

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And while Ofelia enjoys the role reversal brought about by Bellos need to live in hiding, for Bello their home takes on connotations of a suffocating oculto domestic space. In its physical description it resembles a jail: Y alla en la calle de N [. . .] una pequen a casita, encajonada entre dos altas casas, con una puerta angosta, y cuyos cerrados balcones de forma antigua, no a yo (249). Unable to earn an income as la luz exterior, viv dejaban paso a a fugitive from justice, Bello is entirely dependent on Ofelia. As Bryan also shows, he perceives his return to prison as a release from this intolerable situation (244). When he is arrested again he is contento, risuen o, and a had it not been inappropriwould have prorrumpido en gritos de alegr ate. His arrest conrms the importance of his public, political life and, more n of his life com[iendo] over, it liberates him from the verdadera prisio n de ella (268). con la prostitucio One scene in the novel both exemplies some of the difculties a contemporary reader of El Conspirador might have with the text and provides a lead in understanding its rebellion. Ofelia rescues Bello from prison. This scene is at once intriguing for its suggestiveness and alienating for its divergence from novelistic convention. Ofelia arrives at Bellos cell and explains the plan as she undresses muy resueltamente (236): Bello will disguise himself as a woman, using the dress Ofelia is wearing under her own, and will escape while she stays behind in his place. There is one guard who has not been bought, she explains, and thus such machinations are necessary. Bello refuses to put on the dress and, while hesitating to leave Ofelia in prison on account of the ridicule it would bring upon him, he is more conspicuously terrorized by the mujeril disfraz (237), and his deance of Ofelia centers on the s! (237). Ofelia gets clothes. He proclaims, No, con ese vestido ...... jama angry and begins to cry. Just as Bello is about to capitulate to her order, he remembers that he has fake sideburns and a wig, both of which a friend had brought him early in his imprisonment in case he might need them. Ofelia accepts this solution, and they ee togetheror, rather, con extraordinaria sin poderlo evitar (239). me tras s fuerza, Ofelia llevo The improbability of this scene is remarkable: that Ofelia would concoct a plan that would require her to stay in jail; that she would not have contemplated disguising Bello as a man other than himself if that would permit her own escape; and, especially, that Bello would happen to have, hidden in his closet, a disguise, especially when he had complained earlier that no one had been to see him. The scenes presence in the novel despite these improbabilities draws the readers attention to it as if it were proclaiming, by way of its

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strangeness, the signicance of the themes it raises: namely, gender politics, explored through the masquerade. Bello refuses to wear a dress, even when it will allow him to escape from prison. Cabello seems to be underscoring the utterly negative social weight of a dress. The suggestion is that whoever wears the clothes of a woman may end up being treated as oneand this is a terrible fate to endure. Bello will go to any lengths to avoid such an end, including that of violating the realist axiom of verisimilitude. Out come the sideburns and wig. Is Bello a man forced into a feminine role? Rather, it seems that in El Conspirador the connection between male and masculinity, along with the connection between female and femininity, has been attenuated. This helps explain why all of the women are stronger than Bello, and sheds some light on Bellos habit of constantly throwing himself on beds and burying his head in pillows. Ofelias pleasure in aventuras of both the sexual and asexual variety offers a similar challenge to claims that gender roles and the socially appropriate desires assigned to them arise from the natural world. Ofelia does not retain the prerogatives of men forever. Just as her husband returns from the dead, so her enjoyment of masculine liberties is stripped away. Sick and repentant in the nal pages of the novel, she has returned to the Church and languishes in a bedroom lled with women, whose company she previously disdained. She dies of tuberculosis, but Bello seems to assert rica that in this death she is a victim of her gender: La nerviosidad casi histe ltimo de ciertos delicados organismos, excita su sensibilidad, hasta llegar al u a a nimo; Ofelia pertenec e ste extremo, en todas las emociones violentas del a a ser v ctima de su propia sensibilidad (283). Equating deb mero, y quiza nu Ofelias gender with her sexualitythat is, assuming that what society says about what women are, do, and desire is consonant with what individuals are, do, and desireBello implies that her gender cannot be escaped. Bello is a villain of sorts, albeit ultimately a repentant one. His character and its fate could, like Ofelias, be read as a morality tale, a warning of the perils of failing to conform to acceptable gender roles. Men should not, as Bello did, delight in mens company, or unduly exalt the comercio ntimo de la vida social (274). Read this way, the novel would be a condemnation of the homosocial aspects of male public life, and a call for a virility that would not focus so intensely on ties between men. Alternatively, however, the novel can be read as a call for an uncoupling of gender from sexuality, and acceptance of a virility unlinked from its male connotations. In this second reading, the novel evinces suspicion about what society has declared

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natural for man or for woman; in Bello and in Ofelia, the novel offers us characters who are neither men nor women, or who are probably both. If Cabellos use of masquerade is an experimental method as I have suggested, then El Conspirador is not simply concerned with setting representation to rights through negative examples, Ofelia demonstrating the dangers of women usurping the roles of men, and Bello exemplifying the perils of acting like the leader that one is not. While Ofelias name is theatrical, the novel disavows a link between her gender transgressions and the falsity that theatre implies. In fact, Bello seeks Ofelia at the theatre, condent of nding her there, but she never arrives (170). If she is playing a role, it is perhaps because she has been typecast. Bello, disappointed at not nding Ofelia at the Teatro Principal, takes refuge in the performance, thankful for the inanity , al menos de este modo se halla el of the play being staged: Mejor es as sico del sentimiento y la pasio n (171). Insisting on a distinction beaneste tween playacting and the intense masquerade Ofelia lives, the novel suggests that only the former dulls the senses and alienates us further from nature, anesthetizing us from feeling and passion. Even if performance severs El Conspiradors elite from nature, through it Ofelia nds rather than loses herself. The denouement of the novel returns its principal characters to normative gender positions. We leave Bello, headed for exile and repentant of his behavior, gazing through the train window at the hermoso joven at peace with the natural world (287). Ofelia, repentant of her forays into the world of men, is surrounded by women and the Church. That is, the narrative trajectory of the novel revisits well-worn tropes of naturally appropriate gender categories. Nonetheless, from within the context of nineteenth-century Peru, Cabello applies positivist concepts of nature and progress in a way that permits a sharp and radical critique of gender politics, one that questions the legitimacy of more conservative claimants to the throne of interpreter to nature. El Conspirador suggests a model for a positivism rooted in investigation and attention to desire and experience rather than to abstract principles or hasty generalizations. Cabello suggests that morality does not predetermine this process, but, on the contrary, emerges from it. What is natural, Cabello suggests, can be found in radical individuality, and to this heterogeneity Cabello opposes socially imposed gender roles, along with distinctions between private and public. These values and distinctions are but stumbling blocks, binaries that provide only a set of prohibitions making experimentation at best difcult and dangerous to undertake, at worst impossible to countenance.

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Bello rejects Ofelias dress. Ofelia, effective, creative, and energetic as she is, s de que yo te hable este lenguaexcuses her own dying words: Te asombrara bios de una mujer (280). Representation, political and je impropio en los la personal, remains cut off from any basis in an ideal humane order that Cabello still looks to as a source of justice. Cabello denounces the arbitrariness of a societal division that automatically deems unacceptable behavior that falls outside of what is expected of men and of women. That is, she disputes the ontological truism conrming the naturalness of masculine men and feminine women. Certain roles constrain their actors, limiting whatever natural propensity might be. Ofelia cannot act her way out of a social structure that pinions her as, preeminently, a woman, whatever her character. A performative experiment, doomed though it is to failure within the plot of the novel, is what has shown the reader the nature that society compels Ofelia to leave behind. The performative failure is a thematic success, one that permits the reader to see what the characters cannot. The pluma y papel that society does not deny Cabello have at least permitted her to demonstrate an alternative representation of human nature, and to show that at least on paper she can evade the connes of her gender.

Women and Intellectuals

If Cabello, as I have argued, is suggesting that nature might be found through the most scandalous behaviors of a novels most scandalous characters, and if she is arguing that, in general, a refusal to behave might offer the most reliable means of gaining knowledge of nature, then Cabello objected strongly to the gender categories of the real Lima in which she lived. Cabellos historical moment and personal history provided her with both access to public intellectual life and fairly strict parameters within which this access was to be enjoyed. During the period after the War of the Pacic (1879 1883), a space for women in Limas public intellectual life grew. Women participated in some literary tertulias along with men, and a community of women writers grew, aided by woman-dominated tertulias organized by the exiled Argentine writer Juana Manuela Gorriti and novelist Clorinda Matto de Turner (Bryan 119). Venues for publication of works by women

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proliferated (Bryan 23). Cabello, born in 1845, beneted from this relatively open space for womens participation in public life.6 Openness to participation did not mean equality for men and women in the public sphere. Men and women were expected to raise different topics, and to treat them differently. Cabello seems to have been highly attuned to the boundaries delimiting and dening mens and womens intellectual production, and to have challenged them through verbal experimentation. Like some other women writers of this period, Cabello shifts the salience of gendered terms from the writer to the writing, and uses masculine and feminine terms in discussing writing by all writers, including herself and the many other female writers she discusses in La novela moderna.7 As in her novel, in her essay Cabello disassociates gendered terms from the biological categories of male and female, loosening the connections between masculinity and the male sex, and between femininity and the female sex. In La novela moderna, Cabello welcomes the shift from romanticism to realism, claiming that the new generation of Latin American writers has arrojado the galas de aquel arte seductor [romanticismo] (La novela lejos de s 29 30) in favor of the clothing appropriate to realism: la ropa viril, aunque spera y burda, propia del hombre que piensa, estudia, reexiona, y deduce a (La novela 30). This young generation conspicuously includes women: Sigamos su corriente [del arte moderno] she urges the nosotros of which she is a part, aprovechamos su ensen anza, y sin ascos de doncellas pudibundas (La novela 31). Virility becomes an attribute of artists rather than of men, just as men are in equal danger of behaving like doncellas pudibundas or of having worn the effeminate galas of romanticism. She also uses adjectives associated with femininity to discuss male writing, arguing that

6. Cabello was born wealthy, married a well-known European physician, and became a young widow with no children, all of which left her with time, money, and connections. Her six novels, as well as her many essays, on literary topics and womens issues, were widely read and often acclaimed. Indeed, La novela moderna won a prestigious award. Most of her novels were serialized in periodicals, and at least one also published in Madrid (Tamayo Vargas 48). El Conspirador was published in book form in Lima, and then reissued in Mexico in 1898 (Tamayo Vargas 158). She traveled to Europe and participated in a conference of americanists in Madrid, one of only 40 women at a conference of 2,000, and one of just three Latin American women (Palma 36). 7. Cabello was not alone in contesting the gendered ways in which womens writing was discussed mez de Aveand divided, as Bieder demonstrates in her discussion of Spaniards Gertrudis Go n. Cabello places Pardo Baza n A la cabeza de la escuela that will llaneda and Emilia Pardo Baza ns rst novel, Pascual Lo pez. move naturalism to realism in Spain (La novela 1112). Pardo Baza a de un estudiante de medicina (1879), and her 1891 Memorias de un soltero n, could Autobiograf offer an interesting comparison with Cabellos 1892 El Conspirador.

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castidad is a virtue to which all writers should aspirein fact, love and poca viril (La novela 7). chastity alone can guarantee the success of an e Cabello employs the term viril, used previously to mark gender transgression in womens writing (Bieder 103 04), as one of several terms that together create a terrain in which gendered categorizations apply to writing rather than to men and women, thus enabling women to move about this space as equals.8 Cabellos use of the term viril in her essay adds to a reading of El Conspirador, published the same year. Cabello trespasses on masculine terrain by writing the autobiography of a man, thereby appropriating a voice that permits her to discuss national politics.9 As various critics have noted, the male voice masks her own, giving her the freedom to express her own diagnosis of the Peruvian political scene.10 Cabellos harsh and unequivocal political critique may be considered valid because it comes from a male position within the narrative. More radical still, however, is the novels suggestion of a need for renewed gender roles as well as renewed national political ones. Cabello compares the corrupt state politics of the rst half of El Conspirador with the corrupt gender politics of the second. The very name of the novels protagonistBello raises the gender issues I claim the novel addresses, since it is reminiscent of the bello sexo about which such strong debates raged at the time. Thus Cabello does more than infringe on male territory by addressing issues of national politics. In addition to putting a womans analysis of these issues into a mans mouth and thus making them audible, Cabello also places criticisms of gender politics into the same mouth, permitting a directness and a

8. In a similar resemanticization, Cabello uses of the term fraternidad in 1878 while discussing Florence Nightingales accomplishments (qtd. in Masiello Civilization 99). 9. Many critics point to the ways in which Latin American and European women writers of this period strategically inscribed their intellectual work within the parameters of domesticity lez Ascorra, Bermu dez(Bryan 19). For example, Torres-Pou (following Beatriz Sarlo), Gonza Gallegos, Portugal, and Masiello in Civilization. According to these critics, few women writers challenged the public/private split itself, and apparently accepted women writers place within blico 7). More recently, Masiello quesconceptions of republican motherhood (Masiello Espacio pu tions this assumption, arguing that the conservatism that critics have taken for granted does not square with the record offered by nineteenth-century womens periodicals (Melodrama). With respect to Cabello herself, Portugal tempers her claims about Cabellos willingness to work within the existing paradigm, claiming that Cabello was more radical than other women of her generaa caduco o podrido como era la pol tica tion: estaba dispuesta a barrer con todo aquello que sent para ella (14). 10. For example, Bryan, Arango-Ramos, and Tauzin-Castellanos.

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sharpness which would be scandalous (and thus inaudible) if uttered by a woman. As suggested above, the opening paragraph of this autobiography of a public man can be read as a sustained complaint about the narrowness of the domestic sphere to which womens activity was restricted at the time. As Bryan suggests, this could provide a double meaning given the authors gendered social situation (244). The initial exclamationa reader might ask o, seis if this is really a mans voiceintensies this impression: Dios m que vivo encerrado en esta prisio n! [. . .] (5). meses ha Through this bisexual voice, Cabello is able, in El Conspirador, to extend a remapping of social space that she began in a piece she presented at one of Gorritis tertulias and which was then published in Gorritis Buenos Aires periodical, La Alborada del Plata, in 1877. In this brief essay, entitled El Oasis de la Vida, Cabello plays with the language of the domestic sphere, resemanticizing the space of oasis, as she resemanticizes viril above. Cabello discusses at some length the need for a refuge from the tumultuous nde se halla el oa sis para el que atraviesa el a rido desierto world, asking: do de la vida? (Oasis 123). The commonplace answer to this question particularly for a he who might be crossing this desertwas the family. It is different for different men, Cabello goes on to say, but: Yo que no sis color del oro; ni tengo niguna similitud ni con el avaro que quiere su oa a color de cielo; ni tampoco con el materialista que con el poeta, que lo suen ntica que lo desea, lo ve como una gran retorta; ni mucho menos con la roma impalpable, yo, he hallado mi oa sis en medio al desierto de mi vida. vago e haceros una descripcio n de e l (Oasis 125). She identies No intentare the oasis as Gorriti herselfSol arrancado para nuestra felicidad del cielo Argentino (126). That is, the intellectual world offers her the oasis she yearns for. Cabellos comments in Oasis de la vida were certainly read as a rejection of the home. Two impassioned responses published in subsequent issues reinscribe the scandalously absent family as part of the oasis. The rst, written by the woman who later took on the editorship of the Alborada and entitled El Hogar, begins, Bella y santa palabra que mitiga, con su dulce sis de la existencia! inuencia las penas y dolores de la vida! Delicioso oa (Larrosa 129). The second, also entitled El Oasis de la Vida and by a man, opens with an epigraph summing up his point: Es algo que con el mundo 126). The writer, reconcilia / El Ver crecer en torno la familia (Escardo responding to each of Cabellos points in turn, argues: traedme al avaro, al

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bio, a la roma ntica, y si saben constituirlo, tendra n plena oa sis, poeta, al sa 128; emphasis in original). That is, Cabellos attempt en su hogar (Escardo to recast intellectual life rather than the home as the center of personal gratication was, rst of all, understood in exactly such terms, and, second, given a chilly reception at best.

Cabello de Carbonera
In Cabellos account in El Conspirador, the socially upheld principle of gender division runs aground on the shoals of the characters complex desires, which, rooted in experience and in the body, disturb genders hegemony as a descriptive term. Details of Cabellos biography suggest that the questions about gender that I am claiming she raises in El Conspirador may also have gured prominently in her own life. The gender ambiguity that pervades the novel points to a discomfort with gender as an organizing category. Cabello, too, faced difculties in being something other than what her world suggested she should be. Reactions to her life and her work seem to lend credence to Butlers insistence that identity is the necessary scene of agency (147), and that refusals to repeat prescribed gender models are themselves transgressive, and can exact a high price of rebels. Cabello enjoyed considerable privilege and success, but her public life was rife with conict. Much of the roughness of Cabellos reception was apparently linked to her failure to adhere to the dictates of her gendered position. Her style appears to have been direct and polemical, rather than appropriately feminineshe often spoke, to use Ofelias words, in a language inappropriate on the lips of a woman. In 1940 Tamayo Vargas, an admiring biographer who names her as the founder of the novel in Peru, describes her as having had, in moments of a que respond a a cierta intensity, una actitud hostil, una altanera energ masculinidad de su temperamento (16). He also refers to her complejo an cierta varonil (38), and even claims that las pilosidades de su cara dir n varonil (73). Insults and criticism ricocheted around her, some desviacio relatively innocuous and others vicious.11 Gorriti, so important in developing an intellectual community for women in Lima, clearly approached womens

11. Juan de Aronas deformation of her name in a gossip magazine is particularly aggressive and n era (Tamayo Vargas 44). cruel: he called her Mierdeces Caballo de Cabro

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integration into public life far more circumspectly. She wrote in her diary in 1889:
He escrito a Mercedes Cabello que siga mandando sus correspondencias a dicos europeos. Aconse jola no herir susceptibilidades, lisonjear, los perio mentir en ese sentido; derramar miel por todas partes: ni una sola gota de miel, que se torna para quien la vierte veneno mortal. co horror tiene el que escribe historia ntas cosas bellas en su magn Cua nica, que callar, por esa consideracio n de vital importancia. (239) o cro

Gorriti was scandalized by Cabellos 1888 novel Blanca Sol, and condemned it in gendered terms: Es indigna de la pluma de cualquiera mujer, she wrote, and blamed only Cabello herself for problems that such writing might bring her (239). Cabello apparently suffered from increasing psychological problems (Portugal 3). Her public life came to a virtual end shortly after the publication of El Conspirador. She went into retiro, Tamayo Vargas writes, and Su apari n, desde entonces, esta en el campo de la diatriba y del ataque personal. cio [. . .] Luego el silencio completo (64). Retreating further and further from n, in 1900 Cabellos commitment to an insane asylum her centro de accio in Lima severed all access to it. The comments of Ricardo Palma, one of the preeminent intellectuals in Peru at the time, suggest that she, like Bello, might have been suffering intensely in a home that to put it mildly she did not seem to view as a desirable domestic haven:
s Siento darle noticia sobre Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera; desde hace ma de un mes se encuentra la infeliz en el manicomio. Aunque ella tiene modo peligroso conservarla en casa, pues en desta fortuna, la familia ha cre incendiarla [. . .] Desde los an uno de sus ataques intento os antes de su viaje a Chile y Argentina, ya recelaba yo de la sanidad de su cerebro. Lo asdelirio de grandezases una de peor es que la principal de sus man n. (qtd. in Portugal 3 4) las que declara la ciencia de casi imposible curacio

She never emerged from this (second) prison, where she engaged in conversaciones con seres imaginarios (Tamayo Vargas 74) before completing a slow camino al silencio (Tamayo Vargas 73, 75). She died there in 1909.

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Works Cited:
Arango-Ramos, Fanny. Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera. Historia de una verdadera cons n social. Revista Hispa nica Moderna 47.2 (1994): 306 24. piracio n. Peru , meta fora e historia. Lima: Latino dez-Gallegos, Marta. Poder y transgresio Bermu americano, 1996. Bieder, Maryellen. Gender and Language: The Womanly Woman and Manly Writing. Culture and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Spain. Ed. Lou Charnon-Deutsch and Jo Labanyi. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995. 98 119. Bryan, Catherine Marie. Las obreras del pensamiento: Women Intellectuals in NineteenthCentury Peru: Between Feminism and Nationalism. Diss. U of Minnesota, 1997. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Cabello de Carbonera, Mercedes. El Oasis de la Vida. Masiello (1994) 123 26. a de un hombre pu blico. Novela pol tico-social. Lima: . El Conspirador. Autobiograf E. Sequi, 1892. co. Lima: Bacigalupi, 1892. . La novela moderna. Estudio loso Comte, Auguste. Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings. Ed. Gertrud Lenzer. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1975. , Florencio. El Oasis de la Vida. Masiello (1994) 126 29. Escardo lez Ascorra, Martha Irene. La evolucio n de la conciencia femenina a trave s de las Gonza mez de Avellaneda, Soledad Acosta de Samper y Mercedes Cabello novelas de Gertrudis Go de Carbonera. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. Gorriti, Juana Manuela. El mundo de los recuerdos. Oasis en la vida y lo ntimo. Tomo 6 gicas Berta de Obras completas. Argentina: Instituto de Investigaciones Dialectolo Vidal de Battini, 1992. Larossa, Lola. El Hogar. Masiello (1994) 129 31. Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers, 1963. Masiello, Francine. Melodrama, Sex, and Nation in Latin Americas Fin de Siglo. Modern Language Quarterly 57.2 (1996): 269 78. blico. El periodismo femenino en la Argentina del siglo XIX. . La mujer y el espacio pu Buenos Aires: Feminaria, 1994. . Between Civilization and Barbarism: Women, Nation, and Literary Culture in Modern Argentina. Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 1992. Palma, Ricardo. Corresponsal de El Comercio. Lima: El Comercio, 1991. n, Emilia. Memorias de un soltero n. Obras completas. Madrid: Aguilar, 1956. Pardo Baza 448 527. pez. Obras completas. Madrid: Aguilar, 1956. . Pascual Lo a. Mercedes Cabello o el riesgo de ser mujer. Lima: Centro de DocuPortugal, Ana Mar n Sobre la Mujer, 1987. mentacio ngel. Las ma ngel scaras democra ticas del modernismo. Montevideo: Fundacio n A Rama, A Rama, 1985.

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en trance a la novela. Lima: Baluarte, 1940. Tamayo Vargas, Augusto. Peru re dite dans El Conspirador de Mercedes CaTauzin-Castellanos, Isabelle. Politique et he bello de Carbonera. Bulletin Hispanique 95 (1993): 488 99. n narrativa de Mercedes Torres-Pou, Joan. Positivismo y feminismo en la produccio rez. El sujeto femenino en escritoras Cabello de Carbonera. Estudios en honor de Janet Pe nicas. Ed. Susana Cavallo, Luis A. Jime nez, and Oralia Preble-Niemi. Potomac, hispa MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1998. 244 56.