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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations
The Graduate School
2005
The Spaces of a Free Spirit: Manuela Sáenz
in Literature and Film
Heather R. Hennes
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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
THE SPACES OF A FREE SPIRIT: MANUELA SÁENZ IN
LITERATURE AND FILM
By
HEATHER R. HENNES
A Dissertation submitted to the
Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Awarded:
Summer Semester, 2005
The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Heather R. Hennes defended on June
14, 2005.
Santa Arias
Professor Directing Dissertation
Barney Warf
Outside Committee Member
Brenda Cappuccio
Committee Member
Roberto Fernández
Committee Member
Approved:
Peggy Sharpe
Chairperson, Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics
The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.
ii
To Leo and Sara Hennes, who have made great sacrifices for my education. Thank you for your
support, Mom and Dad.
iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
While writing this dissertation has meant endless hours alone with the computer, it is the
culmination of years of graduate studies made possible thanks to the intellectual, emotional, and
financial support of others. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the many people who
have supported me in my graduate studies at Florida State and in the process of completing this
manuscript. I am extremely grateful to the Pat Winthrop-King Foundation and to the Department
of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University for the fellowship that has
allowed me to dedicate myself more fully to my doctoral studies and research. I am also grateful
to the many faculty members who have encouraged and guided me along the way and who
provided feedback on this manuscript. Thank you to my dissertation committee: Prof. Roberto
Fernández, who encouraged me to pursue a PhD in the first place; Prof. Brenda Cappuccio for
her careful reading of the manuscript and enthusiasm about the project; and Prof. Barney Warf
for his invaluable insight into theory, thoughtful and thought-provoking feedback at various
stages of the project, and assistance with the final product. Thank you especially to Prof. Santa
Arias for her constant support, enthusiasm, patience and faith, for her guidance at various stages
of the project, and for encouraging me to explore new approaches to literary and cultural studies.
I would also like to thank my academic family—my colleagues—at Florida State: Isabel
Castro-Vazquez, for providing encouragement and advice from the “other side” of the
dissertation process; Rosita Villagomez and Amrita Das, for being my online resources along the
way (it helped to know I wasn’t alone in cyberspace!); Karina Carballo, for talking gender and
women’s writings over our ritual tennis matches, and José Antonio González and León ChangShik for discussions about the dissertation process and about “space.” A very special thanks to
David Portorreal, for opening me up to the world of film; for seeing me through five years of
classes, comprehensive exams, and research; for putting his plans on hold so I could finish my
PhD; and for making me promise to finish when I found myself at a crossroads.
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I am also blessed to have the unwavering support of family—both family by blood and family by
choice. Thank you to my brothers Eric and Jason Hennes, for encouraging me when the chips
were down, for keeping me supplied with the latest computer technology, and for helping resolve
“life” matters so that I could continue writing. And to my beloved friend, study companion and
Mac support system, Sue Trone: words cannot express how instrumental you have been in
helping me keep my smile and “forward momentum” and embrace my own career. Thank you,
too, to Javier González de Echávarri, for listening to me think out loud, challenging me to
articulate my ideas, and nudging me every day to write, write, write. And, finally, to Leo and
Sara Hennes, my parents: thank you for all the sacrifices you have made for my education, for
instilling in me an appreciation for learning, and for being a constant source of love,
encouragement and support.
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures .............................................................................................................................. viii
Abstract ............................................................................................................................................x
INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................1
Manuela Sáenz Aizpuru: A Biographical Introduction..........................................................2
Overview of the Following Chapters .....................................................................................9
Resituating Sáenz in Official History...................................................................................14
1. GENDER, SPACE, AND MANUELA SÁENZ ......................................................................16
A Bibliographic Overview of Manuela Sáenz .....................................................................16
Gender and Space.................................................................................................................23
2. NINETEENTH-CENTURY PERSPECTIVES ON MANUELA SÁENZ ..............................31
Jean Baptiste Boussingault...................................................................................................33
The Beautiful Moustached Faced ...............................................................................34
Manuela Repositioned in Domestic Space .................................................................40
Eccentricity to the Point of Insanity ...........................................................................43
Ricardo Palma ......................................................................................................................47
“A Freak of Nature”....................................................................................................48
A Feminized Manuela.................................................................................................53
Simón Bolívar ......................................................................................................................57
Diana in the Garden of Odysseus ...............................................................................58
Negotiating the Terms of Gender Transgressions ......................................................59
Conclusions: Manuela Responds .........................................................................................66
3. ‘PATRIOTA Y AMANTE DE USTED’: MANUELA SÁENZ IN HER LETTERS AND
DIARIES...................................................................................................................................69
Reclaiming Feminine Corporeality ......................................................................................71
Harbor and Refuge: Reclaiming Domestic and Marital Spaces...........................................75
Reclaiming and Transforming Domestic Space in Revolutionary Spanish America.78
Transgressions into Political and Military Spaces ...............................................................83
Sáenz Aspires to Military Mobilization......................................................................86
The Trojan Horse .................................................................................................................91
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“Una Pobre Mujer [...] Amiga del Orden” ...........................................................................95
Conclusions: “What about Female Masculinity?” ...............................................................98
4. THE SPACES OF A FREE SPIRIT: DIEGO RÍSQUEZ’S MANUELA SÁENZ,
LIBERTADORA DEL LIBERTADOR .....................................................................................102
Traditional Representations of Manuela Sáenz..................................................................103
“Una Guerrera Entera”: Resituating Sáenz into Official History.......................................106
A Body Dressed and Undressed.........................................................................................108
The Limits to Manuela’s Masculinization .........................................................................112
Transgendering Manuela through Costuming....................................................................116
From Voyeur to La Maja Desnuda ....................................................................................119
The Use of Editing to Convey Mobility.............................................................................121
“A Pioneer for Women’s Rights”.......................................................................................127
Exiled in Paita, Erased from History..................................................................................130
Conclusions ........................................................................................................................134
5. CONCLUSIONS.....................................................................................................................136
Limitations of the Present Study and Direction of Future Research..................................141
NOTES.........................................................................................................................................147
Introduction ........................................................................................................................147
Chapter One........................................................................................................................148
Chapter Two .......................................................................................................................151
Chapter Three .....................................................................................................................157
Chapter Four.......................................................................................................................160
Chapter Five .......................................................................................................................164
REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................165
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................................176
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LIST OF FIGURES
1. Portrait of Manuela Sáenz wearing the sash of the Orden de las Caballeresas del Sol ..............4
2. Antonio de la Guerra visits Sáenz in Paita..............................................................................102
3. Guerrillera with Santiago/Bolívar in Jorge Triana’s Bolívar soy yo......................................105
4. Alejandra/Manuela in uniform in Bolívar soy yo ...................................................................105
5. Alejandra/Manuela pleads with Santiago/Bolívar in Bolívar soy yo ......................................105
6. Sáenz and Bolívar dance.........................................................................................................109
7. Sáenz and Bolívar in step with the “androgynous ones.” .......................................................109
8. A moustache completes Manuela’s disguise ..........................................................................111
9. A masculinized Manuela prepares to hang flyers stating “Muera la tiranía.” ....................... 111
10. Confrontation between Sáenz and Bolívar ............................................................................113
11. Manuela flirts with Dr. Cheyne and gains information about Bolívar ..................................115
12. “Claro que está ocupado. Muy ocupado.” ............................................................................ 117
13. Bolívar is exiled from Bogota...............................................................................................118
14. Manuela as La Maja Vestida..................................................................................................121
15. Thorne insists that Sáenz end her relationship with Bolívar..................................................122
16. Sáenz and Bolívar recline in a hammock as she expresses her desire to be with him...........122
17. Thorne chastises Sáenz for her revolutionary activity...........................................................124
18. La Coronela Manuela Sáenz ..................................................................................................126
19. Sáenz confronts Azuero, who condemns her to death ...........................................................127
viii
20. “Ya soy lo que ves, una mujer entrada en carnes, inválida [...].” ..........................................131
21. Final scene of Manuela Sáenz, Libertadora del Libertador ..................................................134
ix
ABSTRACT
This project studies the various ways in which representations of space have been used to
gender Manuela Sáenz Aispuru in literary, epistolary, and cinematic texts. I approach this study
with an understanding of gender as a social space delineated by the subject’s relationship to other
individuals, entities, and ideas, and made intelligible through each individual’s experience of
physical and mental spaces. My framework draws from feminist, queer, and geographical
theories, including those of Teresa de Lauretis, Judith Halberstam, Elizabeth Grosz, Gillian
Rose, and Henri Lefèbvre. By reading representations of Sáenz through a lens of space, I respond
to the growing interest in this historical figure and to the call made by scholars such as Nela
Martínez, María Cifuentes, and Sarah Chambers to study the complexities of Sáenz’s identity
and historical significance.
In the first part of this project, I analyze the ways in which three of Sáenz’s male
contemporaries—Jean Baptiste Boussingault, Ricardo Palma, and Simón Bolívar—represent her
and her transgressions of gender norms in their memoirs, essays, and letters, respectively. I find
that Boussingault and Palma portray Sáenz as an unnatural and perverse individual because she
handles her body space in ways contrary to hegemonic femininity. However, Bolívar, as her
lover and as General-in-chief of the Colombian Army, writes from a compromised positionality,
from which he negotiates with Sáenz the limits to her transgressions into the masculine spheres
of politics and military participation. In the second part, I examine Sáenz’s personal letters and
diaries, studying her self-representation in light of her ability to appropriate, manipulate, and
navigate physical and mental spaces that have been culturally codified as either masculine or
feminine. I find that by linking these manipulations of gendered spaces to the political,
ideological, and geographical space of revolutionary Spanish America, she establishes for herself
both a coherent identity and a sense of agency. Finally, I analyze Diego Rísquez’s 2002 film
Manuela Sáenz, Libertadora del Libertador, analyzing how the film depicts Manuela’s
x
appearance and movement within gendered spaces in order to construct her as a symbol of
freedom, of rebellion, and of women’s rights.
xi
INTRODUCTION
Space, for the woman, is by definition a place of
frustration, whether physical, moral, or cultural. It
is also the place of systematization and
hierarchization. (Claudine Hermann,1 Les Voleuses
de langue)
Si la Manuela estuviera aquí estaría esto ardiendo
como Troya, pues solo se buscan pretextos para la
revolución [...]. (President Vicente Rocafuerte to
General Juan José Flores, 11 Nov. 1835)
This project examines the ways in which representations of physical, ideological, and
symbolic spaces have been used to gender Manuela Sáenz Aizpuru as a subject in her own
writings, in the writings of her contemporaries, and in recent films. The premise of this study is
that gender is a social space constituted by the relationship between the subject and other
individuals, a relationship made intelligible through each individual’s perception and experience
of physical and mental spaces. This lens enables me to read Sáenz’s self-representation in light
of her ability to appropriate, manipulate, and navigate spaces that have been culturally codified
as either masculine or feminine. Through this reading I find that Manuela, who easily moves
between feminine and masculine spaces, establishes for herself both a coherent identity and a
sense of agency. A key aspect of Manuela’s self-representation as a coherent yet dynamic, multigendered subject is her use of the discourses of citizenship, liberty, and friendship in order to
justify her many social transgressions (including cross-dressing, fighting in battle, and pursuing
an illicit love affair) by linking them to notions of freedom emergent in early nineteenth-century
Spanish America.
I also use this framework of space to examine the ways in which some of Manuela’s male
contemporaries represent her and her problematic gender transgressions. Historian Pamela
Murray provides a panoramic view of some of these writings in her article “‘Loca’ or
‘Libertadora’?: Manuela Sáenz in the Eyes of History and Historians, 1900—c. 1990” (2001).
She traces the historiography of Manuela Sáenz, identifying a number of factors that have
influenced the ways in which she has been represented—or ignored—during the past two
centuries. Referring to one school of thought about Manuela—the negative one—she writes, “Its
1
origins lay in the critical reactions of Sáenz’s contemporaries, some of whom saw her
unorthodox behaviour—including her habit of wearing a military uniform in public and
participating in the masculine world of politics—as evidence that she was ‘crazy’ (loca) and
‘immoral’” (294).
By analyzing the ways in which some of Sáenz’s contemporaries represent her in terms
of the spaces she inhabits (such as her body) and those she transgresses (such as domestic space,
the battlefield, and the public political sphere), I find that some of these texts limit Sáenz to
traditionally feminine spaces and to the categories of seductress, crazy woman, or Amazon. On
the other hand, Simón Bolívar at times represents Sáenz in a way that reflects her participation in
both masculine and feminine spheres. The texts that I examine in this aspect of the analysis are
letters, essays, and memoirs by the Liberator Simón Bolívar, Ecuadorian President Vicente
Rocafuerte, Ecuadorian Secretary of the Interior José Miguel González Alminati, French
scientist Jean Baptiste Boussingault, and Peruvian writer Ricardo Palma.
After a discussion of how Sáenz represents herself in her own writings, I move into the
third part of my analysis, in which I study cinematic representations of Manuela Sáenz. In spite
of the growing interest in Sáenz as an historical, literary, and cultural figure, there is a lack of
critical work about the films that have represented her to a wide, international audience. After
briefly discussing the three films in which Sáenz plays a supporting role to protagonist-hero
Simón Bolívar, I enter into a detailed analysis of Diego Rísquez’s 2002 film Manuela Sáenz,
Libertadora del Libertador. In this film, various aspects of Manuela’s appearance and movement
within gendered spaces contribute to her portrayal as a symbol of freedom, of rebellion, and of
women’s rights.
Manuela Sáenz Aizpuru: A Biographical Introduction
Manuela Sáenz Aizpuru was born in Quito on December 28, 1795.2 She was the
illegitimate daughter of doña Joaquina Aizpuru y Sierra and don Simón Sáenz de Vergara y
Yedra. According to death records consulted by biographer Antonio Cacua Prada, Manuela’s
mother died less than a month after giving birth. Manuela became an hija expósita, an infant left
at the Monastery La Concepción, to be raised by the Reverend Mother San Buenaventura and,
upon her death, by the new Reverend Mother Josefa del Santísimo Sacramento. During her
2
childhood in the convent, her father, who was also a successful merchant, became mayor and
later alderman of the Royal Council of Quito. He was a fervent royalist.
When Manuela was seven years old, don Simón took her out of the convent and brought
her to live at his home, where he had a wife and several children, one of whom was José María
Sáenz del Campo, who would later become a general in the Colombian army. According to
Cacua Prada, while she was living with her father, stepmother, and siblings, Sáenz periodically
stayed with her maternal grandparents at their hacienda Cataguango, which she would later
inherit. When the fight for independence broke out in Quito—in August, 1809—and her father
was arrested as a political prisoner, Manuela went to live at Cataguango, which was then in the
possession of her uncle, Father Domingo Aizpuru. Some—like biographer Cacua Prada (35) and
novelist Luis Zúñiga (16)—have postulated that it was during her visits to Cataguango that Sáenz
developed her equestrian skills, for which she would become well-known.
When the colonial government was reestablished, don Simón Sáenz was freed, but
considering the still unstable political climate in Quito, he moved his commercial endeavors to
Panama. In 1813, Manuela was enrolled as a resident student in the Convento de Santa Catalina
de Siena,3 where she spent three years learning the skills expected of a proper criolla: basic
reading and writing, including Latin and Greek; sewing, embroidery and making lace; baking
sweets, and playing the harpsichord (Cacua Prada 36). Legend has it that during her three years
at Santa Catalina she fell in love with a young official from the royalist army, Fausto D’Elhuyar,
and that she escaped from the convent in order to be with him. While some biographers include
this detail as a fact,4 others such as Cacua Prada attribute it to the “fantastic imagination of [Jean
Baptiste] Boussingault” (36).
In any event, Sáenz went to live with her father in Panama in 1816. There she met the
successful English merchant James Thorne, who was twice Manuela’s age. In the summer of
1817, Manuela married Thorne in Lima, where he was well-established. Though Thorne seemed
to have been in love with Sáenz, for her the marriage was one of social and economic
convenience. When she left Panama for Lima, her father purchased for her two female slaves,
Jonatás and Nathán, who were close in age to Manuela and who would be her companions for
the rest of her life. The couple, who had taken up residence in Lima, would never have children,
and it is often noted that Manuela was infertile.
In Lima, Sáenz de Thorne met fellow Ecuadorian Rosita Campuzano. While James was
3
away on business—or perhaps with his mistress Juana Rosa Alvarado—Sáenz dedicated herself
to the revolution, hosting political tertulias and soliciting support for the revolutionary army. Her
political activities were a point of contention between herself and her husband. For their
contributions to the independence movement, Sáenz, Campusano, and other patriotic women
were bestowed the title of Caballeresa de Sol, granted by General don José de San Martín on
January 11, 1822. Later that spring, Sáenz left Lima for Quito in order to tend to legal business
related to her maternal inheritance. While she was there, she engaged in espionage, established a
hospital for wounded soldiers in her home, donated food and supplies from her newly-acquired
hacienda to the army, and later helped prepare the city for the Liberator Simón Bolívar’s
triumphant arrival at Quito.
Fig. 1. Portrait of Manuela Sáenz wearing the sash of the Orden de las Caballeresas del Sol.
Oil on canvas by Marco Antonio Salas (1930).
Housed in the Casa Museo Quinta de Bolívar.
It was during the victory parade in Quito on June 16, 1822 that Sáenz and Bolívar had their
first encounter. As the Liberator paraded by on horseback, Sáenz threw a crown of laurel from
the balcony where she was seated; the crown hit Bolívar on the chest, he looked up, and saw
Manuela. The two met later that evening at a ball given in celebration of the victory, thus
initiating a love affair that would survive her marriage, his numerous other affairs, the
controversy sparked by her involvement in political matters, and ultimately his exile from
Colombia. Shortly after their meeting, Sáenz and Bolívar began to correspond through letters,
many of which speak of her longing to be with him on the military campaign, his cautions about
her audacious behavior, and mutually-expressed passion.
4
In September, 1823, Manuela put on a military uniform and helped put down an antiBolívar uprising in Quito; in the following years, she would be seen riding through the streets of
Lima and Quito in her military uniform on a daily basis. In recognition of the loyalty she
demonstrated by putting down the uprising, Bolívar assigned Sáenz to remain stationed in Lima,
where she would be guardian of his official and personal archives. He also enlisted her into the
light cavalry called húsares (hussars). Still living with her husband, Manuela returned to Lima
where she lived with Thorne in a country house not far from Bolívar’s estate, La Magdalena.
During the summer of 1824, Bolívar left Lima and headed farther north into Peru. In her
letters Manuela expressed her desire to join him, but he insisted she stay in Lima. Concerned
about Simón’s failing health, and extremely jealous about his affair with Manuela Madroño,
Sáenz defied Bolívar’s orders to stay in Lima and joined him in Huaraz. She participated in the
victorious Battle of Junín in early August and later at the Battle of Ayacucho in December, with
which Peru sealed its independence from Spain. For the courage she demonstrated in both
battles, she was promoted to Captain of Hussars and then Colonel of Hussars, respectively.
Though Manuela and Simón reunited in Lima in January of 1825, that following year would be a
period of separation, and for Manuela, great anxiety. Besides leaving Lima for Cuzco and then
Potosí, Chuquisaca (present-day Sucre), and later returning to The Magdalena near Lima,
Bolívar became involved with several other women, proposed marriage to one, and had sons
with two others.
February, 1826 saw Sáenz still in Chuquisaca while Bolívar was already back at La
Magdalena in Lima, where he maintained a relationship with Jeannette Hart. A letter that
Manuela sent him from Chuquisaca attests to the anxiety and longing she felt during this period
of separation: “Por compasión escríbame, para renovar al menos esta amistad, que sí la creo
sincera. Si antes he querido sus halagos como una dávida de su amor por mí, hoy lo sufro por la
ausencia de usted. Si ya no me necesita, ¡dígame!” (Letter to Simón Bolívar, 17 Mar. 1826).
When Thorne decided to move back to London and to take his wife with him, Manuela first
advised Simón of her departure, then later refused to go, made a definitive break in her marriage,
and returned to Lima. Bolívar’s letters attest to his renewed appreciation for Sáenz when faced
with the possibility of her move overseas. In August of that year, Sáenz moved into La
Magdalena with Bolívar.
At the beginning of 1827, Bolívar had gone to Caracas to confront General Páez. While he
5
was gone, there were anti-Bolívar uprisings in Lima, the Peruvian congress rejected the
Liberator, and Sáenz was expelled from Peru. She went first to Ecuador, where there were more
uprisings, then in December left Quito for Bogota, where she would reunite with Bolívar in
January of the following year. In Bogota, Manuela had a city apartment and also resided at the
Bolívar estate just outside of the city. Facing continued insurrections and required to go to the
Ocaña Convention in March in an effort to establish the Bolivian Constitution and with it his
lifetime presidency, Bolívar left Bogota for Venezuela. He fell ill in Bucaramanga as Gran
Colombia suffered continued insurrections and schisms. In June, 1828, he returned to Bogota,
where he spent the following seven months with Manuela both at his estate and in the Palacio de
San Carlos. In August of that year, Manuela, aware of an attempt to assassinate Bolívar at a
masquerade ball, caused a scandal at the party in order to avert the attempt. The following
month, on September 25, she saved Bolívar’s life for a second time by helping him escape out
the bedroom window as would-be assassins stormed the palace. These two episodes inspired
Manuela’s nickname: Libertadora del Libertador.
The 1829 saw continued fighting between the Colombian army and Peru. Bolívar spent a
great deal of time in Quito. In January of the following year, he and Manuela returned briefly to
the Bolívar estate outside of Bogota, but Bolívar promptly conceded the presidency, left Bogota,
and began his journey toward Europe. At this point Manuela and Simón separated, perhaps with
plans to reunite shortly thereafter. Regardless, she remained in Bogota, where she continued
advocating Bolívar’s return to the presidency. The fervor of her campaign is evidenced in a letter
sent to her by Bolívar on May 11 of that year: “Amor mío, mucho te amo, pero más te amaré si
tienes ahora más que nunca mucho juicio. Cuidado con lo que haces, pues si no, nos pierdes a
ambos perdiéndote tú” (Letter to Manuela Sáenz, 11 May 1830). On June 9, she heard that a sort
of firework “pyre” had been erected in the plaza in celebration of the Feast of Corpus Cristi and
that on it were painted caricatures of her and Bolívar, representing “tyranny” and “despotism,”
respectively. Armed and accompanied by her slaves, she attacked the display and elicited a
furious response from the government but also anonymous words of support on flyers signed
“Unas mujeres liberales” (“El bello sexo”) and “Unos patriotas de corazón” (“A las señoras
liberales” 255). Manuela continued public displays of support for the integrity of Gran Colombia
and the return of Bolívar. Meanwhile, he made his way toward Santa Marta on the Caribbean
coast, where he died of tuberculosis on December 17, 1830.
6
Two months before he died, Bolívar wrote to Sáenz, pleading with her to come to him: “En
mí sólo hay despojos de un hombre que sólo se reanimará si tú vienes. Ven para estar juntos. Ven
te ruego” (Letter to Manuela Sáenz, 2 Oct. 1830). Accompanied by her slaves Jonatás, Nathán,
and Juana Rosa, Manuela began the journey to Santa Marta, but before she could reach him, she
was met along the way by a messenger carrying a letter from Colonel Luis de Lacroix, who
informed Manuela that Simón had passed away. Devastated by the news of Simón’s death,
Manuela tried to commit suicide by provoking the bite of a poisonous snake, but inhabitants of
the area found her and saved her life.
Sáenz returned to Bogota. She rented a house, where she frequently received friends and
allies. It was rumored that at their gatherings they were conspiring to overthrow the government,
and so Sáenz was perceived as a controversial figure and a threat to the government. She was
stripped of her military title and of the pension she was owed accordingly, and antibolivarian
newspapers called for her expulsion from the country. Secretary of the Interior and of Foreign
Affairs don Lino de Pombo voiced this sentiment in a letter to the governor of Cartagena: “La
historia escandalosa de esta señora es bien conocida como lo son su carácter altanero, inquieto y
atrevido. [...L]a señora se había propuesto, apoyada en su sexo y en su altanería, burlarse de las
órdenes de las autoridades [...].” He insisted that if there were no boat ready to take her away,
that she be retained and kept under close surveilance until one were ready, adding, “y que se
tenga cuidado de que ni por cortesía sea visitada de oficial alguno del ejército” (Letter to the
Governor of Cartagena, 7 Jan. 1834). On January 13, 1834, Manuela was delivered President
(and archenemy) Francisco de Paula Santander’s order of expulsion. She resisted, was put into a
women’s prison, and was sent to Cartagena, from whence she would board a boat headed for
Jamaica.
In Jamaica the four women supported themselves by sewing and making sweets. Manuela
maintained constant correspondence with her allies in Ecuador, particularly with General Juan
José Flores, who had been the president of Ecuador upon its separation from Gran Colombia. All
the while she defended herself against the accusations made against her: “¿Qué tengo que hacer
yo en política? Yo amé al Libertador; muerto lo venero y por esto estoy desterrada por
Santander” (Letter to Juan José Flores, 6 May 1834). Motivated (according to her accounts) by
the need to settle business related to the sale of her estate, Manuela returned to Ecuador in
September, 1834 under the protection of a letter of recommendation from Flores. But the
7
government suspected that she had returned in order to seek revenge for the execution of her half
brother, General José María Sáenz, so in October President Vicente Rocafuerte exiled her to
Paita, a remote fishing port in Peru.
Manuela lived in exile in Paita for the rest of her life. She, Jonatás, and Juana Rosa made
and sold lace, embroidery, sweets, cigars, and home remedies. Taking advantage of her
knowledge of English, Manuela also served as translator in the port town; the sign that hung on
the door of her modest home read “Tobacco. English Spoken. Manuela Sáenz” (Cacua Prada
293). The women lived in poverty but Manuela enjoyed the general affections of the
townspeople. At some point she fell and became paralyzed from the waist down. Confined to a
chair and to her bed she often received visitors, including U.S. novelist Herman Melville,
Bolívar’s friend and teacher Simón Rodríguez, Ecuadorian poet José Joaquín Olmedo, Peruvian
writer Ricardo Palma, General Antonio de la Guerra, and some of the many other exiles who
found themselves in Paita, such as Guiseppe Garibaldi, who had fought for the independence of
Uruguay and who later led the Italian Legion; and fellow Eduadorian, Dr. Gabriel García
Moreno, who wrote to his family, “No salgo sino para hacer ejercicio y visitar a la excelente
paisana Doña Manuela Sáenz, de quien soy amigo de toda confianza, y de quien recibo cada día
nuevas finezas” (qtd. in Cacua Prada 313). Sáenz also maintained her correspondence with
Flores, informing him of the talk around Paita (where there lived several political refugees) and
asking for information about politics in the capital.
Manuela’s letters from exile express a deep sense of frustration at being so distant from the
political center. But she began to resign herself; in 1843 she wrote to Flores, “Cuando digo que
me intereso, entienda usted, que este interés no pasa de deseos y buenas intenciones; pues ya
usted debe suponer que una pobre mujer no puede ni armas tomar, ni armas comprar y menos
influir en nada” (Letter to Juan José Flores, 7 Sept. 1843). And a year later, in response to several
rumors about her that her enemy Pedro Moncayo had told her estranged husband, she wrote,
“¡Qué maldad! Esto me ha dolido; pero con respecto al gobierno, se me da un caracol, aunque
me digan que me vaya de Paita; pues he pasado ya tanto y tanto en la época de mi vida que ya
me he puesto indiferente” (Letter to Juan José Flores, 6 Dec. 1844). This resignation is reflected
in the fact that when her exile was revoked in 1837, she decided not to return. And when her
husband, James Thorne, was murdered ten years later, she refused the inheritance he had left her,
in spite of her impoverished state, and expressed sorrow upon hearing the news of his death; to
8
Roberto Ascásubi she wrote, “estoy enferma con la noticia del horrible asesinato de mi marido,
pues aunque no vivía con él no puedo ser indiferente a este lamentable suceso” (qtd. in Cacua
Prada 306).5 Ricardo Palma, who met her in the last year of her life, mentions that her latest
reading selection was the Book of Psalms, and he comments, “Doña Manuela empezaba a tener
ráfagas de ascetismo, y sus antiguos humos de racionalista iban evaporándose” (198).
In 1856 a diphtheria epidemic struck Paita. Both Jonatás and Juana Rosa succumbed to the
disease before Manuela did; she died on November 23, 1856. Two weeks later, General Antonio
de la Guerra wrote to his wife, doña Josefa Gorostidi y Seminario, sharing with her the sadness
he felt when he and his servants arrived at Manuela’s house and saw that the local sanitation
authorities had ordered it burned in an effort to help contain the epidemic. He noted that he and
his servants were able to recover a few items from the part of the house that had not yet been
consumed by the fire. Among them were several religious statues and a coffer full of documents
and letters, including several confidential letters from Simón Bolívar (Letter to Josefa Gorostidi
y Seminario, 28 Dec. 1856).
Overview of the Following Chapters
In Chapter One, I give an overview of the biographical, historical, and literary texts that
have been published about Manuela Sáenz. In this discussion I point to recent scholarly
publications that have opened up a dialogue about the complexities of Sáenz’s identity and, in
particular, have focused on questions of gender and its relationship to her identity and her
political involvement. I then point to ways in which my project enters into that dialogue and
makes new contributions, beginning with its attention to space as a factor in gender identity. As
part of this discussion, I summarize the theoretical basis of my dissertation, defining both gender
and space and presenting my view of how they intersect in the construction of identity. I then
explain how my project fits into recent trends in Latin American historiography and biographies
about women warriors.
My textual analysis begins in Chapter Two, where, I establish Manuela Sáenz as a
transgressive and controversial figure, citing a variety of written texts from three authors who
describe her in highly gendered terms. All three of these authors—her lover, compatriot, and
general-in-chief Simón Bolívar; French scientist Jean Baptiste Boussingault; and Peruvian writer
9
Ricardo Palma—knew Manuela personally, or—as in the case of Palma—had at least made her
acquaintance. In order to convey the sense of controversy that surrounded Sáenz and her
behaviors, I begin the chapter with a look at the memoirs of Jean Baptiste Boussingault, who
dedicated an entire chapter of his Mémoirs (Memorias) to reflections on Sáenz, on her physical
appearance, her actions, and her personality. As a member of the team of French scientists
recruited by Bolívar to reform the scientific academy of Gran Colombia in the 1820s,
Boussingault came into close personal contact with Sáenz. Unlike many of the other descriptions
of Sáenz that we have from those who knew her or who were politically affected by her actions,
Boussingault’s views are not those of a politician, but those of a scientist and an outsider to Gran
Colombia. This perspective, along with the realism that characterizes his descriptions and his
apparent fascination with the uncouth aspects of the social life observed during his stay in Gran
Colombia, make for a direct and detailed discussion of Sáenz’s unconventional behaviors and of
the impact of this behavior on those around her.
While Boussingault represents Sáenz during the height of her relationship with Bolívar and
her involvement in the independence movement, Peruvian writer Ricardo Palma represents her in
retrospect and portrays her as both a young revolutionary and an aged, venerable legend. Palma
claims to have met Sáenz during the final year of her life, while she was living in poverty and
exile in Paita, Peru. This encounter becomes the premise of his tradición—or essay about local
customs—titled “La Protectora y la Libertadora.” Palma portrays Sáenz in three distinct and
contradictory ways: as the almost regal, venerable and legendary woman who, by sharing her
memories, connects the narrator to the past; the loyal and passionate young beauty who had
captured Bolívar’s heart; and the “woman-man” (“mujer-hombre”) who rode around in her
military uniform, felt at home in dangerous places, and read masculine literature. By comparing
Sáenz to her friend and compatriot Rosita Campusano—a “womanly woman” (“mujer-mujer”)—
Palma establishes the young Sáenz as a “freak of nature” (“una equivocación de la naturaleza”)
who was out of place in society, at least in terms of her gender. As with Boussingault, his
representation of Sáenz’s gender transgressions reveal an inability to reconcile the masculine and
feminine aspects of her appearance and behaviors into a coherent gender or personal identity;
Manuela is portrayed by both as a perversion, an eccentric, and a freak.
While Boussingault and Palma knew Manuela, their written representations of her as a
gendered subject did not influence her experience of gender as much as the impressions of the
10
third writer discussed in this chapter: Simón Bolívar. Keeping in mind the idea that gender is a
dynamic and relative social space in constant dialogue with the objects, ideas, and people around
the subject, it is interesting to see how the social space of Manuela’s gender is negotiated in the
relationship lived out—in part—in the correspondence between herself and Bolívar. In the final
section of Chapter Two, I analyze the ways in which Bolívar genders Sáenz in several letters,
some to her and others to his sister, María Antonia Bolívar y Palacios, and to General José María
Córdova. I focus on how Bolívar represents Sáenz and her transgressions of gendered space as he
writes from a compromised position as both general-in-chief of the Colombian army (and later
president of the republic) and also as Sáenz’s lover. This analysis establishes the context for
Chapter Three, in which I study the ways in which Sáenz asserts herself as a complex individual
capable of participating in both feminine and masculine spheres of activity.
Having established Manuela Sáenz as a controversial and complex subject, and having
established the context for her correspondence with Bolívar, I examine her letters and diaries to
see if and how she reconciles the ambivalent aspects of her gender identity. In Chapter Three, I
analyze the ways in which Sáenz establishes for herself a complex yet coherent gender identity
by positioning and repositioning herself within physical, conceptual, and symbolic spaces in her
own writings. These include her letters to Simón Bolívar, to her husband James Thorne, and to
her friend and ally General Juan José Flores, as well as select passages from her personal
diaries.6 I also look at the ways in which she responds to highly gendered attacks on her person
by Ecuadorian president Vicente Rocafuerte and Secretary of the Interior José Miguel González,
who in their letters and official declarations dismiss Sáenz as a crazy, capricious woman and
dangerous subversive. I also connect this analysis to María Cifuentes’s study of nineteenthcentury portraits of Manuela Sáenz and of the social values codified in these pictoral
representations.
In this chapter, I focus on four spheres of social space in which Manuela negotiates her
gender identity: her sexed body, marital-domestic space, the battlefield and military campaign,
and the ideally ungendered (but in reality highly-gendered) space of republican citizenship. In
order to appreciate the unconventional nature of Manuela’s activities in traditionally masculine
spaces, I discuss briefly the patterns of female participation in the wars for independence, the
role women were expected to play in the emerging republic, and the fraternal relationships that
formed the basis of social order and politics in early nineteenth-century Latin America. Pointing
11
to ways in which Manuela asserts herself in these masculine spaces and then reclaims
traditionally feminine sites (such as her body and domesticity), I show that an essential aspect of
her complex gender identity is its mobility. In accord with the theories of Judith Halberstam,
who views gender as “fictions rather than facts of life, and as potentialities rather than as fixed
identities” (759), and who argues that “gender is defined by its transivity, [...] sexuality manifests
as multiple sexualities” (767), I show that Manuela was able to reconcile the apparently
contradictory aspects of her gendered appearance and behavior by constantly transgendering
herself in relation to the actions, reactions, demands, and desires of the people and situations
around her. And because these transgressions of the gender divide occurred in the geographical,
ideological, and historical space of revolutionary Spanish America, she was able to connect her
gender transgressions to her multifaceted role as friend, lover, compatriot, spy, colonel, guardian
of archives, and advisor to the Liberator Simón Bolívar. In short, I emphasize the ways in which
Manuela uses her personal and political relationship to Bolívar as a symbolic space in which to
establish for herself a coherent gender identity.
Chapter Four continues with this discussion of mobility. It also responds to the growing
interest in film as a medium for representing, exploring, and studying history, an interest evident
both in popular culture and in academic practice. This trend has led to a number of publications7
about cinematic representations of Latin American history and has been the subject of reflection
and debate among historians.8 In his article titled “History in Images/History in Words” (1988),
Robert A. Rosenstone advocates the recognition of film as a new, unique medium, whose mode
of representing history is changing the way we relate to the world.9 The limiting factor, he
acknowledges, is “the nature and demands of the visual medium itself” (1173). On the other
hand, the advantage to film as a mode of representation is that it invites us to experience
historical figures in their spaces and surroundings, in other words, in the spaces that shaped their
experiences. Rosenstone gives the example of “farm workers dwarfed by immense western
prairies and mountains, or miners struggling in the darkness of their pits, or mill workers moving
to the rhythms of their machines, or civilians sitting hopelessly in the bombed-out streets of
cities” (1179).
In light of Rosenstone’s observations, in Chapter Four I study the ways in which
filmmakers have represented Manuela Sáenz by situating her within physical, conceptual, and
symbolic spaces. I begin the chapter with a brief discussion of how three films have represented
12
Sáenz as a supporting character in the life of Simón Bolívar. These three films are the biopic
titled Simón Bolívar, a joint production of Miguel Contreras Torres (the director of the film) and
Jesús Grova, premiered in Mexico in 1942; a second biopic also titled Simón Bolívar, an
international (Spanish, Italian and Venezuelan) production directed by Alessandro Blasetti and
premiered in 1969; and finally Jorge Triana’s political satire Bolívar soy yo, released by
Venevision International in 2002. After a brief overview of the role of Manuela in the first two
biopics, I enter into a brief discussion of Triana’s film, paying particular attention to the use of
costuming and makeup to emphasize Manuela’s femininity even in scenes representing her
political activities.
The majority of Chapter Four focuses on another film, also released by Venevision
International in 2002: Diego Rísquez’s Manuela Sáenz, Libertadora del Libertador, a film that
affirms Manuela’s agency as a participant in the formation of the new republics. This focus on
Manuela as the primary subject of the biography stands in contrast to films such as Bolívar soy
yo, which relegate her to the supporting role to which she has been assigned by “official” history.
My analysis underscores the innovative ways in which director Diego Rísquez and screenwriter
Leonardo Padrón problematize the subject’s gender, representing her as a complex though
coherent subject who moves with agility from one gendered space to another. Pointing to the
intertextuality between this cinematic representation and Manuela’s self-representations, I study
the ways in which the filmmakers translate the physical, conceptual, and experiential spaces
delineated by the subject in her own writings to the two-dimensional screen space and the threedimensional diegetic space of the film, primarily through the use of costuming, the exposure of
the character’s naked body, direction (including gestures, intonation and movement), and
dialogue. In their filmic representations of her, Rísquez and Padrón complicate Manuela’s gender
in much the same way that she does in her own writings: by showing her agile movement from
one gendered space to another, while all the while contextualizing her experiences of those
spaces within the political and romantic relationship that she shared with Simón Bolívar, a
relationship that, as I show in the previous chapter, served as a symbolic (experiential) space that
gave coherence to Manuela’s multifaceted gender identity.
In my concluding chapter I summarize my findings, readdressing the question of gender
and its transitivity, performativity, and integral relationship to space. I highlight the contrast
between Jean Baptiste Boussingault and Ricardo Palma’s representations of Sáenz as a
13
fragmented personality, and other representations—those of Simón Bolívar, filmmaker Diego
Rísquez, and Sáenz herself—that point to the transitivity that characterized her dynamic and
ever-shifting gender performance. I also reiterate the importance of contextualizing this
transitivity within the geographical, political, and ideological space of revolutionary Spanish
America. In the second part of this chapter, I identify various critical problems that are beyond
the scope of the present study but that have called my attention to avenues for future research
and ways to develop and enhance this project.
Resituating Sáenz in Official History
Antonio de la Guerra was very vague as to what letters and documents the coffer actually
contained when he saved it from Manuela’s burning house. Carlos Álvarez Saa, who has
published several of Manuela’s letters and her “lost diaries,” claims that the journals in his
volume were among the documents saved from the fire by the general, who passed them on to
General Briceño in 1860. According to Álvarez Saa, Briceño handed them in to the Colombian
National Congress. Mysteriously, however, the documents disappeared and didn’t resurface until
1985, when they were brought to his attention in Quito. Whatever the contents of the coffer, they
seem to have suffered the same fate as other documents related to Manuela Sáenz: omission from
official history. María Mogollón Cobo and Ximena Narváez Yar discuss the period from 1860 to
1895 as one of extreme moral conservatism in Ecuador and, as a result, a period in which
Manuela was mostly omitted from historiography. When she was mentioned, she was portrayed
as the beautiful, loyal, and heroic woman who saved Bolívar’s life on September 25, 1828, thus
redeeming herself from her otherwise sinful life (94). Victor von Hagen comments on this long
period of silence as well. He blames the silence on the “gentleman’s agreement” among
historians who were set on portraying Bolívar as a demigod. “Then in 1897,” he notes,” the
agreement was abrogated by the publication of the memoirs of the French scientist, Jean-Baptiste
Boussingault.” And almost as a side note he mentions the disappearance of Volume 56 of the
Memorias of General Daniel F. O’Leary from the archives of Bogota; the title of the volume:
Correspondence and Documents Relating to Señora Manuela Sáenz, Which Demonstrated the
Esteem in Which Various People of Note Held Her and the Part She Played in Political Affairs
(Von Hagen 302).
14
The anecdotes of Manuela’s life and the mystery and controversy surrounding the
documentation of that life all point to a very intriguing and dynamic individual, who was
marginalized not only for the political views that she held, but also for the fact that she advocated
them as a woman. The following chapters analyze some of the ways in which this controversial
individual has been represented—and represented herself—as a woman fighting for a cause. The
authors of these written accounts—Jean Baptiste Boussingault, Ricardo Palma, Simón Bolívar,
government officials, and Manuela Sáenz herself—all experienced Manuela as a flesh-and-blood
person, who had a woman’s body, who sometimes dressed as a man, who was present among
them on the military campaign or greeted them in the parlor of her home. She was a physical and
spiritual being who moved among the physical, conceptual, and symbolic spaces of their world.
The following chapters are an attempt to understand how these individuals represent Manuela
and her movement among these spaces.
15
CHAPTER ONE
GENDER, SPACE AND MANUELA SÁENZ
As an historical figure and cultural icon, Manuela Sáenz has been textualized,1
retextualized, appropriated, and reappropriated by politicians, travelers, novelists, playwrights,
historians, painters, filmmakers, museum curators2, and even non-profit organizations.3 Though
recently she has been most commonly identified as “La Libertadora del Libertador,”4 Sáenz has
also been called “Manuela, la bella,”5 “Manuela, la bastarda de Simón Sáenz,” or simply
“Manuelita.” In her own time she earned the titles of “Caballeresa del Sol”6 and “Coronela del
Ejército Libertador.” Bolívar affectionately called her “mi amable loca,” while according to
former Ecuadorian president Vicente Rocafuerte she was simply “una verdadera loca.” For her
own part, she once asserted, “lo que soy es, con un formidable carácter, amiga de mis amigos y
enemiga de mis enemigos” (Letter to Juan José Flores, 6 May 1834). Reflective of her
importance as a cultural icon is the Casa Museo Manuela Sáenz, recently opened in Quito, and
the first “Concurso andino Manuela Sáenz” which has been advertised as having “el propósito de
resaltar en la literatura la importancia que tiene esta ecuatoriana como personaje histórico y su
proyección como mujer en el escenario latinoamericano.”7
A Bibliographic Overview of Manuela Sáenz
Pamela Murray identifies two opposing schools of interpretation in the historiography of
Manuela Sáenz between 1900 and 1990: a negative one that depicts Manuela as “crazy” or
“immoral,” and a positive one that portrays her as a heroine, and at times a beatified one at that.
According to Murray, preceding the turn of the twentieth century, there was a general silence
surrounding Manuela. She cites the work of María Mogollón and Ximena Narváez, whose book
Manuela Sáenz: presencia y polémica en la historia (1997) presents a historiographic survey of
texts written about Sáenz between 1860 and 1940. They identify only three books from this
period that discuss Manuela Sáenz. Mogollón and Narváez find that these books—Pedro Fermín
Cevallos’ Resumen de la historia del Ecuador: desde su orígen hasta 1845, Pedro Moncayo’s El
16
Ecuador de 1821 a 1875, and Roberto Andrade’s Historia del Ecuador—mention Sáenz only in
reference to her role in helping Bolívar escape an assassination attempt on September 25, 1828,
and focus their attention not on her intellectual or political contributions, but rather on her
physical beauty and deep love for Bolívar.
Once Sáenz enters more fully into the master narrative of primarily Ecuadorian,
Venezuelan, and Colombian history, she is depicted, to borrow Murray’s terms, as either a “bad
girl” or a “heroine.” Referring to texts in which Bolívar’s opponents openly attack Sáenz for her
dress, political activity, and support of the Liberator, Murray explains, “Such criticism paved the
way for twentieth century historians who view Manuela Sáenz as a ‘bad girl’—immoral,
irresponsible and, above all, a political liability for Bolívar” (294). As an example, she cites
Spanish historian Salvador de Madariaga’s 1951 biography, Bolívar, as well as biographies about
other heroes from the Independence Period, such as Francisco de Paula Santander and José
María de Córdova.8
Murray also points out that “The negative school of interpretation includes accounts that
depict Sáenz not simply as bad, but as abnormal or deviant” (296). One example of this kind of
derogatory representation is the third part of Ricardo Palma’s essay titled “La Protectora y la
Libertadora,” in which the author of these famous Tradiciones peruanas describes Sáenz as a
“woman-man” (“mujer-hombre”) (Palma 199), a “mistake of nature whose masculine spirit and
aspirations were embodied in feminine forms” (Murray 297).9 Another example is Alberto
Miramón’s La vida ardiente de Manuelita Sáenz (1944). In this biography, Miramón draws
heavily from the memoirs of French scientist Jean Baptiste Boussingault, whom Bolívar had
called to Gran Colombia in order to assist in the reorganization of the scientific academy.
Boussingault’s memoirs paint a very negative portrait of Manuela, whom he represents as a
capricious and libidinous woman. Drawing from Boussingault’s memoirs and applying theories
from sexual psychology, Miramón classifies Manuela as a nymphomaniac whose participation in
the revolution was not driven by her ideology but rather by her sexual appetite.10 In her
evaluation of the biography, Murray writes, “Besides relying chiefly on the author’s speculation,
La vida ardiente de Manuela Sáenz plays on a sexist stereotype: that of the powerful or
influential woman [...] whose power is presumed to stem less from skill or intelligence than from
an erotic force that allows her to hold sway over men” (297). I mention this quote because, in my
own readings of contemporary accounts, historiographic essays, novels, and plays, I have found
17
that this sexist stereotype influences the vast majority of representations of Manuela’s
participation in Bolívar’s life and in the revolution. I have found this to be the case, whether the
representation belongs to the “bad girl” or the “heroine” school of interpretation.
This is particularly true of Vicente Lecuna’s 1945 article “Papeles de Manuela Sáenz,” in
which the author transcribes a number of Sáenz’s legal documents and personal correspondences
and provides an essay in which he paints Sáenz as a martyr. As Murray comments, “Manuela
Sáenz appears [...] as an integral part of the cult of Bolívar that has underpinned Venezuelan
nationalism since the late nineteenth-century.” She also notes that Lecuna’s assessment that
“Sáenz’s ‘noble conduct...purified her life and redeemed her of all her sins’11 constitutes a moral
judgement based on a double standard; it once again shows the extent to which sexist attitudes
have influenced even positive assessments of Sáenz among historians” (302).
This either/or, heroine/whore dichotomy that characterizes the historiography of Manuela
Sáenz and that plays into these sexist stereotypes has the effect of fragmenting, distorting or
reducing Manuela to a type rather than a complex individual who moved with agility among a
variety of social spaces and whose personal experiences were deeply influenced by the historical
events of her time. One primary objective of my project is to test a new framework for reading
this agile movement within Manuela’s own texts by seeing how she positions and repositions
herself within a variety of gendered spaces.
The past fifty years have seen an increase in publications about Manuela Sáenz. There have
been a number of extensive biographies, beginning with Alfonso Rumazo González’ Manuela
Sáenz: la Libertadora del Libertador12 (1944), which is a pivotal and often-cited text that
Murray credits as being “the first full-length biography of Sáenz and the first attempt to view her
life within its broader historical context [as well as] portraying its protagonist as a flesh-andblood heroine, a woman with both virtues and flaws, [...who was also an agent] in the political
struggles waged by Bolívar and his followers from 1824 through 1830” (304). The year 1944
also saw the publication of Concha Peña’s La Libertadora: el último amor de Simón Bolívar.
Another important and much-quoted biography is Victor von Hagen’s The Four Seasons of
Manuela (1952), which introduced Sáenz to an anglophone audience. 13 More recent biographies
include Natacha Molina’s Tres mujeres de América: Doña Marina, Micaela Bastidas, Manuela
Sáenz (1976); José Tomás Rojas Graffe’s Manuela Sáenz: el ángel tutelar del libertador Simón
Bolívar (1983); Eugenia Viteri’s Manuela Libertad (1983); Ligia Elena Rojas Millán’s Manuela,
18
mujer republicana (1994) 14; Galo René Pérez’s Sin temores ni llantos: Vida de Manuelita Sáenz
(1997); Nela Martínez’s Manuela Sáenz: coronela de los ejércitos libertadores de América
(2000); Antonio Cacua Prada’s Manuelita Sáenz: Mujer de América (2002); and Vicente Poma
Mendoza’s La coronela Manuela Sáenz A.: perfil político, militar e ideológico, su sepultura en
Paita (2003). Both Pérez and Cacua Prada provide detailed and highly contextualized
biographies that make extensive use of historical documents and personal correspondence.
Summarizing the twentieth century texts that represent Manuela in a positive light, Murray
writes, “Ideological trends of the last 30 years have reinforced the tendency to see Manuela
Sáenz as a heroine. The left-wing, revolutionary nationalism of the 1960s through early 1970s, in
particular, encouraged some Latin American historians, writers and intellectuals to interpret the
region’s independence struggle as an aborted social revolution” (306). She adds that works of
fiction, such as Pablo Neruda’s poem “La insepulta de Paita: Elegía dedicada a la memoria de
Manuela Sáenz, amante de Simón Bolívar” (1962, 1988); Gabriel García Márquez’s novel El
general en su laberinto (1989), and Germán Arciniegas’s play El libertador y la guerrillera
(1990) “have helped popularize (and romanticise) this image of Sáenz as both Bolívar’s
revolutionary comrade-in-arms and soulmate” (306). To this I add a number of biograpical
novels published in the past three decades,15 including Mario H. Perico Ramírez’s Yo soy
Manuela Sáenz, y qué! (1981); Marie-Claire de Andreis’s Manuela Sáenz: hasta el ocaso (1997);
Lindy Arriaga Díaz’s Manuela (1999); Gregory Kauffman’s Manuela (2000); Silvia Miguen’s
La gloria eres tú (2000); María Eugenia Leefmans’s La dama de los perros (2001); Carlos Hugo
Molina Saucedo’s Manuela, mi amable loca (2001); and Luis Zúñiga’s Manuela (2001). The last
of these novels is particularly interesting in the way it integrates the theme of freedom into
Manuela’s narration of her controversial life.
Another novel that merits mention is Denzil Romero’s La esposa del doctor Thorne, whose
publication in Spain in 1988 sparked a great deal of controversy in Latin America due to its
portrayal of Manuela as a perversely libidinous individual. The response was the prompt
publication in Ecuador of a collection of essays titled En defensa de Manuela Sáenz, among
which was included Neruda’s lauditory “La insepulta de Paita.” Among the other recent
fictionalized representations of Manuela’s life and person there are several plays, such as
Arciniegas’ El libertador y la guerrillera, Luis Peraza’s Manuela Sáenz (1960); Gloria Martín’s
Manuela: ballet-drama de los pensamientos vivos (1983); Germania Quintana’s Mi divina loca:
19
obra teatral en dos actos (1995); and Lucrecia Castagnino’s Tetralogía latinoamericana, 19721988 (1988). Reflecting recent interest in questions of race, class, and gender, two books have
been published about the women who were Manuela’s female slaves and companions: Luz
Argentina Chiriboga’s novel Jonatás y Manuela (1994) and Reinaldo Miño’s Las esclavas de
Manuela (1999).
Additionally, the 2002 film Manuela Sáenz, Libertadora del Libertador, written by
Leonardo Padrón and directed by Diego Rísquez, synthesizes these reconceptualizations of
Sáenz and even raises questions related to her relationships with her female slaves, Jonatás and
Nathán. This film stands out as the only one that focuses on Sáenz as its main protagonist. Other
films that have represented Sáenz include two biographical films about Bolívar (and accordingly
titled Simón Bolívar): the first by Miguel Contreras Torres (1942) and the other by Alessandro
Blasetti (1969). Jorge Triana also represents Manuela, though in a supporting role, in his political
satire Bolívar soy yo, released in 2002, the same year as Rísquez’s Manuela Sáenz.
The various biographies, plays and films produced in the past decade about Manuela have
made use of Manuela’s own letters, which were published in a number of volumes primarily in
the 1990s.16 An earlier (and very important) epistolary is Manuela Sáenz: epistolario, edited by
Jorge Villalba F., S.J. and published in 1986. This volume is unique in that it focuses on
Manuela’s correspondence during her exile in Paita, rather than on the period between 1822 and
1830, which is the period in her life most treated by writers. Other epistolaries include Carlos
Álvarez Saa’s edition,17 Manuela: sus diarios perdidos y otros papeles (1995); Simón Bolívar y
Manuela Sáenz: correspondencia íntima, edited by Manuel Espinosa Apolo and published in
1996; Las más hermosas cartas de amor entre Manuela y Simón, acompañadas de los diarios de
Quito y Paita, así como de otros documentos (1998); Cartas de amor: entre Bolívar and
Manuelita (2000), edited by Arturo Andrade; and Patriota y amante de usted, the 1993 volume
edited by Elena Poniatowska.
The widespread availability of Manuela’s correspondences presents an interesting
opportunity for scholars in literary and cultural studies to examine these texts, not only in terms
of the details they offer (details that have been incorporated into numerous biographies, histories,
and works of fiction), but also in terms of how Manuela, in these texts, represents herself as an
individual, as a revolutionary, and as a woman. Two recent studies do exactly this. The first is
María Cifuentes’s article “‘Lo que soy es un formidable carácter’: iconografía de Manuela
20
Sáenz” (1998). Cifuentes describes her project as part of a larger study of the relationship
between the concepts of gender and nation in Ecuador and a response to Nela Marínez’s article
calling for a reconceptualization of Sáenz, recognizing her complexities. Cifuentes analyzes the
codes used to represent Sáenz in four painted portraits of the Libertadora from the 1820s.
Focusing on the social values inherent in and communicated through these codes, Cifuentes
discusses ways in which these portraits illustrate the historical discourse that defined white
criolla women at a time when a new master narrative about independence and the formation of
the new American republics was emerging (123-24). While Cifuentes focuses on four portraits of
Manuela, she cites some of Manuela’s own letters in order to contextualize and further support
her arguments. In so doing, she draws attention to some of the ways in which Manuela subverts
the official discourses of craziness, excessiveness, and immorality that surrounded her person
(Cifuentes 135). The author also examines ways in which Sáenz appropriates and deconstructs
hegemonic discourse of femininity (139). Cifuentes points out that when Manuela joins the
independence movement, “ [ella] redefine el proyecto bolivariano al abrir un espacio relativo
para las mujeres criollas que podía rebasar los límites de la maternidad cristiana-republicana”
(138). She also notes some of the ways in which Sáenz used the means available to her in order
to assert herself in politics, and she points out that “donde no habían espacios, los creó” (140).
A second textual analysis of Sáenz’s letters is Sarah Chambers’s article, “Republican
Friendship: Manuela Sáenz Writes Women into the Nation, 1835-1856” (2001). Chambers
examines the letters that Sáenz sent to her friend and ally, Ecuadorian president General Juan
José Flores, during her exile in Paita. In this study, Chambers draws closer attention to a littlestudied period of Manuela’s life. The historian finds that “By shifting the focus to the writing of
Sáenz in exile in Peru, [...] it becomes clear that she not only continued her political activities but
also developed a discourse of friendship to justify the influence of women in the new nations”
(226). She also finds that “By rooting stability in friendship and associating it with women, in
contrast to the disorder created by masculine ambition and partisanship, Sáenz subtly inverted
the gendered symbols within republican ideology” (252). With this study, Chambers adds to the
dialogue on what she identifies as an underdeveloped aspect of nineteenth-century Spanish
American historiography: women’s intellectual and social history during the periods of
independence and the formation of the new republics. In her introduction, she states that some of
21
the ideas that she is presenting “[...] are of necessity tentative” and she proposes to open up a
discussion and encourage future research in this area (227).
My project responds to Sarah Cambers’s call and contributes to the discussion about
Manuela Sáenz in several ways. First, by focusing on what I refer to as Manuela’s
“transgendering,” 18 in other words her agile navigation between masculine and feminine spaces,
I treat her as a complex and dynamic subject, an approach that responds to Martínez’s call for
future research on Sáenz’s “complexities.” In so doing, I take up some of the ideas presented by
Cifuentes: that Sáenz subverts hegemonic discourse of craziness, immorality, and Christianrepublican motherhood; that in order to do this she appropriates a discourse of hegemonic
femininity; and that her political and military activities open up a space for criolla women in the
independence movement and in the formation of the new republic. What I contribute to the
discussion is an analysis of how Sáenz manipulates and represents gendered spaces in order to
accomplish these things. While I take up the ideas of subversion, appropriation of femininity,
and the establishment of friendship (or in Bolívar’s case, romantic love) in order to justify
political activity and social transgressions, my study departs from those of Cifuentes and
Chambers at this point. Unlike Cifuentes and Chambers, I focus my attention on the physical,
conceptual, and symbolic spaces of Manuela’s experience, on the way she represents these
spaces in her texts, and, ultimately, how this representation portrays Manuela as a gendered
subject.
Additionally, I take a different perspective on the “friendships” that Manuela establishes
in order to give meaning to and justify her political and social transgressions. I view friendship in
terms of Henri Lefèbvre’s notion of social space. From this perspective, I use this term
friendship in a broad sense, understanding it to be, in part, what Chambers describes as a
symbiotic and ambivalent relationship partially shaped by traditional customs of patronage yet
“officially” defined by the Royal Spanish Academy in 1852 as “‘reciprocal affection among two
or more persons, based upon good treatment and honest interchange’” (11). But I argue that for
Manuela, friendship (and this includes her relationship with Simón) becomes a “lived” space that
allows her to accesses masculine social spaces. What is key in her maintenance of these
friendships is her ability to oscillate between representing herself as an active participant in
masculine space and then, when necessary, reposition herself within traditional feminine spaces.
22
The underlying premise of this perspective is that discourse (in this case a discourse of
friendship) is constituted by language, which is culturally produced in space.
Another way in which this project adds to the discussion is by examining the effect of the
geographical and ideological space of “America” on Sáenz’s personal experience of gender. In
order to do this, I keep in mind the patriarchal triad of Church, Father, and State (King), which
structured colonial society at the levels of state, family, and intimate personal relationships. We
cannot separate Manuela’s political rebellions from her personal ones; while she dresses her
female body in masculine clothing and fights against imperial authority, she also enters into an
illicit love affair, rejecting the rules of Christian marriage, reclaiming her female body as a space
of pleasure and not as a space for reproduction. Manuela justifies this by situating herself within
“America.” In this geographic and ideological space, she justifies her adultery by adopting a new
concept of honor based on notions of liberty emerging in early nineteenth-century Latin
America. My project is also the first comparative literary analysis of nineteenth-century texts
representing Manuela, as well as the first critical analysis of gender representation in the film
Manuela Sáenz, Libertadora del Libertador.
Gender and Space
My study is based on the premise that gender, as a social space through which one entity
relates to others, is, in other words, a way of representing that subject to (or in relation to) others.
In “The Technology of Gender,” Teresa de Lauretis defines gender as “[...] the representation of
a relation, that of belonging to a class,19 a group, a category” (4). She explains that “[Gender]
both as representation and as self-representation, is the product of various social technologies
such as cinema, and of institutionalized discourses, epistemologies, and critical practices, as well
as practices of daily life” (2). Her notion of gender, which synthesizes the theories of both Judith
Butler (Gender Trouble) and Michel Foucault (The History of Sexuality), is useful in that it
recognizes gender to be both a process of representation and also the product of that
representation. As a process, gender is performed in dynamic relation to society. As a product,
gender carries with it implied and inscribed meanings related to “identity, value, prestige,
location in kinship, and status within the social hierarchy” (de Lauretis 4). This understanding of
gender as process and performance (as per both de Lauretis and Butler) allows me to analyze
23
Sáenz’s representation and self-representation (in other words, how others establish her gender
and how she establishes her own gender) as a process of relating her as a subject to the entities
that surround her in the physical and mental spaces of her real-life existence and in the texts
written about her.
One important aspect of de Lauretis’s definition of gender is the attention it pays to the
“practices of daily life,” practices that take place in concrete spaces: the street, the home, the
office, clothing, the body, etc. Daily practices define a subject’s identity; they establish one’s
gender in the relationship between the Self and other entities within the concrete spaces of
his/her daily activities. Elizabeth Grosz (1994) points out that for women, the female body is an
inescapable space of daily experience; women are confined to their “fleshy limitations,” while
men are considered capable of transcending the physical and engaging in the spheres of reason
and logic (Volatile Bodies 14). As Nancy Duncan (1996) explains, “This gendered dualism of
mind and body has special corollaries in other dualisms such as interiority/exteriority and
public/private distinction. This latter distinction in turn depends upon other gendered
dichotomies such as immanence/transcendence.” She notes that “the public sphere has been seen
as the sphere of universal reason and transcendence of the disembodied” (2). In other words, for
Woman, the female body plays a central role in her experience of the physical, social, conceptual
and ideological spaces around her. This corporeality is central to the formation of her gender
identity, which in turn reflects certain power relationships (Rose 30). A woman’s corporeality
also limits her movement, not only through physical spaces, but also in social spheres,
professional arenas, and in public politics. Alluding to the relationship among the body, space,
mobility and power, Gillian Rose writes, “The everyday is the arena through which patriarchy is
(re)created—and contested” (17). Don Mitchell summarizes Rose’s theories, as well as those of
Luce Irigaray, focusing on the impact that this body-centered relationship between space and
gender has on women’s experiences: “In a phallocentric world, the imaginary of the feminine is
necessarily more constrained than that of the masculine. Yet it is constrained not only in
discourses, but in the ‘spaces’ in which women and men must live” (214).20 In this study, I
analyze the everyday spaces of Manuela’s experience and identify the ways in which
representations of these spaces and of Manuela’s place(s) within them gender her either by
positioning her in traditionally feminine spaces or by affirming her ability to move between
masculine and feminine spheres of activity.
24
The questions of coherence and mobility are two that emerge throughout the course of
my analysis. For a definition of coherence, I look to Judith Butler, who employs the term in a
discussion of gender identity. Understanding gender to be the way in which one “performs”
culturally-established attributes of masculinity or femininity, Butler writes, “The appearance of
an abiding substance or gendered self, what the psychiatrist Robert Stoller refers to as a ‘gender
core’ is thus produced by the regulation of attributes along culturally established lines of
coherence” (32-33). The performance of masculine attributes produces a (coherent) masculine
gender, and the performance of feminine attributes produces a (coherent) feminine gender. But
what happens when a subject performs both masculine and feminine attributes? Is coherence
possible? If gender is performed within physical, conceptual and symbolic spaces, then how does
a subject’s movement among these spaces affect the coherence of her gender identity?
I identify a positive correlation between Manuela’s gender mobility—her ability to act in
masculine spheres and then reclaim a feminine positionality—the sense of freedom that she
expresses, and the apparent threat she poses to civil authorities intent on reinforcing the norms of
heteropatriarchy.21 When asserting herself in traditionally masculine spheres and performing
masculine attributes, Manuela justifies this mobility by asserting it as part of the larger struggle
for political freeedom: the war for Latin American independence. The independence movement
becomes a venue for her mobilization as a revolutionary and her quest for personal liberation as a
woman in an unhappy marriage and a patriarchal society in which women were marginalized
from politics and erased from official history. At the same time, a large part of her involvement
in the independence movement was her personal, romantic relationship with Simón Bolívar, a
relationship in which she—for the most part—reclaimed a feminine positionality. Did her
reappropriation of feminine attributes and spaces contradict her masculine behaviours? How did
others represent her in light of this multifaceted gender performance, and how did she represent
herself?
In order to bring Manuela’s mobility into focus in a way that highlights the relationship
between her gender and the spaces in which it is performed, I look to Swedish geographer
Törsten Hägerstrand, who developed a geographical model known as the time-geography
perspective.22 Hägerstrand identifies three general kinds of constraints on an individual’s
mobility. First, there are capability constraints—or physical limits to movements—such as the
body’s physical needs, the limitations of transportation, and the laws of physics. The second kind
25
of constraints are coupling constraints, which compel people to come together at certain times
and in certain places. The third are authority constraints, which are “social rules banning or
encouraging certain temporospatial behavior” (such as laws regulating entrance into bars and
admission to amusement park rides) (Rose 22). These constraints are not only physical, but also
social and ideological; as such, they affect a subject’s experience of physical, social and
ideological spaces and, therefore, her performance of gender. It is only by identifying the
constraints to her mobility that we can perceive and appreciate Manuela’s transgressions of
prescribed social space.
In this project, I read gender not as a space, but as a place; a site defined by its
circumscription within a number of dynamic, overlapping spaces; an experience shaped by the
heterogeneous and ever-shifting objects and ideas that surround it and by its own impact upon
these objects and ideas. Gillian Rose differentiates between space and place in her theoretical
discussion of humanist geography: “in contrast to spaces, which were represented through
scientifically rational measurements of location, places were full of human interpretation and
significance” (43). This latter part is particularly important; more than a mere physical location, a
place is a site of experience, where a subject interprets the spaces around her and attaches
meaning to her position within them. Place is a site of identity. In this project, I analyze place as
a site of gender identity.
My concept of space also draws from the theories proposed by Michel Foucault in “Of
Other Spaces.” In this article, Foucault differentiates between our current conceptualization of
space and Cartesian notions of space. Pointing to the dynamism inherent in our current notions,
he explains, “The site is defined by relations of proximity between points or elements; formally,
we can describe these relations as series, trees or grids. [...] Our epoch is one in which space
takes for us the form of relations among sites” (23). Converging this aspect of Foucault’s theory
of space with de Lauretis’s definition of gender as the “representation of a relation” between an
individual and society (4) within the concrete spaces of daily activities, I view gender as a place
(or “site”) in which a subject is identified (or identifies herself)—as if locating herself on a social
grid—within a dynamic social space in which objects and ideas are heterogeneous and evershifting. The effect of this is a gender identity that is not fixed, but ever-shifting, always relative
to the physical and conceptual spaces that surround it.
26
My textual analyses of the gender representations of Manuela Sáenz draw from these
recent theoretical connections between gender, space, and place. To facilitate and structure this
analysis, I apply a theoretical framework based on Henri Lefèbvre’s notion of “social space,” as
defined in his seminal 1974 publication The Production of Space. In this treatise, Lefèbvre
defines social space as a social product that is both abstract and real, is an instrument of power,
and is “indistinguishable from mental space (as defined by the philosophers and mathematicians)
on the one hand and physical space (as defined by practico-sensory activity and the perception of
‘nature’) on the other” (26-27).
Lefèbvre points to three aspects of social space: spatial practices, representations of
space, and representative space. Spatial practices presuppose the use of the body (40); they are
those activities that, by means of the human body, perceive, manipulate, utilize, and transform
material spaces. These activities identify spaces according to their usage: spaces of/for worship,
spaces of/for work, spaces of/for leisure, etc. As Lefèbvre explains, “The spatial practice of a
society secretes that society’s space; it propounds and presupposes it, in a dialectical interaction;
it produces it slowly and surely as it masters and appropriates it” (38). The second aspect of
social space consists of representations of space. As the “conceived” space of any society,
representations of space constitute the cognitive map (the system of classification) that orders
and renders intelligible the chaotic physical world perceived by our senses. Lefèbvre describes
representations of space as “conceptualized space, the space of scientists, planners, urbanists,
technocratic sub-dividers and social engineers...all of whom identify what is lived and what is
perceived with what is conceived” (38). Maps and urban plans; names, titles and offices; and
scientific classifications are all examples of representations of (in other words “conceived”)
space. The third aspect of social space is what Lefèbvre calls representational space, which is
“[...] space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of
‘inhabitants’ and ‘users,’ [...]. It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects”
(39). Art—including architecture, clothing, and film sets, to name a few examples—consists of
representational spaces. By defining social space as an ever-shifting intersection of perceived,
conceived, and symbolically lived spaces, Lefèbvre’s model provides a paradigm through which
we can study sites of gender identity as “social spaces” shaped by the dynamic physical,
conceptual, and symbolic spaces that surround them.
27
By approaching this reading through an analysis of space, I am situating this study within
the growing interest in space and place among scholars of early Latin American literatures and
cultures, an interest reflective of what Foucault describes as our present “epoch of space”: ‘‘The
present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity:
we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of near and far, of the side by side, of the
dispersed’’ (22). The influence of this postmodern mode of thinking, synthesized in Foucault’s
theories of space in relation to discourse and power, is reflected not only in new studies of early
Latin American texts, but also in new approaches to early Latin American cultural studies in
general.
Evidence of this emerging spatial thinking is the collection of essays Mapping Colonial
Spanish America: Places and Commonplaces of Identity, Culture, and Experience, edited by
Santa Arias and Mariselle Meléndez and published in 2002. This collection of essays reflects
new interdisciplinary approaches to literary and cultural studies and responds to cultural
geographer Edward Soja’s23 “aggressive demand for ‘geographical and spatial imagination’ in
studies of cultures” (13). Toward this end, the essays synthesize into their textual analyses the
theoretical contributions of not only literary theorists but also cultural geographers.24 Gender is
addressed by three of the essays in this volume, paying particular attention to the space of the
female body. Arias and Meléndez point to Grosz’s perspective on bodies as sites of identity:
Women had been represented by masculine authorities in terms of the traditional
dichotomy of domestic versus public space in order to limit their mobility. Yet,
from these same points of location, women have also been able to define
themselves and transgress the spatial divisions imposed upon them. That is why
bodies, as well as space, can be considered the ‘centers of perspective, insight,
reflection, desire, and agency’. (Grosz, Volatile Bodies 11, qtd. in Arias and
Meléndez 18)
My study of the gender representations of Manuela Sáenz considers the female body as such a
site of confinement/mobility, of oppression/transgression and of “perspective, insight, reflection,
desire, and agency” during a space and time in Latin American history when the mobilization of
women as part of the revolutionary movement created an aperture for the questioning of
women’s social space.25
28
The socio-historical contexts of Manuela Sáenz’s various gender representations is
significant. By studying the ways in which Sáenz understands and legitimizes her gender
transgressions (in other words her “transgendering”) by positioning herself within the
geographical and ideological spaces of Latin American independence, I connect this study to a
few other scholarly discussions. First, this study provides a close look at an example of a socalled “Amazon” or “transgender warrior” women whose transgressions into the masculine space
of warfare have inspired publications such as Julie Wheelwright’s Amazons and Military Maids:
Women Who Dressed as Men in the Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness (1989) and Leslie
Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Rupaul (1996), to name
only two.26 In the field of Spanish American literary studies, this interest in transgendered
subjects—particularly in women warriors—is reflected in recent scholarship27 on the
seventeenth-century memoirs of Catalina de Erauso, the Lieutenant Nun, whose transgender
identity was recently recast by Spanish filmmaker Javier Aguirre in the 2000 film La Monja
Alférez28.
Additionally, my project meets Victor M. Uribe-Uran’s call for a more inclusive
examination of the Age of Revolution (1750-1850), focusing on political, economic and social
continuities throughout the “middle period,” bridging the span between the late colonial period,
through the independence era, and into the early modern period (xiii).29 In spite of apparent
consistencies in gender relations throughout this period, the republican discourse and wartime
demands on women opened up a space for the questioning (and subsequent reinforcement) of
women’s social spaces, as Sarah Chambers explains in From Subjects to Citizens: Honor,
Gender, and Politics in Arequipa, Peru, 1780-1854 . The relevance of gender studies of this
liminal period is also argued by Rebecca Earle in her article “Rape and the Anxious Republic:
Revolutionary Colombia, 1810-1830.” Earle argues that “the alarming reality of female
participation in the war was met by a steady rhetorical insistence on women’s role as victim [and
that] the period of the war saw a sustained effort to confine women to a nonparticipatory political
sphere” (138). Earle analyzes actions upon and representations of the female body as part of this
agenda of confinement. In light of these arguments, and paying due attention to gender relations
during this dynamic time and space, my study of the textual gendering of Manuela Sáenz
explores the ways in which this subject, who in her words and actions embraced republican
29
discourse as a way to legitimize her gender transgressions, effected this transgendering through
the appropriation and manipulation of physical, conceptual and symbolic spaces.
30
CHAPTER TWO
NINETEENTH-CENTURY PERSPECTIVES ON MANUELA SÁENZ
Cuando me acerqué para saludar al coronel, él
maniobró de manera de esconder su rostro [...];
luego mirándome saltó la risa y ví que el oficial era
una mujer muy bonita, a pesar de su enorme
mostacho: Manuelita, la amante titular de Bolívar.
(Jean Baptiste Boussingault, Memorias 111)
Doña Manuela era una equivocación de la
naturaleza, que en formas esculturalmente
femeninas encarnó espíritu y aspiraciones varoniles.
[…] La Sáenz renunciaba a su sexo […F]ué [sic] la
mujer-hombre. (Ricardo Palma, “La Protectora y la
Libertadora” 197-99)
Esta señora no dará más un motivo para
habladurías, pues no se lo merece. […E]lla en su
afán de servicio, se muestra como una noble amiga
de alma muy superior: culta, desprovista de toda
intención de ambición, de un temperamento viril,
además de femenina. (Simón Bolívar, Letter to
María Antonia Bolívar y Palacios, 9 Jan. 1823)
In the nineteenth century, Manuela Sáenz’s transgressions into masculine spaces gave
rise to a number of theories and suspicions about her sexuality and character. French scientist
Jean Baptiste Boussingault portrays her as perverse. Peruvian writer Ricardo Palma calls her “a
freak of nature” (197). And her political enemies, such as Ecuadorian president Vicente
Rocafuerte, call her “a truly crazy woman” (Letter to Francisco de Paula Santander 10 Nov.
1835). All of these characterizations rob Sáenz of the political and personal agency that she
established for herself in her actions and writings by constantly moving between feminine and
masculine spheres of activity and by contextualizing all of these movements within her
relationship to Simón Bolívar and the political cause that they shared. Bolívar, on the other hand,
creates in his letters to Sáenz a discursive space in which she is both feminine (Manuela his
lover) and somewhat masculine (Captain/Colonel Sáenz the revolutionary). But when we read
31
these letters together with other statements made by the Liberator—in speeches, in letters to
other people, and in his actions—we see that his textual positioning and repositioning of Sáenz
within feminine and masculine spaces is a negotiation of that social space with Sáenz herself. In
other words, because of his position as both general-in-chief and her lover, he was compelled to
mediate between her transgressions into the masculine spaces of politics and warfare and the
social prejudices against women’s involvement in these spheres.
In this chapter, I analyze the ways in which Manuela Sáenz is gendered in the literary and
epistolary texts of three men who knew her personally, or at least met her on a few occasions. I
begin with the memoirs of French scientist Jean Baptiste Boussingault. With his realistic, highly
detailed descriptions, Boussingault presents the perspective of a scientist (not a politician), an
outsider who, through his close personal and professional relationships, gains insider knowledge
of Sáenz and of the others in Bolívar’s close circle. With detailed descriptions and numerous
anecdotes, the scientist paints a portrait of Sáenz during the height of her social scandals,
transgressions, and political involvement.
Ricardo Palma, on the other hand, represents Manuela Sáenz as a legend. His
perspective—or locus of enunciation—is that of a writer of literature (as opposed to “pure”
history) from early republican Peru, a casual acquaintance of Sáenz, whom he had allegedly met
in the last year of her life. Interested in portraying the “romantic yesterday” of colonial Peru and
not the “prosaic present” of the early republic (Denegri 27), Palma represents Sáenz as a
legendary figure, who was feisty and controversial in her younger days, but who later became the
venerable, dignified (though poor and crippled) lady that he visited in Paita. His account is a
precedent to future biographies of Manuela Sáenz in the sense that it fragments her into
essentially two persons: the “unnatural,” controversial “woman-man,” more political than
private, more masculine than feminine; and the almost beatified heroine, the woman who
devoted her life and love to Bolívar and to the cause of independence.
Finally, I discuss several letters written by Simón Bolívar to his lover and compatriot
Manuela Sáenz. Here I study the ways in which the Liberator negotiates with Sáenz the gendered
social space that she occupies. As a way to further define his locus of enunciation—as a political
and military leader, as a highly public figure, as man embracing the ideals of (masculine)
“republican friendship,” and as Manuela’s lover—I also study the ways in which he genders
Sáenz in a few letters to other individuals: his sister María Antonia and General José María
32
Córdova. Having shifted our focus to the personal correspondence between Bolívar and Sáenz, in
other words, to this discursive space of gender negotiation, we can begin to read this negotiation
from the perspective of Sáenz herself, which is the focus of Chapter Three.
Jean Baptiste Boussingault
In 1821, the Liberator and president of Gran Colombia, Simón Bolívar, launched an
initiative to reestablish the intellectual life of the emerging republic. A number of intellectuals
had been exiled or executed during the revolution, there was a lack of educational institutions,
and the extensive scientific data that had been collected and illustrated from the region as part of
the Royal Botanical Expedition in the New Kingdom of Granada around the turn of the
nineteenth century had been moved from Bogota to Madrid. It was under these circumstances
that Bolívar sent then-Vice President Francisco Antonio Zea to Europe in order to solicit
economic aid, scientific support, and international recognition of Gran Colombia as a legitimate
state. In May, 1822, Zea met with Baron Caulvier, Baron Alexander von Humbolt, and
Francisco Arago in order to ask for their help in contracting a scientific commission, whose
objective would be to study and assess the natural resources of Gran Colombia and to direct the
advancement of agriculture, arts, and commerce as sources of progress and wealth for the
republic (“Nacimiento del museo”). The French scientists chosen to complete this task were
physician and illustrator, François Désiré Roulin; topographer, Jacques Bourdon; zoologist Justin
Marie Goudot; and Jean Baptiste Boussingault, who would organize the academy of chemistry.
Peruvian Mariano de Rivero would direct the project. It was for this reason that Boussingault, an
attractive young man of twenty-one, came to Bogota in July, 1823, stayed there for nine years
and came in close contact with Simón Bolívar and Manuela Sáenz. His description of Sáenz is
published as part of his Memoirs (Memorias), a multivolume collection of his observations and
experiences as part of this scientific enterprise. In this text, he dedicates an entire chapter to
anecdotes and opinions regarding this controversial woman.
It is important to note that Boussingault’s portrayal of Sáenz, as well as that of Bolívar
and of other prominent figures of revolutionary Gran Colombia, has been criticized as being
biased, fabricated, and even malevolent. Prominent Colombian historian Vicente Lecuna, for
example, attacks him severely, claiming that he based the most offensive of his descriptions on
33
second-hand information1 and that he was one of those “espíritus morbosos, nacidos bajo el
signo de Saturno, propensos a la crítica amarga y la censura injusta, y rara vez dispuestos a
expresar sentimientos generosos o nobles.” He discredits Boussingault’s observations of social
behavior on the grounds that the scientist had a “satanic spirit,” which becomes evident in his
personal anecdotes (497).2 However, in a critical biography about the French scientist,
biographer Carlos E. Chardon makes note of the negative image that Venezuelans and
Colombians have held of the scientist, sharing personal experiences that testify to the fact that his
name has become “taboo” (88). He argues that Boussingault had established professional and
personal relationships with individuals in Bolívar’s intimate circle, that his detailed descriptions
of meals, customs, jokes, and social gatherings reveal his insider knowledge of the culture and
peoples of which he wrote, and that what is often perceived as a lack of sentimentality and even
harshness is a realism that stems from his training and perspective as a scientist (90). Chardon
concedes that Boussingault’s judgments may be biased and perhaps even erroneous, but that “en
su calidad de hombre de ciencia fuese impecable en su relación” (90), an assertion that he backs
up with testimonies of Boussingault’s colleagues regarding the quality and integrity of his
professional writings (106-07).
I provide these details regarding the debate over Boussingault’s text in order to inform a
critical reading of his account, as well as to testify to the impact and presence his text has had in
the historiography of Manuela Sáenz. This influence is both direct and indirect, as Bousingault’s
text is heavily used by Sáenz’s biographer Victor von Hagen, whose The Four Seasons of
Manuela Sáenz (1952), in turn, is a canonical reference on the topic of the Libertadora. Von
Hagen explains in his annotated bibliography that because Boussingault “was the only literary
figure of note who knew her intimately” and because his accounts resonate with historical
records, he had relied heavily and without reservation on the scientist’s acounts (308). Having
established the relevance of this text, I now point to three themes that emerge in the French
scientist’s gendering of Manuela Sáenz: her libidinous nature, her “craziness” (“locura”), and the
alcohol-induced metamorphoses that the scientist offers as explanations for her transgressions
into and out of masculine behaviors.
The Beautiful Moustached Face
In the volume of his memoirs of the years 1823-1824, Boussingault opens up the chapter
titled “El Salto de Tequendama: Historia de Manuelita Sáenz” with a scientist’s vision of the
34
eastern highlands of Colombia, describing the geological makeup of the plateau. The scientist
then enters into a detailed description of the awesome Tequendama Falls3 (el Salto de
Tequendama), articulating a series of measurements and scientific observations that he
personally has made of the waterfall and its environs. Describing the setting in empirical terms,
the author represents this natural space as a scientific one. This is relevant because the scientific
thought that became privileged in the eighteenth century, when the Enlightenment moved into
Spanish America, was naturalized as a masculine sphere of activity because it depended on the
ability to reason, of which women, it was generally accepted, were not capable.
One fundamental voice in the development of Enlightenment thought in Spain and its
colonies was that of the Benedictine monk, Benito Gerónimo Feijóo (1676-1764), who in “A
Defense or Vindication of Women” (1726) spoke out against the inferiority of women by
affirming their capacity for virtue and their ability to excel in certain fields, such as the arts and
music. However, as Johanna Mendleson points out, “Feijóo, the anatomist, believed that the
softness of the female brain decreased her ability to comprehend as much as men” (199).
According to this perspective, the experimental investigation, reason, and scientific knowledge
that became privileged intellectual and academic activities during the Age of Enlightenment
would be too demanding for the female mind.
This was a commonly-held perspective, and, as Mary Louise Pratt points out, the “natural
defects” of women—their inability to reason or to engage in abstract thought and their
emotional, particular and infantile nature—made them incapable of republican citizenship and,
therefore, excluded from the political sphere. For these reasons, the vast majority of famale
students, rather than be educated in the sciences or in French and Italian—the languages of the
Enlightenment—were educated in proper manners, virtuous behavior, and domestic skills, such
as basic arithmetic, sewing and cooking. Literacy skills were only a concern to the extent that
they facilitated prayer and made women better wives, mothers, and guardians of their children’s
education (Mendelson 212, Socolow 168-70).4 In short, women were not brought into the formal
circles of scientific discourse; that remained a masculine sphere of intellectual activity.
In the scene introduced above, Boussingault breaks his scientific discourse in order to
preface the anecdote he will soon relate: “Conocí una sola persona a quien tendré ocasión de
nombrar, quien tuvo la suficiente audacia para permanecer de pie sin ningún soporte, al borde de
la roca sin sentir vértigo” (109). Having read the title of Boussingault’s chapter (“El Salto de
35
Tequendama: Historia de Manuelita Sáenz”), the reader might anticipate that this singular
individual is the Libertadora herself. What is interesting, though, is that this brief anticipatory
reference to “una sola persona” lacks any indication of the subject’s gender. This detail, together
with two culturally biased assumptions—first, that the rugged outdoors described in scientific
terms is a masculine space; and, second, that if there exists only one such daring individual,
surely he must be a man—establishes a suspense-filled tension that takes advantage of the gender
ambiguity in the phrase “una sola persona.” We may have expected the protagonist of this
anecdote to be a woman, but she appears to be participating in very masculine spaces.
Later in the narrative, Boussingault begins to tell the story of his excursion to the
Tequendama Falls and his unexpected encounter with Manuela Sáenz:
Estábamos en pleno verano (tiempo seco) y la cita fue por la mañana a las 8 en la
calle de la Carrera [...]. A la hora indicada me puse en camino y alcancé a ver de
lejos un grupo de jinetes que iban adelante y entre ellos, para mi sorpresa, un
oficial superior. Sin embargo, de acuerdo con lo convenido, todos debíamos estar
en traje civil. Cuando me acerqué para saludar al coronel, él maniobró de manera
de esconder su rostro, de lo cual resultó una escena de equitación bastante curiosa
por algunos momentos; luego mirándome soltó la risa y ví que el oficial era una
mujer muy bonita, a pesar de su enorme mostacho: Manuelita, la amante titular de
Bolívar. (111)
This description of Boussingault’s encounter with Manuela Sáenz presents a number of
details that point to the highly ambiguous gender that the author establishes for his subject. His
first references to this individual are all masculine, all identify the subject according to “his”
bodily activities, location, and dress; and all reveal the author’s assumption that the individual
accompanying him on this rugged outdoor excursion is a man, to whom he refers as jinete,
oficial superior, coronel, and él.
The moment of revelation and transition, when the enunciating subject suddenly
identifies the rider’s body space as not male, but rather as female, expresses the author’s surprise
by drawing a stark contrast between the very military and therefore very masculine individual
described to this point, and the very sensual, feminine subject that he is about to represent: “ví
que el oficial era una mujer muy bonita, a pesar de su enorme mostacho.” By continuing the use
of the masculine article “el” before “oficial,” right up until the moment he identifies the subject
36
as a woman, the author intensifies the reader’s surprise at discovering that the figure dressed as
not only a man, but as a colonel, and rather recklessly handling her horse was, in fact, a woman,
and a beautiful one at that. Boussingault’s reference to the rider’s beautiful face represents
Sáenz’s body as a sexualized, feminine space, a feminization that is further punctuated and made
ironic by the enormous moustache that it bears. This apparent negotiation between the narrator’s
perception of the subject as a sexed being and his use of gendered nouns and pronouns to classify
that same subject is an example of what Lefèbvre points out as the dynamic, constantly
fluctuating definition of social space. This is a process in which one’s gender (which is a social
space) is constantly redefined by one’s relationships to physical, conceptual, and symbolic
spaces.
The author further feminizes his subject in the subsequent phrase, where he appends her
name with the diminutive morpheme “-ita” (employing Manuela’s commonly used nickname)
and identifies her as Bolívar’s lover. In so doing, the author accomplishes several effects: first,
by employing the diminuitive morpheme, he closes his eyes to the physical symbols of Sáenz’s
military status, nullifies the position of authority previously held by this colonel, and repositions
her in a subordinate conceptual/categorical space relative to both her male lover and, as an
implied extension, to himself and the other men of the expedition. He exemplifies the widespread
practice of referring to famous historical figures in gendered ways: we often refer to these
women by their first names and to famous men by their titles and surnames (e.g., Bonaparte and
Josephine, Maximilian and Carlota, and more recently Perón and Evita) This practice both
reflects patriarchal biases and reinforces the dichotomy of private versus public space. In this
dichotomy, women are identified by their first names, which as a conceptual space imply
familiarity, and are thus relegated to the private sphere of influence. Men, on the other hand, are
identified by their more formal and “official” surnames, which represent them as public figures
whose actions have a public impact.
This gendered distinction between private and public spaces is a common axis in Western
thought. In his introduction to The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late
Colonial Mexico, Steve Stern explains this “bifurcation of society” in terms of spheres of
activity, stating that, through their naturalized connection to “public life and activity, the visible
world of politics and power,” men’s activities are perceived as having historical consequence.
On the other hand, because women are associated with “private life and activity, the shielded
37
world of family and domestic arrangements,” their activities are perceived as trivial and of little
historical consequence (8). With this in mind, it becomes clear that Boussingault’s choice to
represent his female subject in this way was by no means exceptional. Second, by opting for the
nickname “Manuelita” as opposed to a more formal, public name such as “Manuela Sáenz,” or
“Coronela Sáenz,” or even a more generic reference like “el jinete” or “el/la coronel(a),” the
author assumes the license to disregard the reverence due to Sáenz’s military title and to
reposition her into a private, subordinate, historically inconsequential, feminine position. This
positionality is even further emphasized by its contrast to the name “Bolívar.”
Thus, the narrator’s naming of “Manuelita” acts as a pivotal point; here the representation
transitions from that of the male colonel atop the horse to the beautiful little lady underneath the
male disguise. The image of the military uniform and skillful jockeying that initially marked this
subject’s body space as masculine have been eclipsed by the rider’s beautiful face; Sáenz is thus
is reassigned (and confined) to her feminine body space, which, in being identified in terms of
the conceived space, “la amante titular de Bolívar,” ceases to be her own. It instead becomes the
possession of this famous man and an object of beauty admired by the narrator.5
At this point in the anecdote, Boussingault continues to struggle with the ambiguous
gender of the individual behind the beautiful moustached face. In the subsequent paragraph, in
which the scientist narrates the group’s trek toward Soacha, he oscillates between masculine and
feminine representations of his subject, even pausing to “correct” himself: “Nos acercábamos a
la loma de Canoas cuando el coronel Manuelita tuvo una caída que nos aterró: él—o ella—salió
de la silla y fue a caer a seis pasos de su caballo” (111). While by means of her clothing and
actions Sáenz has represented her body as that of a military officer, this is a social space that has
been naturalized as a masculine one, and as such it implicitly calls for the masculine article “el,”
a conceptual space of masculinity. This of course creates the effect of an ambiguous, inclusive,
(un)gendering, established in the tension created between the masculine term “el coronel” (which
represents the appearance, activity, and social function of this individual) and the feminine
“Manuelita” (a name carrying the connotations signaled in the first paragraph: sexualized beauty,
subordination, and passive positionality as Bolívar’s lover). This tension reaches its climax when
the author switches pronouns: “él—o ella—salió de la silla.” This passage clearly illustrates the
process of negotiation that underlies gender representation; as a dynamic relationship among
individuals within a variety of physical, cognitive, and symbolic spaces, the social space
38
constituted by one’s gender representation may at times reflect such tensions between physical,
cognitive, and symbolic spaces that the subject’s gender seems ambiguous. Such is the case here,
where this sexualized female body is participating in an all-male excursion and is dressed in a
uniform that symbolically locates her within a masculine sphere of authority, influence, and
activity. Is this subject, then, feminine, masculine, both, or neither?
Boussingault’s ambiguous gendering of his subject continues: “Aturdida por el galope
quedó sin movimiento, pero felizmente el doctor Cheyne, un espléndido escocés, iba con
nosotros; al desabotonar el uniforme del coronel le dije al doctor:—‘¡Haga una exploración, ya
que Ud. tiene conocimiento de los seres!’—‘Mala lengua’, dijo Manuelita” (111). Though Sáenz
is once again identified with the masculine article and title “el coronel,” she is more decisively
gendered as feminine. This occurs through the use of the feminine morpheme “–a” with the
adjective “aturdida” and, even more so, by the way the author refers to the doctor’s examination
of her body. The tone of levity with which the narrator (who occupies a masculine social space)
encourages the other masculine subject to unbutton Manuela’s uniform is clearly understood as
an indirect reference to the sexual tensions lying between these men and this woman, thus
inciting Sáenz’s sharp reply: “Mala lengua.” What is most noteworthy is that this literal and
symbolic removal of Manuela’s uniform (and the masculine positionality that it represents) is
followed by a series of physical and literary moves in which the narrator genders his subject as
decisively feminine, regardless of the fact that this individual’s dynamic manipulation of
masculine and feminine spaces has blurred the male-female dichotomy that the narrator accepts
as natural.
He continues the narrative, “Terminado el examen se vió que no había pasado nada
grave: una muy ligera luxación del hombro izquierdo. La coronela, a quien yo le había quitado
los mostachos, subió de nuevo a la silla sin dificultad y yendo al paso llegamos a Canoas [...]”
(111). The feminization of the term “el coronel” into “la coronela” (which Boussingault employs
from this point on) complete’s the narrator’s regendering of his subject and marks the
professional and social space of colonel as one whose gender has been renegotiated in light of
Manuela’s manipulation of physical space: her body, uniform, equestrian maneuvering, and
military participation. But in conceding this military title (in its feminine version) to her, the
narrator enacts a process of feminization that reflects his removal of the artificial moustache
from Manuela’s face. Her body, which has been subjected to examination, jest, and now
39
symbolic alteration, has been marked by the author as unmistakably feminine—regardless of the
social space that she occupies in accord with her title “coronela.”
Manuela Repositioned in Domestic Space
Boussingalt tells the anecdote of Manuela’s death-defying approach to the edge of the
cliff overlooking the waterfall: “vi a Manuelita, de pie, al borde del precipicio, haciendo gestos
muy peligrosos; lo que ella dijera no se oía por el ruido del Tequendama” (112). Describing how
he and Dr. Cheyne tried to save “esta loca y bebida mujer” from falling, he writes, “[Cheyne] se
prendió a un árbol mientras enrollaba a su brazo izquierdo las largas y magníficas trenzas de la
imprudente que parecía resuelta a saltar al vacío. Así pasamos Cheyne y yo un terrible cuarto de
hora, hasta que al fin, con intervención de los amigos, se pudo llevar a la muchacha a un sitio
seguro” (112). What is noteworthy here is the condescending use of the word “muchacha”;
Sáenz has gone from being a jinete, oficial superior and coronel, to being identified as mujer and
“Manuelita” and finally coronela, to now being subordinated even further with the use of the
classification muchacha. What’s more, this muchacha must be kept in her place—understood as
her “safe” and “protected” place—by the narrator and the other men present at the waterfall.
When Boussingault’s description moves from the masculine space of the expedition to
Tequendama Falls to the feminine space of Manuela Sáenz’s home, there is a notable shift in the
author’s representation of Manuela’s gender. Repositioning Sáenz within the physical and
symbolic space of the home, the narrator describes the events following their return to Bogota:
“Por la tarde los excursionistas del Tequendama estábamos reunidos en los salones de Manuelita,
quien parecía fresca y adornados sus cabellos con flores naturales. Estuvo encantadora y amable
con cada uno de nosotros [...]” (112). Now relocated within the traditionally feminine space of
the home, a delicately adorned body, and her role as hostess, Manuela is described in favorable
terms by the narrator, who in the preceding paragraphs called her “esta loca y bebida mujer,” “la
imprudente” and “muchacha.” The emphasis, once again, is on the details that enhance the
“feminine sensuality” of her highly sexed body space. The braids that were once pulled to keep
Manuela from challenging the precipice of the waterfall have now been loosened and adorned
with flowers; the body that once transgressed gendered space and defied nature has now been
resituated within a “safe” domestic space, where it is simply adorned with nature’s tokens.
Reflecting upon Manuela’s eccentricity, Boussingault begins a new subsection titled
“Manuelita Sáenz.” Regarding this “persona tan extraordinaria,” he writes, “Quiero ensayar de
40
trazar con pluma el recuento de su vida excéntrica” (112). He begins, not surprisingly, with a
detailed description of Manuela’s physical attributes, making special note of her beauty:
“Manuela no confesaba su edad. Cuando la conocí parecía tener de 29 a 30 años; estaba entonces
en todo el esplendor de su belleza no muy clásica; bella mujer, ligeramente rolliza, de ojos
pardos, mirada indecisa, tez blanca y sonrosada y cabellos negros” (113). The narrator then shifts
his focus to Sáenz’s personality: “Su manera de ser era bien incomprensible; tan pronto lucía
como una gran señora, o como una ‘ñapanga’6 cualquiera; bailaba con igual perfección en
minuet o la ‘cachuca’7” (113). Here Boussingault alludes to Sáenz’s ability to change registers,
to move her body from one social space (a style of dress, a form of dance) to another, although
he represents this dynamism as enigmatic and contradictory.
After further description, Boussingault concludes this paragraph with another allusion to
the “man-to-man” jesting between himself and Dr. Cheyne, a homosocial8 interaction between
two male subjects (a kind of “male bonding”) that objectifies and subordinates Manuela as the
sexualized object of the jest and of their masculine heterosexual desire: “Tenía un secreto
atractivo para hacerse adorar y el doctor Cheyne decía de ella: ‘¡Es una mujer de una
conformación singular!’; jamás le pude hacer explicar cómo estaba conformada” (113). Subtle as
this may seem, the scientist’s remark genders Sáenz as the female subject within a patriarchal
structure of power. In her study of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century English novels,
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that emerging patterns in male homosocial relationships, which
were closely tied to questions of class, must necessarily be understood in their relationship to
women and to gender as a whole (1). She points out that “in any male-dominated society, there is
a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures
for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power: a relationship founded on an inherent and
potentially active structural congruence” (25). Young, white, European, male scientist Jean
Baptiste Boussingault certainly had that kind of socially “congruent” relationship with Dr.
Niniano Ricardo Cheyne,9 another young, white, European, male scientist, who, like
Boussingault, had been contracted by the Liberator himself. The joke about Manuela’s body
space situates her outside of this homosocial relationship and into a marginalized, feminine
positionality.
Once the author has established Sáenz’s body as a feminine space, he situates her person
within the social space of a “dama sudamericana,” an elite criolla whose prescribed sphere of
41
influence and daily activity is the home. He achieves this by describing her experience at the
Convento de Santa Catalina, where she learned the skills required of any proper woman of her
social class: “las labores de aguja y los bordados en oro y plata que son motivo de admiración
para los extranjeros, luego le enseñaron la preparación de helados, sorbetes y confituras” (113).
This exemplifies what María Mogollón Cobo and Ximena Narváez identify as the focus of
criolla woman’s education in nineteenth-century Ecuador, when women were taught skills to aid
them in their domestic work: hygiene, home economics, sewing, embroidery, and
knitting/weaving (“tejido”) (72).10
Boussingault’s description of Sáenz’s education genders her in several ways. To begin,
he situates her within the convent, a space whose dark corners and thick walls are the physical
manifestation of the highly regulated, silenced and subordinated social space occupied by
women in the Catholic Church and, accordingly, in the patriarchal society of early nineteenthcentury Quito. Novelist Luis Zúñiga (2001) describes this space through the eyes of his
protagonist, the young Manuela Sáenz Aizpuru: “Eran lugares obscuros, húmedos, de paredes
blancas y altas, que me provocaban la sobrecogedora sensación de una cárcel silenciosa” (15).
Having situated Manuela within this confining space—symbolic of the silence and subordination
that characterized feminine social space in this patriarchal religious and social culture—
Boussingault tells us that there she learned to manipulate the physical objects of domestic space:
the needle and thread, food and culinary instruments—hardly objects used by a colonel.
Boussingault makes further mention of Sáenz’s skill at domestic handicrafts when he describes
her morning practice of embroidering, a description in which he juxtaposes two physical sites of
femininity: her embroidery and her beautiful fingers: “[...] en la mañana llevaba una bata de
cama que tenía su atractivo; sus brazos, generalmente desnudos que se guardaba muy bien de
disimular; bordaba mostrando los más lindos dedos del mundo” (116).
What Boussingault has done is to strip Manuela of the material objects that facilitated her
participation in the masculine spaces of military activity and the outdoor excursion (namely the
moustache and her uniform) and has redressed her in feminine clothing, positioned her as the
hostess in the domestic space of her home, and inscribed her into that domesticity by describing
the skills that she had learned at the convent: sewing and baking, both of which are daily
practices of domestic production. If gender is a social space partially constituted by an
individual’s relationship to the physical (“perceived”) spaces of her daily practice, then
42
Boussingault’s text genders Sáenz as a feminine subject who adorns herself with objects
symbolic of hegemonic femininity: feminine dress, a sensual female body, and the needle and
thread. I will return to this idea of feminine domestic space in the next chapter, where I explore
the ways in which Sáenz repositions herself within domestic space (and even mentions this
embroidery to which Boussingault refers) in order to reestablish a feminine positionality that
reinforces her position as Bolívar’s lover and helpmate and as General Juan José Flores’ loyal
female friend.
In analyzing Boussingault’s description of Sáenz’s childhood education, through which
she was trained to be a proper young criolla, it is interesting to consider his omission of the more
masculine activities and spaces of that childhood. For example, some biographers claim that
during her adolescence, Manuela frequently stayed at Cataguango, the hacienda belonging to her
maternal grandfather Mateo José de Aizpuru, where—as some claim—she learned the equestrian
skills for which she would later become known.11 While Boussingault makes direct reference to
Manuela’s equestrian skills, he never delves into their origins—like he does regarding her
learning of needlework. Her riding skills, which would have required several years of practice in
order to acquire, are evidence that Sáenz had spent considerable time in the outdoors, riding, as
opposed to remaining indoors, perfecting her cross stitch. Considering Boussingault’s tendency
to include even the most controversial details, I doubt that the omission of this detail was
intentional. Regardless, the effect remains the same: by not describing Manuela’s outdoor
activities at the hacienda, the narrator maintains the focus on her feminine (domestic) social
space. Had he delved into the matter of her ability to ride a horse “like a man,” this would
resonate with the scene at Tenquendama Falls and would represent Sáenz’s gender as being more
complex and dynamic than it does.
Eccentricity to the Point of Insanity
Sáenz’s transgressions into masculine space led to a number of theories about her
sexuality and character. Boussingault maintains that Manuela was “eccentric”: audacious,
inclined toward drinking, and highly libidinous (not to mention unfaithful to Simón and possibly
even bisexual). While these may or may not be accurate assessments, what is interesting is the
way in which the scientist genders Sáenz in his narration of the episodes that he presents as
illustrative of her eccentric personality. I will now discuss two episodes in which the author
maintains a focus on Manuela’s female corporeality12 in a way that implies that her “true” gender
43
is that which is biologically determined by her sex, an assertion that means that her
transgressions into masculine social spaces are signs of perversity.
In support of his argument that she “carried her eccentricity to the point of craziness”
(111), Boussingault illustrates ways in which Sáenz (mis)used her female body space in order to
pervert (or perhaps it should be “subvert”) the symbolic sanctity and “wholesomeness” of the
central axis of domesticity: maternity.13 The scientist recalls an episode involving Sáenz and her
pet bear cub, which she apparently allowed to roam about the house. According to Boussingault,
one morning when he went to visit Manuela, he was told that she was still in bed but was invited
to enter her bedroom, where he witnessed what he calls “a terrifying scene” (“una escena
aterradora”): “[...] el oso estaba tendido sobre su ama, con sus horribles garras posadas sobre sus
senos. Al verme entrar, Manuelita me dijo con gran calma:—‘Don Juan, vaya a la cocina y traiga
un jarro de leche que colocará al pie de la cama: este diablo de oso no quiere dejarme’” (117).
The horror that the narrator expresses before this scene is underpinned by the cultural association
between the female body (particularly the breasts) and motherhood, nurturing, and
wholesomeness. From the narrator’s perspective, what at first appears to be an act of violence,
the placing of sharp claws atop soft breats, becomes an act of perversion as the “victim,” who
should be more protective of her body, remains unalarmed. The immediate reference to the dish
of milk confirms the assumption that the bear was taking her breast in attempt to feed.
Boussingault assumes the masculine role of protector when he ties the bear up and orders him to
be shot. But Manuela, in her reactions, subverts the narrator’s representation of her female body
as a victimized one and of her person as the “víctima”14 (as the narrator calls her); she responds
to the situation “with great calmness” and later shows the scientist her bosom, claiming “Vea Ud.
[...] no estoy herida” (117).
This anecdote brings to mind what Rebecca Earle writes in “Rape and the Anxious
Republic: Revolutionary Colombia, 1810-1830.” Earle points out that the image of the passive
and victimized female body became popular in revolutionary Colombia not only as wartime
propaganda, but also as a way to counteract women’s increased mobilization as part of the war
effort (136). She notes that these images were accompanied by an increased anxiety over
prostitution and female sexuality (137). These phenomena were related to the idealization of the
female body as a site of republican motherhood: the process by which the new nation would be
born and would pass along the values and ideals of the new republic (142). Boussingault’s
44
anecdote establishes Manuela’s audacity and eccentricity by implying that her unorthodox
behavior mocks the conceptual space of motherhood, embodied in the physical space of her
breasts. The scientist’s description of the bear’s attempt to nurse from a female body outside of
its own species essentially represents maternity as a biological phenomenon, a perspective that
categorizes this feminine subject to a female body, biologically designed to nurse young. The
narrator’s reaction to Sáenz’s “audacious” and “eccentric” behavior highlights the fact that the
female breast has become a symbolic space, as well as the site where the sacred conceptual space
of motherhood has been mapped onto the female body. Sáenz’s reaction shows her lack of
reverence for this sacred, symbolic space; her breast is just a breast, and—look—it’s not hurt.
This scene brings to mind a more recent episode illustrating the taboo surrounding the
expectant female body and any immodesty shown toward that body. The example is one
analyzed by Robyn Longhurst in “‘Corporeographies’ of pregnancy: ‘bikini babes’”: a ‘pregnant
bikini competition’ held in New Zealand on October 7, 1998. Longhurst explains that “when
occupying public places [pregnant women] are expected to act in a manner that is demure and
modest,” and that because such behavior has become accepted as ‘natural,’ the bikini contest
“momentarily destabilized these expected behaviours” (471) Longhurst notes that the contest
organizers described the contestants as “pregnant women with attitude,” and that the event
sparked controversy, motivating several individuals to write letters to the editor with complaints
that used words like “spectacle,” “abhorrent,” and “shame.” (468) I mention this case because it
clearly illustrates how, even in the 21st century, the female body as a symbolic or real site of
maternity is a sacred space surrounded by taboos against immodesty and irreverance toward that
body.
Manuela’s irreverence toward her own breast, which is a sacred, symbolic site of
maternity, is matched by her lack of modesty regarding her female body. What’s more, when she
shows her male visitor her unharmed, bare breast, she disregards the taboo surrounding nudity,
refusing to shroud her breast as a private, sacred and symbolic space. Manuela’s “immodest”
treatment of her own body space is further illustrated in a scene in which (from Boussingault’s
perspective) she uses feminine needlework in order to “lure” the narrator into an “immodest”
encounter. Once again situating Sáenz within the domestic space of her home, Boussingault
writes,
45
¡La buena Manuelita era una de las mujeres livianas más curiosa [sic]! Una tarde
pasé por su casa para recibir una carta de recomendación que me había prometido
[...]. Se acababa de levantar de la mesa y me recibió en un pequeño salón y en el
curso de la conversación elogió la habilidad de sus compatriotas quiteñas para el
bordado y como prueba se empeñó en mostrarme una camisa artísticamente
trabajada. Entonces, sin más ni más y con la mayor naturalidad, tomó la camisa
que tenía puesta y la levantó de manera que yo pudiese examinar la obra de sus
amigas. (119)
Here the narrator shifts the focus to the feminine sensuality of the body adorned by this
embroidery, making a close connection between the two sites of femininity, much as he did
when he described her beautiful hands juxtaposed with her needlework:
¡Desde luego fuí obligado a ver algo más que la tela bordada! y ella me dijo:
—‘Mire, don Juan, ¡cómo están hechas!’
— ‘Pero, hechas en torno’, contesté yo haciendo alusión a sus piernas.
La situación se estaba convirtiendo en un problema para mi pudor, cuando
me sacó de pelígro la entrada de Wills, a quien ella dijo, sin desconcertarse:
— ‘Muestro a Don Juan bordados de Quito’. (119)
In this scene, the narrator genders Manuela through a description of both her female body and of
the famous quiteña needlework that adorns that body. The most obvious way in which he does
this is by representing Sáenz as the object of his desire; since throughout his Memoirs the
narrator establishes himself as a heterosexual male (as revealed in the sexual overtones of his
many anecdotes about women), his representation of Sáenz as having the “well made” legs that
become the object of his desire genders her as feminine. But this feminine subject transgresses
the norms governing the (un)veiling of her body space; while the needlework can be read as a
reference to feminine domesticity, Manuela once again “perverts” (or “subverts”) this site of
feminine domestic activity by using it to play an active role in this flirtatious encounter; she uses
it as a pretense to reveal (rather than conceal) the body that by social standards should be kept
hidden under long, full skirts and within the private space of the home.
The subtext of Jean Baptiste Boussingault’s representation of Manuela Sáez is that she
was perverse. By biological nature a woman, she mocked, abused, and transgressed sites of
hegemonic femininity: maternity, the female body, and domestic space. Faithful to a
46
dichotomous notion of gender based on exclusive binaries, the scientist cannot—or will not—
reconcile the masculine and feminine aspects of Manuela’s behavior. Instead, he represents her
movement between masculine and feminine social spaces as a “metamorphosis,” a drastically
transformative process facilitated—he suggests—by the wine that Manuela was fond of drinking.
He writes that her behavior and appearance in the morning was very modest, that she was most
often seen in her beautiful dressing gown, embroidering with “the most beautiful fingers in the
world,” speaking very little, and smoking gracefully. She would receive news and forward
messages, and during the day she would go out dressed in her military uniform. Then, later in the
afternoon, “sobrevenía la metamorfosis, gracias, creo yo, a la influencia de unos vasos de vino de
Oporto que le gustaba mucho; usaba colorete y sus cabellos siempre estaban artísticamente
arreglados; tenía mucha vida, era alegre sin mucha gracia y a veces usaba expresiones bastante
arriesgadas” (116). In other words, Sáenz’s movement between various gendered spaces, her
altered behaviour and changing of registers was not due to any personal agency or intentional
negotiation of the norms of feminine behavior, but rather it was due to an alcohol-induced
metamorphosis that just further emphasizes the perversity of her transgressions. In the next
section, I examine how another literary figure, Ricardo Palma, reconciles the masculine and
feminine aspects of Sáenz’s appearance, behavior, and personality.
Ricardo Palma
Ricardo Palma describes Manuela Sáenz is one of his tradiciones,15 “La Protectora y la
Libertadora.” The first two sections of this text share a common structure and are titled “Doña
Rosa Campusano” and “Doña Manuela Sáenz.” They begin with the narrator’s recollections of
his personal encounters with the aged and impoverished Protectora16 and Libertadora,
respectively. Each of these narratives is followed by a nostalgic look into each woman’s past,
focusing on her appearance, relationships, and political activities during the wars for
independence. The third section draws these two subjects together in a comparative essay titled
“La Protectora y la Libertadora,” in which he compares the lives of the two women in their
younger days.
47
“A Freak of Nature”
Palma represents the young Manuela Sáenz as a “freak of nature.” Underpinning the
tradicionista’s description is the notion that Manuela’s female body belied the true gender of her
spirit, which he describes as “manly”; Palma writes, “Doña Manuela era una equivocación de la
naturaleza, que en formas esculturalmente femeninas encarnó espíritu y aspiraciones varoniles”
(197). This implied distinction between biological sex and “spiritual” gender raises interesting
questions as to the relationship between the gender of a subject’s interior person (including her
self-image and how she experiences her social space in relation to other entities), her body, and
the physical spaces in which that body moves and acts.
This relationship to the problem of embodiment, which Elizabeth Grosz addresses in
Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies. Grosz emphasizes the importance
of considering embodiment when addressing questions of subjectivity; she writes,
Seeing that the subject’s consciousness or interiority, its essential humanity or
unique individuality, can no longer provide a foundation or basis for accounts of
identity, it is appropriate to ask whether subjectivity, the subject’s relations with
others (the domain of ethics), and its place in a socio-natural world (the domain of
politics), may be better understood in corporeal rather than conscious terms. (8384)
Grosz argues that a reconceptualization of bodies necessitates a reconceptualization of “their
environment and spatio-temporal location” (84). According to Palma’s description, Manuela’s
female body alone does not make her a “true woman”; rather, her actions and reactions situate
her within masculine spheres of activity that transgender her into someone “in-between”: she is,
in Palma’s words, a “woman-man.” Palma makes this assessment by positioning Sáenz’s female
body within masculine spheres of activity and by pointing out how her ways of dressing,
adorning, and moving that body integrate her into those physical spaces, where, as Palma claims,
she is “in her element” (197). In the same way, by listing the various authors that Sáenz enjoyed
reading, and by contrasting this bibliography to the more “feminine” readings of Rosa
Campusano, Palma positions Sáenz within masculine intellectual/conceptual space. The
disjunction between Sáenz’s female body and her activities in masculine spaces is the premise of
Palma’s assessment that she is “a freak of nature.”
48
Palma structures his description of Sáenz as a comparison between this “mujer-hombre”
and Rosita Campusano, “la mujer-mujer” (a “womanly woman”), whom he describes as “la
mujer con toda la delicadeza de sentimientos y debilidades propias de su sexo” (197). In this
schema, Campusano’s delicate stature, sentimentality, affinity for the home and for the comforts
of the city, practice of always traveling in a carriage, tendency to faint (in other words, inability
to control her body) when spooked by owls and mice, as well as her affinity for romance
literature establish her as the norm of femininity against which Sáenz is measured. One central
theme in this comparison is woman as the “fairer” sex, she who is by nature suited to enclosed,
“safe” spaces and whose “weaknesses” allow her intense emotions—as opposed to her
rationality—to govern her body. This portrayal is rooted in the widely-held assumption that
women’s “natural defects” included their being incapable of abstract thought, being overly
emotional, particular, childish, etc. (Pratt 263). In contrast to Campusano, Sáenz, who prefers
open, dangerous spaces, and who was notorious for maintaining her composure even amidst the
gruesome horrors of battle, is portrayed as “manly.” The clearly comparative structure of
Palma’s essay, together with his invented gender categories of “woman-woman” and “womanman,” with which he concludes the comparison, are clear evidence that this essay is a conscious
reflection on gender differences (differences, that is, that are determined by biological sex).
Early in the comparison, Palma situates each subject within distinct and opposite
physical spaces. He positions Campusano within the protected spaces of the home, the comforts
of the city, and, when she did venture out into the streets, in the enclosed space of a carriage
(197). Sáenz, on the other hand, was “in her element” in the middle of open, turbulent, and
perilous spaces: the military headquarters and camps, and the streets of Quito and Lima, where
rather than ride about in a carriage, “[ella] cabalgaba a manera de hombre en brioso corcel,
escoltada por dos lanceros de Colombia y vistiendo dolmán rojo con brandeburgos de oro y
pantalón bombacho de cotonía blanca” (197). Not only is Sáenz outside of the enclosed protected
space of the carriage—a detail that suggests freedom of movement—but her position atop the
“spirited steed,” which she rides—and implicitly dominates—implies a strength and an agency
associated with masculinity. In other words, her embodiment is constituted not only by her
biological sex, but also by how and where she positions her body and how she interacts with the
physical spaces around her, such as the feisty steed beneath her. What’s more, the description of
the military uniform that she wears and of the Colombian lancers accompanying her
49
superimposes military space onto this already masculine space of skillful jockeying in the city
streets.
Palma develops this characterization with further description of the way in which Sáenz
and Campusano dressed and adorned their bodies. According to Palma, while Campusano was
careful to dress in the latest fashions, Sáenz “vestía al gusto de su costurera.” And while the
former “deslumbraba por la profusión de pedrería fina,” the latter always wore gold or coral
hoop earrings (197). While these may appear to be minor details, there is a more profound
presumption underlying this description: that true femininity entails treating one’s female body
as a site to be meticulously adorned and presented to the implicitly male gaze.
In this aspect, Palma’s description of Sáenz and of the way she presented her body space
stands in stark contrast to Boussingault’s accounts. While the scientist does at one point describe
Sáenz as dressed in a military uniform, coincidentally riding atop a lively steed (111), he does so
with less detail, feminizes the uniformed Manuela by eventually removing her moustache and
calling her “una mujer muy bonita,” and later pays much closer attention to the details of her
more feminine dress in the implicitly feminine space of her home (112, 113, and 116). For
Boussingault, Manuela is essentially a woman deviantly disguised as a man, and the author is
quick to reposition his subject within a feminine body space.
Palma’s representation, in contrast, suggests that Manuela’s gender is partly a product of
her use of physical space. By focusing on Manuela’s masculine, military dress, and by presenting
this as evidence that her spirit was not feminine, but rather masculine (or, rather, semimasculine), Palma’s text has the opposite effect of Boussingault’s: it embodies Sáenz as a
masculine subject. Consequently, it moves her out of the line of the heterosexual male gaze and
sets her aside in some space apart. Granted, he portrays this space as one of abnormality, but it is
nonetheless significant and intriguing that the effect of this textual embodiment—this
repositioning—is that Manuela is indeed removed from the male gaze, including that of the
narrator, who confesses, “Decididamente, Rosa Campusano era toda una mujer, y sin escrúpulo,
a haber sido yo joven en sus días de gentileza, me habría inscrito en la lista de sus
enamorados.....platónicos. La Sáenz, aun en los tiempos en que era una hermosura, no me habría
inspirado sino el respetuoso sentimiento de amistad que la [sic] profesé en su vejez” (199).
There is another aspect of Palma’s description that again brings to mind what Elizabeth
Grosz writes about the relationship among the body, space, and time. Palma writes,
50
[La Sáenz] dominaba sus nervios, conservándose serena y enérgica en medio de
las balas y al frente de lanzas y espadas tintas en sangre o del afilado puñal de los
asesinos. [La Campusana] sabía desmayarse o disforzarse, como todos esos seres
preciosos y engreídos que estilan vestirse por la cabeza, ante el graznar fatídico
del buho o la carrera de asustadizo ratoncillo. (198)
Here the author shifts his focus from the body space of his two subjects to the details of the
physical space in which those bodies move, act, and react. Gender is determined by the subject’s
interaction with her surroundings. In the masculine sphere of warfare, graphically painted in
concrete terms of flying bullets and blood-stained swords, Manuela maintains calm and in
control, a reaction that allows her to enjoy agency within this masculine sphere of activity and,
consequently, leads to her reputation for being cold-blooded. This echoes what Boussingault
writes:
Ella había dado pruebas de su valor militar; al lado del General Sucre, asistió
lanza en mano, a la batalla de Ayacucho[...], en donde recogió, a manera de
trofeo, los estupendos mostachos de los que se hizo hacer postizos. Se puede decir
que tenía entretenamiento, de lo cual no cabe duda, pero Manuelita, como se va a
ver, estaba dotada de gran valor, de sangre fría y de una calma increíbles, en las
circunstancias más peligrosas. (120)
Likewise, by describing Manuela as cold-blooded, Palma represents her as the polar opposite of
Campusano, in whose heart “había un depósito de lágrimas y de afectos tiernos” (197). In her
article titled “The Feminine Press: the View of Women in the Colonial Journals of Spanish
America,” Johanna Mendelson lists a number of attributes that were commonly associated with
criolla and peninsular women of colonial Spanish America: “sophistication, decency, purity,
virtue, sensitive, and goodhearted” (213). By exemplifying such sensitivity and softheartedness
when she faints or cries, Campusano embodies femininity while Sáenz, who dominates her
nerves in frightening situations, embodies the antithesis to this femininity: masculinity.
One interesting aspect of this comparison is that the essential difference in the two
subjects’ reactions to threatening situations lies in their ability or inability to control their bodies;
while Manuela remains aggressive and on the offensive when placed in the masculine sphere of
battle, the mere presence of animals is enough to make Campusano lose control over her body
and faint. This gendered dichotomy of control/lack of control is closely related to the dichotomy
51
of order/disorder that, as I explain later in this chapter, heavily influences the way in which
several government officials represent Manuela Sáenz, her political activities, and her
compatriotas. It also has correlations with the image of the hysterical woman that, as Ruth
Bankey explains, has become standard in Western medicine, literature and culture, and that was
affirmed by its treatment in the institutionalized medical practices of the 19th century. Bankey
studied Canadian women diagnosed with panic disorder with agoraphobia (PDA) and found that
what most of these women feared was the image of the hysterical woman/female body. She
explains, “The hysterical body has become emblematic of all the traditionally negative
characteristics considered to be feminine: duplicity, theatricality, suggestibility, instability,
weakness, passivity, and excessive emotionality” (40). Citing the work of Niel Micklem, she
discusses the history of this image of hysteria, emphasizing the significance of a series of
paintings that framed a Salpelrière Hospital lecture hall in late nineteenth-century Paris, where
lectures were given to medical students: “These images of hysterical women were designed to
show how women were in need of the moral guardianship of a ‘rational’ medical or scientific
system for care” (41). The contrast between the hysterical female body and the rational male
physicans in the paintings illustrates one way in which lack of control over one’s body was
considered a feminine trait, an attribute that in Palma’s description is demonstrated by
Campusano, but not by Sáenz.
The final aspect in which Palma compares Sáenz to Campusano is in each woman’s
preferences in reading material. With this description, he situates each subject within or outside
of intellectual spheres that, as implied by the author’s comparison, are heavily gendered. Palma
himself entered into theoretical debates about the writing of history and the relationship between
history and literature; defending his tradiciones as literature when they were criticized as lacking
historical rigor. It is important to note that this distinction was highly gendered. Considered to be
a masculine sphere of intellectual activity, history was seen as rational, factual, and academic.
Literature, on the other hand, was seen as light, seductive, and enchanting, a quintessentially
feminine sphere of thought (Denegri 33). In light of this debate, we can see how Palma
represents Campusano’s readings as harmless and non-political17; her reading of the romance
novel Eloísa y Abelardo18 and of “pornographic booklets” were enough to land her a place on the
registry of the Holy Office of Lima, but according to the tradicionista, such books were read all
over Lima and did little more than give the more prudish readers something to mention in the
52
confessional (198). Palma also names “the gentleman (galante) Arriaza”19 and the “very sweet
Meléndez”20 as Campusano’s preferred poets. In short, while some of Campusano’s readings
may transgress social or religious norms of decency, they limit the reader’s intellectual activities
to the feminine, non-political sphere of literature.
According to Palma’s description, then, Sáenz transgresses gendered intellectual space by
engaging in more “academic” and “masculine” genres, including histories and biographies from
classical antiquity, imperialist Spain, and colonial Spanish America. It is important to consider
that in the context of revolutionary Spanish America, these readings also become highly
political—or at least inform the politically minded—through their discussions of imperial
processes, protagonists, and subjects; they thus allude to a connection to the political sphere,
which is also masculine. In light of this gendered distinction, Palma portrays Sáenz as a
“masculine” reader; she read Tacitus21 and Plutarch22; the New World and Spanish histories of
Antonio de Solís,23 the Inca Garsilaso de la Vega,24 and Father Juan de Mariana,25 respectively;
the Psalms; Cervantes; and the poetry of Cienfuegos,26 Quintana,27 Espronceda28 (Pelayo), and
Olmedo, particularly the latter’s Victoria de Junín (Canto a Bolívar), 29 which the Libertadora
knew by heart (Palma 198). Having thus positioned Sáenz within both physical and now
conceptual spheres of masculine activity, Palma concludes rather concisely that “La Campusano
fué la mujer-mujer. La Sáenz fué la mujer-hombre” (199).
Palma’s representation of the young Manuela Sáenz emphasizes her masculine dress,
activities, and reactions to the exclusion of any reference to her activities and integration into
feminine spheres. Unlike Boussingault, he never describes her as elegantly dressed, adorned with
flowers, or playing the role of hostess or Bolívar’s lover. What is not present in this section of
Palma’s tradición, but is central to Boussingault’s description, is Sáenz’s social space as a sexual
being. Boussingault represents Sáenz’s body as heavily sexualized (and consequently heavily
feminized); it becomes the object of an off-color comment “between men,” the victimized
maternal breast of a hungry bear cub, and the object of the masculine narrator’s lustful gaze.
Palma, on the other hand, desexualizes Sáenz’s body, creating for it a new conceptual space: the
androgynous, in-between category of “woman-man.”
A Feminized Manuela
In order to appreciate the ambiguity of the term “mujer-hombre,” it is helpful to note that
Palma used it as the title of another tradición, in which he tells the story of María Leocadia
53
Álvarez, also known as Antonio Ita, a nun of the order of St. Claire in Agreda, Spain, who left
the convent, traveled to Buenos Aires, later fled to Potosí, and eventually married Martina
Bilbao, a mestiza woman being held in the convent of Santa Monica so as to reform her “sinful”
life. Álvarez/Ita’s secret was discovered in 1803 and she was returned to the convent in Spain. It
is interesting that Palma uses this same term “woman-man” to refer to both Álvarez (who fully
assumed masculine social space, including a masculine alias and role as husband), and Sáenz,
who as much as she was active in masculine spheres, was also more active in feminine spheres.
This comparison shows the extent to which Palma shifts Sáenz away from feminine spaces and
toward masculine ones, depositing her in some desexualized place in-between.
I attribute this difference—in large part, at least—to the very different circumstances
under which each author met and came to know Sáenz. Boussingault was a handsome young
man of twenty-one when he arrived in Gran Colombia. His memoirs express an acute sexual
awareness between himself and a number of young Spanish-American women with whom he
came in contact. When he met Manuela, she was a young, vivacious, sensual woman. It comes as
no surprise that his representation of her would reveal an acute awareness of Sáenz’s female
body space.
Palma, on the other hand, claims to have met Sáenz years later in Paita (Peru), just before
her death in 1856. In part two of this tradición, the section titled “Doña Manuela Sáenz,” Palma
shares his first impressions of the exiled Libertatora, whom he visited in her humble home:
En el sillón de ruedas, y con la majestad de una reina sobre su trono, estaba una
anciana que me pareció representar sesenta años a lo sumo. Vestía pobremente,
pero con aseo, y bien se adivinaba que ese cuerpo había usado en mejores tiempos
gro, raso y terciopelo. Era una señora abundante de carnes, ojos negros y
animadísimos, en los que parecía reconcentrado el resto del fuego vital que aun le
quedara, cara redonda y mano aristocrática. (193-94)
Clearly Sáenz’s body is a considerably different space than it had been thirty years prior. While
in this section of the essay Sáenz is not represented as a semi-masculine—but rather fully
feminine—subject, her body is still desexualized, this time due to its physical condition.
An analysis of this initial section of Palma’s tradición, paying close attention to the way
in which he desexualizes Manuela’s body, highlights even more clearly the relative
masculinization of the young Sáenz in the third section, in which he compares her to
54
Campusano. The section titled “Doña Manuela Sáenz” presents itself as the narrator’s memories
of the time he spent docked in Paita when he was a twenty-three-year-old, working on the
battleship Loa. He tells how one day, an acquaintance of his, a young French merchant, offered
to introduce him to “the best thing Paita has to offer”30 (193). Assuming that his companion was
referring to some pretty young woman, and, as he confesses, “[...] como a los veintitrés años el
alma es retozona y el cuerpo pide jarana,” he readily accepted the offer. Thus, “woman” is
introduced into the narrative as an anonymous and highly sexualized, corporeal entity. This
having been established, when the narrator finally meets “the best thing Paita has to offer” (the
legendary and already aged, crippled, and overweight Manuela Sáenz), he represents this woman
not as a sexualized body and a site of desire, but rather as a sort of matriarch or grandmotherly
figure, a “mujer altiva,” who has the presence of a queen on a throne, but who also indulges him
with sweets that she herself has made (194). Though Sáenz is highly gendered here—she is
represented as a nurturing and gracious lady, “la dama que había vivido en alta esfera social”
(194) and who has the presence of a queen—her gender is more closely associated with classspecific and maternal behaviors than with her female corporeality.
It is when the narrator begins to delve into this venerable woman’s past that he sexualizes
the image of her (younger) body space. When he does, she becomes the “bella Manuelita, única
mujer que, después de poseída, logró ejercer imperio sobre el sensual y voluble Bolívar” (195).
This sentence illustrates the fragmented and dual nature of Palma’s gendering of Sáenz: here she
is both passive (read “feminine”) and active (“masculine”); she is both the female body
“possessed” by the Liberator and the strong character who enjoyed control over him.
Subsequently in this section, she is represented in terms of her feminine positionality with
respect to Bolívar and in the domestic space that she occupied in that role: she enjoyed the
treatment due the “Liberator’s legitimate wife” (195), and she was the lady who occupied the
palace as his lover (196).
On the other hand, the narrator also positions Sáenz in masculine spheres of activity: he
notes how she became deeply involved in politics, and he describes her, lance in hand, at the
head of a squad of soldiers, putting out a riot in the streets and plaza of Quito (195). Palma
situates Sáenz in both feminine and masculine spaces, but what he fails to do is establish any
kind of coherence or integrity of identity. In other words, the narrator reveals an inability to
reconcile Sáenz’s femininity with her masculinity; in the section titled “Doña Manuela Sáenz,”
55
he portrays an essentially feminine subject whose activities in masculine spaces did not affect her
gender. In fact, when describing an incident when Sáenz dressed in her (masculine) military
uniform and went out to defend Bolívar against the revolt led by Colonel José Bustamante,31 he
writes that “la Sáenz penetró disfrazada de hombre en uno de los cuarteles con el propósito de
reaccionar un batallón” (195). Palma represents Sáenz as an essentially female subject, in a
female body space, who falsely represents that body space in order to act as a man32 and to enter
into the masculine space of the military barracks. On the other hand, in the third section of this
tradición (“La Protectora y la Libertadora”) he describes how Manuela regularly rides around in
her military uniform, which is not a disguise but rather an essential part of her identity, and he
explains that she is “in her element” in open, perilous places. Here Palma focuses exclusively on
Sáenz’s activities in masculine spheres and overtly omits any reference to her feminine
positionality with respect to Bolívar, sensuality as a beautiful young woman, or domestic
activity. In neither section does Sáenz move freely between masculine and feminine social
spaces; she may be a woman acting in a masculine sphere of activity (such as war), but she is
represented as still fundamentally feminine, and when her gender does take that shift toward
masculinity, then she is completely removed from feminine spheres of activity.
Both Boussingault and Palma represent Sáenz as an incoherent subject, a “freak of
nature,” an individual characterized by a kind of dual personality who—according to
Boussingault—needs wine in order to undergo the metamorphoses that transition her from
feminine to masculine and back to feminine social spaces. As we will see in the following
section about the letters from Simón Bolívar to Manuela Sáenz, the Liberator attempts to
reconcile the masculine and feminine aspects of Sáenz’s behavior by negotiating the terms of her
involvement in the independence movement. In the discursive space created by the couple’s
correspondence, we can see how he constantly tries to reposition her in sites of hegemonic
femininity, while she, in turn, positions and repositions herself in both feminine and masculine
spheres of activity. This negotiation between Bolívar and Sáenz illustrates the idea that gender,
as a social space, is constantly defined and redefined by the relationships between the subject and
other social entities, physical objects, and conceptual and symbolic spaces, and it provides a
valuable context for the analysis in the following chapter, where I analyze the ways in which
Sáenz genders herself in her own letters and diaries.
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Simón Bolívar
On August 10, 1826, Simón Bolívar wrote to his sister María Antonia Bolívar y Palacios:
“Te aconsejo que no te mezcles en los negocios políticos, ni te adhieras ni opongas a ningún
partido. Deja marchar la opinión y las cosas aunque las creas contrarias a tu modo de pensar.
Una mujer debe ser neutral en los negocios públicos. Su familia y sus deberes domésticos son
sus primeras obligaciones” (Letter to María Antonia Bolívar y Palacios, 10 Aug. 1826). Both
Bolívar’s admonishments and official government reports about the activities of “capricious” and
“crazy” women as inciters of revolution are evidence that, although women were systematically
marginalized from the center of political activity in the emerging nations, they nonetheless
asserted themselves in this public, masculine sphere of activity by influencing their husbands,
sons, and other male relatives and by hosting tertulias—private discussion groups—in their
homes, where political ideas were often discussed (Cherpak 220). As we will see in Chapter
Three, Bolívar’s enemies and successors marginalized and criminalized Manuela Sáenz because
of her continued public political activity following the Liberator’s exile. But how did Bolívar
himself treat Sáenz and her gender transgressions during the eight years of their relationship as
lovers and compatriots?
In spite of his insistence that women not involve themselves in politics, Bolívar’s letters
show that he did give some concessions to Sáenz, recognizing the contributions that she and
other women made to the independence movement. In his correspondence with Manuela, we see
the creation of a new social space, a semi-private and also semi-public relationship located
somewhere between the political and the personal. It is in this space that Bolívar and Sáenz
negotiate the terms of her involvement in the politico-military movement for independence; in
other words, in this lived space, they negotiate the terms of her transgressions of gendered social
spaces. As this lived space is partially delineated by the contours of their love affair, there
appears in Simón’s letters a clear feminization of Manuela as a highly sensual, corporeal being.
But since the relationship was also forged in a political alliance, within the context of the
geographical and ideological space of revolutionary America, we also see the ways in which
Sáenz tests the limits of her movement within masculine spaces and, accordingly, how the
Liberator responds to her transgressions and negotiates these limits with her. Finally, because of
the controversial nature of their relationship, Bolívar found himself situated between the desires
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of his compatriot and lover on the one hand, and public criticism on the other. In this chapter I
also examine the ways in which Simón Bolívar genders Sáenz as he defends her and her
transgressions—both sexual and socio-political—to his sister María Antonia and to General José
María Córdova, respectively.
Diana in the Garden of Odysseus
The early correspondence between Simón and Manuela is marked by strong sexual
overtones and sensual images, in which Manuela is represented in highly feminized corporeal
terms. One example is the letter Simón sent Manuela from the military headquarters in Pasto on
January 30, 1823, seven months into their love affair. This letter, in which he addresses her as
“Manuela bella, Manuela mía,” Simón draws from Greek mythology in his representation of
Manuela as a highly corporeal subject: “Tú me nombras y me tienes al instante. [...] Pienso en tu
cuerpo y la tersura de tu piel y empaco inmediatamente, como Marco Antonio fue hacia
Cleopatra. [...] Espérame, y hazlo ataviada con ese velo azul y transparente, igual que la ninfa
que cautiva al argonauta” (Letter to Manuela Sáenz, 30 Jan. 1823). In this passage, Simón
constructs Manuela as a sexualized body waiting passively in some distant place for him to
return to her. This opposition between the passive, stationary, feminine object of beauty and the
active, mobile, masculine hero is further developed in the appropriation of two figures from
classical Greek mythology: the nymph and the Argonaut, each of which carries certain
connotations of space and movement. Beautiful and graceful, nymphs were deities of the waters,
forests, and countryside; they personified not only grace, but also fertility (“Ninfa”). The
Argonauts, on the other hand, were the sailor warriors, who under Jason’s command captured the
Golden Fleece at Colchis (“Argonauta”). This particular reference is to the mythological water
nymph that seduced and essentially captured Hylas, one of Jason’s Argonauts.
This metaphor genders Manuela in three ways. First, it establishes her as the immobile
member of this binary (mobility being a masculine privilege). Second, it positions her in a
natural space, an allusion that carries clear connotations of fertility. The connotation of fertility,
in turn, invokes two feminine spaces: the physiological space of the womb (woman as a passive
sexual being) and the social space of motherhood. Third, this reference to the seductress-nymph,
particularly this one tantalizingly draped in a transparent blue veil, owes its intelligibility to the
stereotype of women as seductress.33
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These themes of classical mythology and of the seductively beautiful female figure who
lures the male warrior-hero into her “natural,” idyllic space reappear in a letter that Simón wrote
to Manuela upon his arrival in Lima in April of 1826:
Tú me acechas entre el lecho de las acacias y los cedros aprisionando mi pobre
humanidad entre tus brazos. Yo me entrego de tu sutil sonrisa y tu audacia, en
méritos estratégicos para aparecerte como Diana en los jardines de Odiseo.
Contigo estoy dispuesto a llenarme exasperado de las satisfacciones propias del
amor. Este altar de Venus vale bien trocarlo por el trajín del servicio a Marte [...]
Espérame en el huerto de “Chuquiguada,” con tu vivaz encantamiento de
sorpresas. (Letter to Manuela Sáenz, 20 Apr. 1826)
Here Manuela is Diana, the Greek goddess of the hunt, of the wildlife, and—ironically—of
chastity. Bolívar’s choice of this metaphor is curious in that—intentional or not—it suggests a
degree of “feminist” agency on Manuela’s part. Diana stands in contrast to a heteropatriarchal
model of femininity; she is the huntress (not the passive prey), who maintains her chastity (in
other words, she rejects maternity). Here we have a glimpse of one of the ways in which Bolívar
subtly negotiates with Manuela her transgressions of hegemonic femininity, though in this
instance, it appears to be a playful twist of metaphors used as a form of flirtation.
That said, it is significant that, like the nymphs, Diana is also situated within nature,
which in classical mythology—and in Bolívar conceptual framework, the neoclassical aesthetic
of the Enlightenment—is a feminine space. As the embodiment of nature, beauty, love, and
sexual desire, Sáenz waits for her warrior-hero at the “altar of Venus.”34 This “altar” becomes a
symbolic space evoked by Bolívar in this letter as he experiences the orchards of “Chuquiguada”
not as a merely practical space of fruit-bearing vegetation, but as a lived space of life-giving
love: Manuela, embracing his “poor humanity” in her arms. In the next chapter, I study the ways
in which Manuela situates herself—much like a nymph—within the natural space of the garden
and the springs of the hacienda El Garzal, where she and Simón enjoyed a romantic interlude
during the first year of their relationship.
Negotiating the Terms of Gender Trasgressions
As their relationship develops, Manuela plays an increasingly active role in the politicomilitary campaign, acting as informant, fighting in battle, and eventually becoming an officer
and official guardian of Bolívar’s personal and official archives. The correspondence between
59
the two often becomes a site of negotiation between her determination to participate in the
independence movement and his conviction that a woman’s place is in the home and not in
politics. In response to her actions on one such occasion in September, 1823, when Manuela, in
military uniform, joined in efforts to suppress a civil uprising, Simón writes to her of his
concern, not only because her actions were a transgression of feminine space, but also because
her political actions were integrally tied to her personal relationship with him, a relationship that
jeopardized whatever sense of honor she enjoyed in society. Expressing deep admiration for her
courage in facing the mob, and acknowledging that in so doing she was not only defending the
cause, but also him personally, he pleads with her to be more discrete in her transgressions of
this gendered space of public political action: “Tú has escandalizado a media humanidad, pero
sólo por tu temperamento admirable. Tu alma es entonces la que derrota los prejuicios y las
costumbres de lo absurdo; pero Manuela mía, he de rogarte: prudencia, a fin de que no se lastime
tu destino excelso en la causa de la libertad de los pueblos y de la república” (Letter to Manuela
Sáenz, 13 Sept. 1823). Here Bolívar suggests that her soul (which, unlike the body, is genderneutral) proves the ridiculousness of these prejudices—undoubtedly the sexual stereotypes and
preoccupations with a woman’s honor.
By expressing admiration for Sáenz’s courage, Bolívar seems to be reiterating what he
had written to his sister, María Antonia, in January of that year, when the latter expressed
concern about the rumors spreading about the couple; stating that he feels destined to accept
Sáenz, Bolívar portrays her as an almost gender-neutral individual: “[...] ella en su afán de
servicio, se muestra como una amable amiga de alma muy superior: culta, desprovista de toda
intención de ambición, de un temperamento viril, además de feminina” (Letter to María Antonio
Bolívar y Palacios, 9 Jan. 1823). These almost disembodied portrayals of Manuela’s ungendered
spirit seem contradictory to Bolívar’s very corporal representation of other women who took
arms in defense of the republic; in a speech given to the soldiers who had liberated Trujillo
province, Venezuela, he declared, “[...] hasta el bello sexo, las delicias del género humano,
nuestras amazonas han combatido contra los tiranos de San Carlos, con un valor divino [...] Los
monstruos y tigres de España han dirigido las infames armas contra los cándidos y femeninos
pechos de nuestras beldades [...]” (qtd. in Cherpak 222, 232). Here again Bolívar evokes the
physical and symbolic space of the female body, this time to rally the republican troops to
continue the fight. Rather than emphasize the “manliness” of their spirit—as he did in reference
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to Sáenz—he focuses on the physical spaces of their “beautiful” bodies: soft, pure, and innocent
in contrast to the beastly soldiers of the royal army. The female breast, a symbolic and physical
site of maternity, seems tragically out of place here amidst the horrors of battle. These are the
contours of the physical, conceptual, and symbolic space of female participation in armed
conflict. It is consistent with the image of female body space in Bolívar’s representation of Sáenz
as the nurturing embrace in the garden. It is not consistent with her audacious self-assertion in
the public sphere of politics and revolution, where she wears a military uniform, rides a horse
like the other soldiers, and goes out in the street to suppress a mob.
Positioned somewhere between this idealized notion of women’s role in the revolution,
the real need for female armed support, and the reality of his lover’s transgressions of those
gender limitations, Bolívar must negotiate these gendered boundaries of private/public,
feminine/masculine participation in the war for independence. So, in order to avoid further
problems and to simultaneously appease this woman who so fervently adores him and insists on
playing an active role in the cause, Bolívar creates for her a position that will keep her busy yet
contained as well as safe: “Prefiero que vengas a Lima, a fin de hacerte cargo de la seretaría de
mi archivo personal, así como los demás documentos de la campaña del sur” (Letter to Manuela
Sáenz, 13 Sept. 1823). This position was a prescribed space for Manuela. As a military
assignment, it positioned her within the boundaries (though in the margins) of masculine space.
But as a safe, “home front” alternative to her desire to be on the battlefield, this position also
confined her to the feminine space of protection at a distance from the front lines.
Though Bolívar’s letters usually acknowledge Sáenz’s politico-military activities as
transgressions into masculine space, on a few occasions, his discourse nonetheless situates her
firmly within that space—such as when he awards her official titles—essentially validating her
experience of participation in the independence movement. On the other hand, he also at times
excludes her from that space, as he does in a letter to General José María Córdova, which I will
soon analyze. On all occasions, there is a clear sense of overlap between the private space of
their romantic relationship and the public space of their relationship as compatriots, in which he
is her general-in-chief. Because of this overlap, and because Manuela never fully escapes the
social norms governing female participation in battle, even her participation on the battlefield
follows cultural norms of feminine domesticity.
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Since October 13, 1823, Manuela Sáenz had been officially enlisted as hussar35 in the
Colombian army. Her official duty was that of archivist for Bolívar’s official and personal
documents. She remained stationed in Lima under the personal protection of lancers sent by
Bolívar himself. During the following year, Sáenz pleaded with Bolívar to allow her to join him
in his campaign through the Peruvian Andes. As she often did, she offered herself as political
council and nurse in light of his failing health. Bolívar, of course, refused her request, though his
correspondence from Otusco, dated April 13 of that year, expresses his longing for her presence
(as his lover, not as an official of his army). A month later, his attentions were diverted to the
eighteen-year-old Manuela Madroño, who would later follow Bolívar through the Peruvian
Andes and would celebrate with him the victory at Junín on August 6. Infuriated by the news of
this affair, Sáenz sent a letter from Huamachuco, in which she threatened to commit suicide “sin
el ‘permiso de su Señoría’”; she then adds, “ya que no me llegará a tiempo, debido a sus
múltiples ocupaciones [...]” (Letter to Simón Bolívar, 10 May 1824), making a double allusion to
the distance that lay between them due to both his military duties and his personal affairs.
Motivated not only by a desire to participate in the military campaign, but now spurred by a
possessive jealousy, Sáenz is determined to join Bolívar. Leaving Lima along with the mobile
government unit that had been stationed there but that was relocating to Huaraz, she made the
journey into the Andes. Along the extremely rigorous march, she demonstrated such
“intrepidness and valor” that she was named Lieutenant of Hussars.
During this journey Sáenz and Bolívar exchanged a series of letters regarding her
continued march through the Andes. Bolívar tries to dissuade her. His argument establishes the
course of the military trek as a masculine space: “Hay que estar dispuesto al mal tiempo, a
caminos torturosos a caballo sin darse tregua, tu refinamiento me dice que mereces alojamiento
digno y en el campo no hay ninguno” (Letter to Manuela Sáenz, 9 June 1824). He then
sarcastically suggests that if she wants to join them, she do so on a rugged trek through the
mountains, so rugged it is sure to dissuade even the most convicted patriot. She picks up on the
subtext of his masculization of the mountainous trek and responds with a sort of selfmasculinization, arguing, “Usted siempre me ha dicho que tengo más pantalones que cualquiera
de sus oficiales, ¿o no?” (Letter to Simón Bolívar, 16 June 1824). She also asserts her strength of
spirit—a spirit that Bolívar himself had called “manly”—as a way to downplay the physical
disadvantages of her female body and the difficulties it would face in this masculinized space.
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She also emphasizes her political (masculine) over her personal (feminine) motivations by
insisting that she is driven by a love for independence. I will study this passage in greater depth
in the next chapter, but I mention it here in order to highlight the negotiation that takes place in
the correspondence between Bolívar and Sáenz and to point out the adjustments that Bolívar
makes in his representations of Sáenz as a subject transgressing gendered spaces.
Sáenz followed through with her promise by actively participating in the campaign that
resulted in the victory of Junín. These actions earned her the title of Captain of Hussars. On the
day of the victory, August 6, 1824, Bolívar signs a letter granting Sáenz this title, a conceived
space that thus positions Sáenz closer to the inner circle of military authority. This letter, dually
addressed to “[E]l señor teniente de húsares de S.E. El Libertador y presidente de Colombia[:]
Señora Manuela Sáenz” and to “Mi muy querida Manuela,” is composed in an official discourse
that gives only the vaguest references to the intimate personal relationship between the writer
and the addressee:
En consideración a la resolución de la junta de generales de división, y habiendo
obtenido de ellos su consentimiento y alegada su ambición personal de usted de
participar en la contienda, visto su coraje y valentía de usted de su valiosa
humanidad en ayudar a planificar desde su columna las acciones que culminaron
con el glorioso éxito de este memorable día, me apresuro, siendo las 16:00 horas
en punto, en otorgarle el grado de capitán de húsares, encomendándole a usted las
actividades económicas y estratégicas de su regimiento, siendo su máxima
autoridad en cuanto tenga que ver con la atención a los hospitales, y siendo este el
último escaño de contacto de mis oficiales y su tropa. (Letter to Manuela Sáenz, 6
Aug. 1824)
Bolívar concludes the letter expressing his pride at having Sáenz by his side as his “más querido
oficial del ejército colombiano.”
A few details of this letter stand out. The classifications—or conceptual spaces—
“Lieutenant of Hussars” and “official” are naturalized as being masculine, and so when Bolívar
positions Sáenz within this space, he maintains the masculine modifiers: “Al señor teniente de
húsares” and “querido oficial.” The effect of this disagreement between Manuela’s female sex
and the masculine modifiers used to represent her is an emphasis on the transgressive nature of
her occupation of these posts, much like the transgressions that Boussingault represents in his
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depiction of the moustached Colonel Sáenz. While not the first woman to be named an official in
the Colombian army,36 she was certainly one of the very few exceptions and not the rule. In light
of this, note the way that Bolívar physically locates Sáenz away from the front lines: first, she is
rewarded for her strategic contributions made “desde su columna” (which at the time had not yet
arrived at the plains of Junín; Sáenz did not arrive there until August 9); and second, as part of
her official duties as Captain of Hussars, Bolívar assigns to her the supervision of the hospitals,
where she will be, again, away from the front lines and among the other women who contributed
to the war by caring for the wounded and burying the dead (Socolow 176). In short, while
Bolívar concedes to Sáenz the conceptual space of the title of Captain of Hussars, he maintains
his position that a woman’s place is not on the front lines.
From Bolívar’s subsequent letters, we get a sense that Sáenz challenged his attempts to
keep her out of armed conflict. In a “confidential” letter from Andahuaylas, dated September 26,
1824, Bolívar gives Sáenz a series of orders, finding it necessary that he insist on her remaining
passive in the conflict. Here he clearly positions Sáenz into the feminine role of “helpmate” and
“nurturer”: “Tú serás muy útil al lado de Héctor, pero es una recomendación para ti, y una orden
de tu general en jefe, de que te quedes pasiva ante el encuentro con el enemigo. Tu misión será la
de ‘atenderme’, entrando y saliendo de la tienda del Estado Mayor y llevando viandas de agua
para ‘refrescarme’” (Letter to Manuela Sáenz, 26 Sept. 1824). Her participation will not be
realized through a sword (a masculine object) on the battlefield (a masculine space), but rather
through the water jug in Bolívar’s tent (a feminine object in the most domestic space there is on
the battlefront). Perhaps this is more the result of Bolívar’s affections than of his gender politics;
after all, he concludes the letter “No desoigas mis consideraciones y mi preocupación por tu
humanidad. ¡Te quiero viva! Muerta yo muero.”
Evidently Sáenz did not respect his wishes. On December 10 of that same year, General
Antonio José de Sucre wrote to the Liberator to request that Sáenz be promoted to colonel in
recognition of her corageous participation in the Battle of Ayacucho the day before: “Se ha
destacado Doña Manuela Sáenz por su valentía; incorporándose desde el primer momento a la
división de Húsares y luego a la de Vencedores, organizando y proporcionando al
avituallamiento de las tropas, atendiendo a los soldados heridos, batiéndose a tiro limpio bajo los
fuegos enemigos; rescatando a los heridos” (Letter to Simón Bolívar, 10 Dec. 1824).
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Bolívar responds to Sucre’s epistle with surprise at Sáenz’s “audacity” at disobeying his orders
to “remain on the sidelines of any perilous enemy encounter.” Nonetheless, he acknowledges her
contribution to the patria, “‘como ejemplo soberbio de la belleza, imponiéndose majestuosa
sobre los Andes’37 ” (Letter to Manuela Sáenz, 10 Dec. 1824) and names her Colonel of the
Colombian Army. By evoking her physical beauty, he reaffirms her feminine body space and
echoes the speech he gave to the liberators of Trujillo province, in which he denounced the
monstrous enemy tigers for attacking “the innocent feminine breasts of our beauties” (qtd. in
Cherpak 222-23). Regardless, later that evening, at the banquet given in celebration of the
victory, Colonel Sáenz would take her seat to Bolívar’s left at the head table (Cacua Prada 96).
While Sáenz’s role as Bolívar’s lover factored into the way he represented her military
activity, her role as colonel also entered into his interaction with her as her lover. On one
particular occasion in September, 1825, in an attempt to assuage his lover, who had become
infuriated by rumors of his infidelity, Bolívar concludes one particularly passionate letter from
La Paz with an allusion to their love relationship in military terminology. His play on words
appeals to Sáenz’s sense of pride at her role in the revolution and therefore has the effect of
validating her transgressions of this gendered space, as it superimposes the conceptual space of
the military (the discourse of titles, orders, and battles) onto the symbolic space of their love
affair: “Contéstame […] ¡Hazlo en favor de una orden expresa de tu más fino adversario en los
campos del amor! Si no, atiende al próximo ‘Consejillo de guerrera.’ Por indisciplina e
insubordinación, al faltar acatamiento a una orden superior. Para la más bella y adorada de mis
oficiales, Manuela la quisquillosa” (Letter to Manuela Sáenz, 29 Sept. 1823). This extended
military metaphor creates in their correspondence a discursive space in which Manuela plays
both feminine and masculine roles, as she does in the practical space of the “battlefield” (broadly
conceived as the arena of revolutionary activity). This discursive space is a symbolically
negotiated space that validates Manuela’s activity in masculine practical space, and in validating
this transgression it represents her as a coherent subject in spite of her ambiguous gender
identity.
Though he acknowledges her contributions to the cause and tries to appease her, Bolívar
never fully accepts Sáenz into the close-knit, homosocial relationships at the core of political
decision making: the “republican friendships,” to borrow a term from Chambers (2001). The
historian points to the crucial role played by “friendship” based on loyalty, mutual favors, and
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freedom from clientage in the political alliances forged (and betrayed) during the emergence of
the new republics (“Republican Friendship” 245). As an example of how this notion of
“republican friendship” was manifested in discourse, and how it excluded women, like Sáenz,
from the central sites of decision-making, I look to a letter that Bolívar sent to General José
María Córdova, who in August, 1828, spurred by Sáenz’s scandalous staging of General
Francisco de Paula Santander’s execution, expressed to Bolívar his concerns that “la dicha
(Manuelita, la ‘presidenta’) se ingiere en los negocios del gobierno y que se le oye” (qtd. in
Cacua Prada 192). Invoking the pathos of this republican friendship, he assures the Liberator—
then President of Gran Colombia—that he was only looking out for his (Bolívar’s) best interest.
Bolívar’s response to Córdova affirms this homosocial relationship—this republican
friendship—as a space that is off-limits to his “consort”: “En cuanto a la amable Loca. ¿Qué
quiere V. que lo le diga a V.?” he asks. Bolívar insists that he’s tried to separate himself from
her, but that she is simply too resistant to the idea. Though he plans to send her back to Ecuador,
he makes clear to Córdova that “[...] no se ha metido nunca sino en rogar, más no ha sido oída
sino en el asunto del C. Alvarado, cuya historia no me daba confianza en su fidelidad.” Having
established that Manuela was positioned outside of these inner circles, and having proposed to
remove her physically by sending her back to Ecuador, Bolívar reaffirms the closed space of his
republican friendship with Córdova by addressing him as “mi querido Córdova,” by
acknowlegding his apparent loyalty: “[...] debo agradecer el aviso que mucho debe haber costado
V. dármelo,” and by signing the letter “Soy de V. afmo. amigo y de corazón, Bolívar” (Letter to
José María Córdova, Aug. 1828).
Conclusions: Manuela Responds
Sáenz was fully cognizant of her exclusion from both the inner circle of Bolívar’s direct
council and from the republican friendships that surrounded him. In the next chapter, I look
again to Chambers’s analysis of how Sáenz “wrote herself” into the discursive space of
friendship with General Juan José Flores, Bolívar’s follower and successor as president of
Ecuador. With tones of desperation and frustration she often pointed to these limitations to her
political involvement: “Horror de los horrores,” she writes to Bolívar during the same month as
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his correspondence with Córdova, “usted no me escucha; piensa que sólo soy mujer” (Letter to
Simón Bolívar, 7 Aug. 1828).
Sáenz was fully aware of Bolívar’s disapproval of her transgressions in general. Her
reflections provide a perspective on how the Liberator represented these transgressions to her.
On Christmas Day, 1830, shortly after Simón’s death, Manuela records in her diary her
recollections of how he would reprimand her and of how this would frustrate her. She writes,
[…C]itaba […] a Demóstenes: ‘Una mujer desbarata en un día lo que un hombre
construye en un año,’ referiéndose mi Simón a lo del acontecimiento del castillo,38 que
con tanta gana hice en Bogotá. El no omitía ninguna frase de estos pensamientos, y sus
consejos—muy a pesar de mi entereza de carácter. […Siempre citaba] a Cervantes: ‘La
mujer ha de ser buena, y parecerlo, que es más,’ recriminándome mi conducta con
Santander. (“Diario de Paita” 32)
Bolívar’s admonishments reinforce the gender stereotypes that categorize unruly women as
destructive, volatile and disorderly. Reproaching her public outspokenness against Santander
(whose figure she had ordered shot in effigy), he attempts to confine Manuela’s passion and
locura to the private space of their affair, in the context of which he often referred to her as “mi
amable loca.”39 In his efforts to discipline her with these notions of what a woman should be,
Bolívar not only relegates Sáenz to the realm of the disorderly, the volatile, and the destructive,
but consequently he also excludes her from politics (ideally the realm of the “rational” and the
“orderly”) and, as we have seen, a space formed around friendships among men.
Recalling Bolívar’s diatribes moves Sáenz to reread Cervantes’ Don Quijote de la
Mancha and to draw a comparison between the idealistic “knight” and the Liberator (“Diario de
Paita” 32), an implication of foolishness that invalidates Bolívar as a reliable subject and
consequently discredits his reproach of her transgressive behavior. By discrediting Bolívar’s
reproaches, Sáenz rejects their prescriptions for feminine passivity, modesty, and confinement,
and, by implication, suggests that her transgressive mobility into masculine spheres did not
warrant reprimand. Here, she does not problematize her femininity so much as she takes issue
with the passivity and confinement that characterize the feminine spaces to which she is
assigned.
In summary, a common theme of the nineteenth-century representations of Manuela
Sáenz studied in this chapter—namely those of Jean Baptiste Boussingault, Ricardo Palma, and
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Simón Bolívar—is the irreconcilability of the ambivalently gendered aspects of Sáenz’s
appearance, activities, and personality within a heteropatriarchal socio-cultural context. In such a
context, one’s gender is understood as an innate quality based in biological sex and culturally
manifested in binaries, according to which the feminine is subordinate. In such a system, women
are relegated to the private realm of the home, are systematically excluded from politics, and—of
key importance in Sáenz’s case—have limited mobility.
In the next chapter, I examine what happens to Sáenz’s representations of her own gender
when she mobilizes herself by embracing certain notions of liberty that she identifies with the
newly independent geopolitical space of “America” and the emerging constitutionality of that
space. In the social and political apertures presented by the revolution, at a time when necessity
led to the military mobilization of women, Sáenz embraces the notion of “mobility”—a notion
underpinned by liberty—by asserting herself in both masculine and feminine spheres of activity.
For her, the lived space of her personal and political relationship with the Liberator provides an
arena for this mobilization; in her correspondence with Bolívar we see how she repeatedly
transgenders herself through constant negotiation of the limits to her involvement in the
revolution. Because it is rooted in Sáenz’s identity as a citizen of this liberated American
continent, her dynamic and unfixed self-gendering is not the mark of a “freak” or “perverse”
identity,—as Palma and Boussingault suggest; rather, it is the mark of a coherent and highly
complex subject who undermines the fixity of gender binaries and stereotypes.
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CHAPTER THREE
‘PATRIOTA Y AMANTE DE USTED’: MANUELA SÁENZ IN HER
LETTERS AND DIARIES
Yo le dí a ese Ejército lo que necesitó: ¡valor a toda
prueba! y Simón igual. El hacía más por superarme.
Yo no parecía mujer. Era una loca por la Libertad
[...]. (Manuela Sáenz, “Diario de Paita” 44)
“[…Y]o sé que ninguna mujer sobre la faz de la
tierra podría hacerle feliz como yo. […] Por su
amor seré su esclava si el término amerita, su
querida, su amante; lo amo, lo adoro, pues es usted
el ser que me hizo despertar mis virtudes como
mujer. Se lo debo todo, amén de que soy patriota.”
(Sáenz, Letter to Simón Bolívar, 5 May 1825)
Historically represented as the devoted heroine, as voluptuous lover, as “Amazon,” as
“woman-man” and as crazy subversive, and fondly remembered as both “Manuelita” and “La
Libertadora del Libertador,” Manuela Sáenz has been characterized by an ambiguous gender
identity that pervades even her own writings. In this chapter, I examine the ways in which
Manuela genders herself in her personal diaries and in her letters to Simón Bolívar, General Juan
José Flores, Secretary of the Interior José Miguel González Alminati, and her estranged husband
Dr. James Thorne. I find that Sáenz’s dynamic self-gendering, which emerges in response to how
others gender her, exemplifies her skill at manipulating personal relationships. By reclaiming
traditional feminine spaces within these relationships, Manuela gains access to masculine
political space and a sense of freedom from the social space prescribed to her as a married criolla
in the patriarchal society of nineteenth-century Quito. In spite of the apparent contradictions and
fragmentation that mark both her self-representations and other’s representations of her,
Manuela, over the course of her writings, constructs herself as a coherent subject, whose agency
lies in the very transitivity of her gender identity.
Reading Sáenz’s texts in terms of space helps us to see how she demonstrates this
transitivity on several levels and how she establishes herself as a coherent subject in spite of her
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movement in both masculine and feminine spheres of activity. Keeping in mind what Doreen
Massey points out in her discussion of identity and place—that “In the pair space/place it is place
which represents Being” (9)—we can see how Sáenz’s gender identity—her “place” in society—
emerges out of her interaction with the social spaces around her. Applying Lefèbvre’s triad of
social space, we can see how Manuela relates the perceived space of her female body to other
bodies, objects, and individuals, positioning and experiencing it as a relative and dynamic site
within social space. Resulting in what we can call Manuela’s “gender,” this positioning emerges
out of the dialogue between the perceived, conceived, and lived spaces of her experience (what
Lefèbvre calls the triad of social space). Her perceived spaces are constituted by the material
objects and spaces of her daily practices, including her body, her homes and domestic objects,
the hacienda and garden, the treacherous trek on the military campaign, the battlefield, and her
military uniform. The conceived spaces of her experience are delineated by society’s designs on
space, how her society maps out and classifies the world, creating names and categories such as
marriage, honor, femininity, craziness and subversiveness and titles such as Captain of Hussars
and Colonel. Manuela’s transgressions of these prescribed and gendered spaces are facilitated by
the distinction between private and public life and the ambiguity created between the two
through both her illicit affair with Bolívar and the arena of revolution in which she lived. The
third apex of this triad of social space is lived (“experienced”) space, in which the subject’s
experience is created by her symbolic use of the perceived and conceived spaces around her.
How does Manuela make sense of the objects and people of her daily experience? How does she
internalize her interaction with them in a way that gives meaning to her experience, articulating
her gender identity through the use of metaphors and other reflections on her actions?
In this chapter, I focus on four sites at which Manuela negotiates her gender identity. The
first is her sexed body. In what concrete ways does Manuela textualize her female, heterosexual
sexed body? How do her self-representations as a sensual, corporeal subject limit her spatial
experiences to prescribed feminine spaces, and/or how do they facilitate her transgressions of
them? The second site is closely related to Manuela’s experience of her sexed body and is
characterized by her appropriation of the domestic space of marital (or pseudomarital) relations.
How does Manuela simultaneously reject the domestic space prescribed to her as the criolla wife
of James Thorne and assume the domestic space open to her as the lover of Simón Bolívar? How
does Manuela appropriate traditionally feminine domestic arts and duties in order to access
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masculine political, military and public spaces? The third site I will examine is the campaign for
Latin American independence. How is Manuela’s experience of this political and military space
(which is predominantly masculine) shaped by her manipulation of personal relationships? In a
way that contributes to her coherence as a gendered subject, how does she assert her
ambiguously gendered spirit over her female body as a way to make a place for herself in a
sphere that is so decisively masculine? Finally, I look closely at the diaries and letters that
Manuela writes from her exile in Paita, highlighting the ways in which she responds to
characterizations of her as a “crazy” woman, set on inciting uprisings. Employing a
constitutional discourse to position herself within the (ideally) ungendered space of citizenship,
how and why does this notoriously brazen woman, this self-proclaimed “loca por la libertad”
(“Diario de Paita” 44) subvert her gendered positioning in the space of chaos, disorder, and
insanity? In my concluding thoughts, I emphasize the ways in which Manuela establishes for
herself a coherent gender identity, in spite of her movement within both masculine and feminine
spaces.
Reclaiming Feminine Corporeality
Manuela’s love letters and diaries provide a textual arena in which she as a subject
genders herself through representations of her sensuality, corporeality, and passive-aggressive
positioning as female lover. In her representation of her body space, which she at times positions
in the garden and home, Manuela transforms what might typically be perceived as sites of
passivity and of female heterosexuality into sites of agency. In a diary entry she wrote from the
hacienda El Garzal,1 where she was staying as the guest of one of Bolívar’s personal friends, she
affirms her integral complexity as a subject. This complexity stands in contrast to other
representations of Sáenz, such as those of Ricardo Palma and Jean Baptiste Boussingault, whose
characterizations of Sáenz fall closely along the lines of the masculine/feminine dichotomy in
which beautiful women are the passive object of the masculine gaze. Situating herself
somewhere between this feminine site of passivity and a masculine site of agency, Sáenz writes
in a journal entry from 1822, “El éxito de una mujer está en su gracia y en su ingenio, a más de
su belleza que atrae como el almíbar de las flores a los pajarillos que se deleitan con su néctar”
(“Diario de Quito” 24). With this characteristically romantic metaphor, Manuela represents
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herself as a beautiful flower, with its dual passivity (it lies in wait of the approaching birds and
bees) and agency (it produces the nectar that will surely seduce them and draw them near). To
successfully obtain the object of her desire, a woman must not only attract him passiveaggressively with her nectar, but also keep him with her charms (gracia) and cleverness
(ingenio). While not downplaying but rather celebrating her physical beauty as a woman,
Manuela points to the integral complexity of herself as a female subject who employs her charms
and cleverness in order to stealthily conquer the object of her desire. Furthermore, as this
metaphor is based on the assumption that the female subject not only desires but also acts upon
that desire, it claims a certain agency that is absent in many neoclassical and romanticist
representations of the two-dimensional feminine beauty. This passage brings to mind
Boussingault’s description of a very feminized Manuela, elegantly dressed and adorned with
flowers, acting as hostess to the group that had gone on the expedition to Tequendama Falls
(112).
The image of women waiting passively among the flowers of the garden was a theme of
the lecture given by John Ruskin in the Manchester Town Hall (England) in 1864. Feminist
geographer Gillian Rose refers to this lecture, titled “Of Queens’ Gardens,” as “one of the central
manifestations of Victorian sexual politics,” in which Ruskin established the home as the
woman’s domain due to the fact that she was “passive, self-effacing, pious and graceful” and
man was “the doer, the creator, the discoverer” (Rose 17). Rose explains the flower metaphor
often used to represent women in the nineteenth century; she explains that it was woman’s
“natural perfection” that inspired Ruskin to describe them as flowers:
[...] his metaphor of the garden indicates both the supposed naturalness of
women’s spiritual beauty and the boundaries to their existance. For Ruskin,
wherever woman was became a home, a space endowed with special qualities, a
haven of tranquility and love: although she was to be ruled by her lord, she could
be his conscience and moral guide and so influence his actions in the wider world.
(18)
Manuela’s appropriation of this metaphor reveals a sense of agency not present in Boussingault’s
or Ruskin’s descriptions; she consciously uses her feminine beauty and position in the garden
refuge in order to lure men toward her.
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Though it is her strong character that would eventually secure for her Bolívar’s favor and
affections,2 Manuela aptly utilizes her body, characterized by its “belleza no muy clásica”
(Boussingault 113), as a site of agency. From this site she initiates through seduction the
relationship that will gain her both vicarious and real access to (masculine) political space.
Reflecting upon her strategy, Sáenz explains, “Pienso que una mujer no solo [sic] debe trastornar
a un hombre con su belleza, sino dedicarle toda su atención, en vista de tal vez una intuición más
fina, que procura ver todo con la realidad de los aconteceres, y el tino de poder seducir con
mejores armas al enemigo, con solo un guiño” (“Diario de Quito” 23). We will later see how
Manuela uses the female intuition mentioned in this passage in order to secure her position in
Bolívar’s intimate circle.
Since social space is neither constructed nor experienced in isolation but rather in
negotiation with other social entities, it is interesting to see how Manuela responds to others’
representations of her. In her diary entry from June 19, 1822, she recalls the first time she met
Simón Bolívar: “S.E. Bolívar no paraba de hablarme y lisonjearme presentándome a sus
generales, advirtiéndoles de antemano que yo estaba con él y con la causa” (“Diario de Quito”
20). Here Sáenz describes Bolívar’s response to the “almíbar” of her beauty, noting how the
physical space of her body has gained her access to a coveted social circle. In other words, by
celebrating her feminine body space, Sáenz gains access to masculine social space. It is her
position within this circle that provides Sáenz with a sense of agency and direct personal
involvement in the revolution. She demonstrates her ambitions toward such a position and
recognizes the fact that her success in obtaining it hinged on her being accepted (or desired, in
Bolívar’s case) by male military authorities. This ambition and awareness are reflected in a prior
journal entry, dated May 25, 1822:
He conocido a casi todos los oficiales del Ejército Libertador, yéndome a su cuartel
general, a fin de hacerme reconocida de esos cuerpos militares, pues me gusta mucho la
causa. ¡Creo que nací con vena para la gloria! Aunque mi padre se opone, y mi marido,
a que ande en roce con el ejército. No me queda más que hacer mi voluntad, que es más
fuerte que yo. (“Diario de Quito” 12)
Here, in an ironic act of subversion, Manuela uses her female body space as a point of access to
military activity and a site of resistance against the wishes of her father and husband, who
represent patriarchal society and its anxiety over the mobilization of women.3 Rebecca Earle
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points out that anxiety over the increased mobilization of women during the wars for
independence was manifested in two particular kinds of representations: those of women’s
bodies as the passive victims of rape, and representations of their participation in the
independence movement as merely symbolic (134-38). Manuela, on the other hand, insists on
being physically active in the movement: “que ande en roce con el ejército.” By writing this
passage, Manuela affirms her active participation in the military campaign and thus transgresses
hegemonic feminine social space.
Manuela’s self-representation as a sensual, corporeal subject is a textual construction that
in the written space of her diaries affirms the flirtatious social interactions that she experiences
with her body. By infusing her love letters with her female sensuality, she actively persuades her
lover to return to her, a subtle yet real manifestation of her passive-aggressive agency. In other
words, because of her reclaiming of the feminine virtues of passivity, beauty and sensuality, their
love affair becomes an arena in which she forges a sense of agency.
Moreover, by infusing the textual experience of this affair (the symbolically lived space
of their correspondence) with the very palpable desires of her sexed, female body, she constructs
herself as a three-dimensional, corporeal subject, who is not only the object of desire, but who
also desires another. As she locates herself within the gardens of El Garzal, she infuses her
description of the house and grounds with a sensuality that flows from her own sensuality, from
the practical experience of her own sexed body:
Este ambiente, con su aire cálido y delicioso, trae la emoción vibrante de olor del
guarapo que llega fresco del trapiche, y me hace experimentar mil sensaciones
almibaradas. […] Los prados, la huerta y el jardín que está por todas partes,
serviranle de inspiración fulgurante a su amor de usted, por estar S. E. dedicado
casi exclusivamente a la guerra. […En la casa] los dormitorios reverentes al
descanso, como que ruegan por saturarse de amor. […] Los bajíos a las riberas del
Garzal hacen un coloquio para desnudar los cuerpos mojados sumergidos en un
baño venusiano, acompañado del susurro de los guaduales próximos y del canto
de pericos y loros espantados por su propio nerviosismo. Le digo yo que ansío de
la presencia de usted aquí. (Letter to Simón Bolívar, 27 July 1822)
Note the analogy between the nervous chirp of the birds in the garden and the peaked anxiety
expressed by this lover in waiting. As would the romanticists of the next generation, Manuela
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makes the interior space of her own sensuality intelligible to her reader by evoking the sights,
sounds, smells, and textures of nature as a metaphor. She is a flower among the flowers, a
fragrant aroma among the sweet smells of the garden’s “delicious air,” the reverent yet
passionate lover positioned in the bedroom that “cries out to be filled with love.” Here Sáenz
reclaims the garden and home not only as material spaces, rejuvenating havens where she will
wait passively (as women were expected to do) for her male lover to return to her, but also as
symbolic spaces; by embracing the home front, Sáenz textualizes herself as the loyal female
companion who waits patiently for her man to return. Her agency lies in the knowledge that to
have such a position in the life of the Libertador was to have access to the mobile, active male
space outside the gardens. By embracing passivity and immobility, then, Manuela gains access to
mobility.
Harbor and Refuge: Reclaiming Domestic and Marital Spaces
From the very beginning of their relationship, at a dance celebrating the Liberator’s
triumphant entrance into Quito, Manuela makes note of the way in which Bolívar’s response to
her affects her social positioning. For example, she recalls the public address in which he
insinuates the possibility of leaving an heir in Quito, and the fellow guests assume it will be with
her. She notes how this made her blush, considering her “condición civil” (her marriage to
Thorne) (“Diario de Quito” 21), which of course was public knowledge. Noting immediate
changes in the public’s reception of her, Manuela writes, “A partir de ese momento, todos sus
generales se dirigían a mí con profunda admiración y respeto, que no dejaba de incomodarme,
puesto que quería tener también de ellos su confianza” (“Diario de Quito” 21). At this point,
Manuela is testing the boundaries of her transgression, the limits of this illicit yet very public
love affair that will become for her the social space that allows her to access masculine spaces of
activity and influence by reclaiming physical and mental sites of traditional feminine
positionality.
Manuela’s manipulation of prescribed feminine space takes the form of loyal female
“friendship.” I use this term “friendship” in a broad sense, understanding it to be that symbiotic
relationship described by Chambers in “Republican Friendship: Manuela Sáenz Writes Women
into the Nation, 1835-1856.”4 Chambers describes friendship as an ambivalent relationship
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partially shaped by traditional customs of patronage yet “officially” defined by the Royal
Spanish Academy in 1852 as “‘reciprocal affection among two or more persons, based upon
good treatment and honest interchange’” (11). What Chambers identifies as “republican
friendship” is the same homosocial5 relationship that Mary Louise Pratt calls “el amor fraterno,”
that fraternal solidarity that formed the basis of the notion of citizenship as it was conceptualized
in the discourse of the emerging republics (Pratt 264). In her study of the fraternal social
contract, Carole Pateman explains, “[...] nineteenth and twentieth-century liberalism [...] relies
heavily on fraternity as a crucial bond integrating individual and community.” She also explains
that the transition into the modern political era saw a shift from a paternal form of patriarchy to a
“new specifically modern (or fraternal) form: patriarchal civil society” (35). I argue that in her
letters and journal entries to and about Bolívar, Manuela creates what Chambers (in reference to
Manuela’s letters to General Juan José Flores) identifies as this “discourse of friendship.” I find
that in order to assert herself in this kind of “fraternal” relationship—from which women were
systematically excluded6—Sáenz emphasizes the virtues of loyalty and solidarity associated with
this friendship with the nurturing aspects of traditionally feminine domesticity. In this way, she
creates a new kind of relationship in which, by repositioning herself within traditional sites of
femininity—her female body, the home, the handkerchiefs she embroiders, and the food she
prepares—Sáenz secures access to the masculine space of politics. This said, it is important to
keep in mind that discourse (in this case a discourse of friendship) is constituted by language,
which, as Lefèbvre points out, is inherently connected to space in that it is the medium by which
we “[bring] order to the qualitative chaos (the practico-sensory realm) presented by the
perception of things” (17). Keeping in mind this relationship between discourse and space, we
will now look at the perceived (practico-sensory) and conceived (conceptual) spaces that gave
form to Manuela’s discourse of domestic/republican friendship, which in turn shaped her
experience of social space.
Describing Manuela’s relationship with Bolívar as a friendship is clearly an
understatement. Regardless of any political or military contributions she made, Manuela has
been primarily remembered as Simón Bolívar’s most devoted lover. But the sexual affair that the
two shared was contextualized within a deeply emotional and intellectual friendship. In this way
the sexual affair became for Manuela a site of subversion. Refusing to limit her female body to
the feminine spaces prescribed by the patriarchal triad of Church, Father, and State, Manuela
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reclaimed her body in the illicit affair, using it to solidify a relationship that freed her from the
marriage norms of patriarchal society and gave her access to customarily masculine spheres of
influence, namely politics and warfare. I am not suggesting that Manuela simply prostituted
herself to gain access to political space; her letters are a very convincing testimony to the real
love and devotion that she felt for Simón.7 But I am paying particular attention to the ways in
which, within the context of that relationship, she represents the physical space of her body in a
way that transforms it into a site of subversion.
The negotiation of gender as a social space is just that: a negotiation. As a positioning
that implies a power differential, gender is not constructed or experienced in isolation, but rather
in relation to another gendered space or being. As one member of this relationship, Manuela
constantly (though not necessarily consciously) rethinks her gender identity in response to the
needs, desires, and responses of her partner. As we saw in the previous chapter, Bolívar
represents Sáenz in a variety of ways and in a variety of spaces: as “nymph” and “Diana” in the
garden, as a woman who did not belong in the perilous sites of battle, and yet as a captain and
later colonel among the ranking officials of the Colombian army. In the textual arena of her love
letters to Bolívar, then, Sáenz must constantly reposition herself within feminine and masculine
spheres of activity as she negotiates her gender identity.
Though she represents her body space as thoroughly feminine and highly sensual, this
feminization does not exclude her from the masculine space of the fight for independence. On
the contrary, by refusing to distinguish between Simón her lover and Bolívar the Liberator,
Sáenz experiences the love affair as both an amorous and a political union, making her part in the
(heterosexual) relationship an important contribution to the political struggle they share. A
dynamic not uncommon for women during the Age of Revolution, personal intimacy (often
marriage) became a venue for women to express their political views to and through their
husbands and thus served as a liminal space between the very public, masculine sphere of
politics and the private domestic sphere, in which women played the role of nurturer, helpmate,
and advisor. Evidence of this gendered social dynamic can be found in Ecuadorian president
Vicente Rocafuerte’s correspondences with General Juan José Flores. In several of these letters,
Rocafuerte maintains his position that Sáenz poses a threat to public order, and that it was
imperative that she be exiled. In the following letter written in October, 1835, Rocafuerte alludes
to the nature of women’s participation in the revolution: “[…] las señoras principales son
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enemigas declaradas de todo orden y […] tienen tanto influjo sobre las almas débiles de sus
hermanos, maridos y parientes; al ver que aún existen todos los elementos de la pasada
revolución; […] sólo necesitan una mano que sepa combinarlos para darles nueva acción […]”
(Letter to Juan José Flores, 14 Oct. 1835). Rocafuerte’s comments describe a socio-political
dynamic in which women did enjoy certain influence, but in which that influence was exerted in
the private sphere of the home and family and relied on male agency in order to realize
substantial public change.
Manuela’s letters to Bolívar reflect her sensitivity to this dynamic. Consequently, when
Bolívar fails to heed her warnings about the pending treason by Santander and other officials, she
expresses her deep frustration, pointing to her sex as the reason she is being dismissed: “Horror
de los horrores, usted no me escucha; piensa que sólo soy mujer.” And so she immediately turns
the argument around by reclaiming her womanhood as a positive attribute: “Pues sepa usted que
sí, además de mis celos, mi patriotismo y mi grande amor por usted, está la vigilia que guardo
sobre su persona que me es tan grata para mí” (Letter to Simón Bolívar, 7 Aug. 1828). In
recasting her jealousy, love, and passion as positive traits that (instead of discrediting her as a
trustworthy advisor) make her an even more reliable one, Sáenz affirms her feminine
positionality as the nurturer, the loyal caretaker. These roles, which are similar to the “female
friendship” that Chambers sees established in Sáenz’s letters to Flores, make Manuela an
invaluable figure not only in Bolívar’s life, but implicitly in the cause for which they are
fighting, and they represent her attempt at inscribing herself into the homosocial, fraternal
friendship at the foundation of republican citizenship.
Reclaiming and Transforming Domestic Space in Revolutionary Spanish America
If in fact Bolívar stood by the assertion that he made in a letter to his sister María
Antonia—that women should stay out of state affairs and concentrate on their domestic
responsibilities (Letter to María Antonia Bolívar y Palacios, 10 Aug. 1826), then it would have
been necessary for Manuela to temper her self-assertion into political matters with
reappropriations of hegemonic femininity. One way in which Manuela asserts this feminity is by
positioning herself within the physical space of the home—first the household she kept as the
wife of James Thorne and later the hacienda El Garzal and Bolívar’s quinta, where she created a
refuge for her lover, acting at times as surrogate wife. The objects that fill these practical
spaces—the food she prepares, the handkerchiefs she sews, and the sheets in which she makes
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love to Bolívar, not to mention the gardens, which we have already discussed—all appear
represented in the lived space of her diaries and letters. In her treatment of these objects, this
feisty, ambitious woman at times embraces and at other times rejects the domestic spaces
prescribed to married women of her time.
There is a difference between Manuela’s representation of her experience as a matrona (a
term referring to her position as a married woman in charge of a household) and her selfrepresentation as a kind of surrogate wife to Bolívar. Writing to her lover from her marital home,
she confesses: “[…S]ólo la sombra de usted, mi glorioso Libertador, es la que me cubre en el
absurdo de mi convivencia en este hogar que aborrezco con todo mi corazón. […G]uardo su
imagen constante como aliciente de este desatinado matrimonio que lejos de enriquecerme me
envilece, por el desagrado con el que atiendo las cosas de la casa como matrona” (Letter to
Simón Bolívar, 18 May 1825). Manuela’s rejection of her role as matrona in the home she
shared with Thorne in Lima is not a rejection of domestic space but rather a rejection of her
husband. In subsequent letters to Bolívar she reclaims the feminine domestic roles of nurturer,
“warmer of the hearth,” so to speak, and refuge, sending along with those letters the food that she
has prepared for him, the handkerchiefs she has embroidered, and the clothes she has purchased.
In this May 18, 1825 passage, Manuela represents herself as the abandoned lover who
waits in the trappings of her own life for Bolívar to return and free her from them. As matrona
she is confined to the physical, legal, and social spaces of her marriage. But as Bolívar’s lover,
she releases herself from the bonds of her marriage and experiences the female position in this
love affair as her role in a liberating spiritual union commited to the cause of freedom (both
political and, in her perspective, personal). It is important to keep in mind that, unlike widowed
and unmarried, legally emancipated adult women, who had legal rights to enter into contract and
own property, married women were legally subject to their husbands (Dore 12). By denouncing
the notions of honor that morally, socially, and legally oblige her to her husband, Manuela steps
outside of the social space of her marriage, scandalously rejecting the patriarchal triad of Church,
Father, and State.
Whether or not Latin American women at large viewed the revolution as an opportunity
for personal liberation (which most likely they did not8), for Sáenz, it was, indeed, a matter of
personal freedom. This connection between the personal and the political took place within the
social space of her love affair with Simón Bolívar. Sáenz justifies her actions and their affair by a
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romantic appeal to the primacy of an individual’s emotions9 and personal freedom, notions that
were derived from growing discourses on liberty, personal happiness,10 and independence and
that transformed the relationship into a site of resistance. As she pointedly writes in a farewell
letter to her estranged husband (who persists in trying to reconcile with her),
¿Y V. cree que yo después de ser la querida de este señor por 1 año y con la seguridad de
poseer su corazón prefiriese ser la mujer del padre, yjo o espíritu santo? ¡e! ni la
santísima Trinidad? [...] Yo se mui bien que nada puede unirme ha él bajo los auspicios
de lo que V. llama onor. ¿y me cree V. menos honrrada por ser mi amante y no mi
marido? ¡A! yo no vivo de las preocupaciones sociales, ymbentadas para atormentarse
mutuamente. (Letter to James Thorne, Oct. 1823)11
As a homosocial and economic arrangement between her father and husband, her marriage to
Thorne had silenced (or in her case “muffled”) her as a subject. In rejecting her husband, she also
rebels against her father, the State, the Church, and the prescribed social space into which she
had been positioned by these three apexes of patriarchal social order. It is noteworthy that
Thorne was opposed to Sáenz’s participation in the revolution, but when he was away from Lima
(usually on a ship from his commercial fleet), she played an active role in patriotic circles,
raising funds, supplying the troops with provisions, nursing the wounded and even opening up
her home for use as a hospital (Von Hagen 34). In casting off her role as James’s wife, then, she
was not only rejecting a personal (emotional and physical) union with him, but also the
obligation to align herself with him politically. Her marriage was a prescribed social space that
would have positioned her as the faithful, tempered wife of a loyal colonial subject. In rejecting
it, as she so clearly articulates in her diatribe on honor, she rejects the entire patriarchal triad of
Church (her moral obligation to her husband), Father (who had arranged the union in the first
place12), and State (who sanctioned the marriage and enjoyed the loyalty of her husband). And
she legitimizes this self-liberation through revolutionary notions of personal freedom that find
their way into her discourse. She reclaims her voice, and with this voice, which she exercises in
her love letters and journals, she symbolically experiences her love affair in a way that justifies
her transgression of marital laws by problematizing the very notion of honor that had obligated
her to them.
Theirs was a love affair that, rather than occupy some publicly sanctioned space within
this social framework, existed in some private space apart. The parameters of their relationship,
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rather than being delineated by financial arrangements or religious law, were negotiated by the
two lovers according to their own desires, needs, and expectations. In this sense, the two found a
space for their affair within the historical and geographic space of Revolutionary Spanish
America. As Manuela writes to Bolívar in a letter dated May 1, 1825, “Usted, mi señor, lo
pregona a cuatro vientos: ‘El mundo cambia, la Europa se transforma, América
también’…¡Nosotros estamos en América! Todas estas circunstancias cambian también. […Y]o
soy una mujer decente ante el honor de saberme patriota y amante de usted” (Letter to Simón
Bolívar, 1 May 1825).13 As I will explore in the next section of this chapter, the mobilization of
women during the revolution created certain apertures in social space, encouraging some women
to test the boundaries of this space in flux. Manuela Sáenz did just that, not only through her
public demonstrations and military involvement, but also in her rejection of traditional notions of
honor in favor of obedience to her own desires and sentiments (a truly romantic notion).14
Though she remains legally bound by her marriage vows, Manuela positions herself
alongside Bolívar in such a way that some treat her as if she were his wife. Her experience in this
negotiated social space as Bolívar’s surrogate wife positively affirms Manuela’s transgression of
normative space. As Manuela demonstrates in her letter to James (above), her experience of this
space reshapes her notions of honor in a way that frees her from the notions held by her
patriarchal society. And as Bolívar explains in a letter to his sister, who was concerned about the
gossip that had spread about the couple, “[...] te diré que esta señora no empaña mis virtudes;
pues lejos de toda pretensión mis Generales la respetan como si fuera mi esposa, y en los círculos
sociales su presencia hace con su señorío el respeto que merecemos” (Letter to María Antonia
Bolívar y Palacios, 9 Jan. 1823). In spite of social norms that prescribed for her other spaces,
Manuela began to experience the lived space of a pseudomarital relationship with Simón.15
What are the contours of the physical space that circumscribes and gives tangibility to
this relationship? Inasmuch as the domestic space of her marital home was the practical
(perceived) space of her unhappy marriage, Sáenz experiences (i.e., textually represents it) as a
suffocating space. As physical experiences related to this space, obligatory feminine household
duties become true chores for Manuela. These same duties, however, are symbolically
experienced in a different way when Manuela represents them within the space of her affair with
Bolívar. Compare Manuela’s representation of domestic life in her husband’s home to her
sensual representation of waiting for Bolívar in the gardens of El Garzal, or this letter that she
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sent him from Lima (where she was living with her husband): “Le envío unos cariñitos y dulces
que le encanta a S.E. Use el pañuelo que le bordé para usted, con mi amor y devoción, así como
la camisa, que es inglesa” (Letter to Simón Bolívar, 28 May 1825). In several of Manuela’s
letters she represents herself as nurturer, referring to her gestures of feeding Bolívar. In January
of 1826, for example, she writes, “En la faltriquera le hice poner unos bocadillos. ¿Los comió
usted? Eran de sorpresa, de lo mucho que lo amo, para que usted piense en mí como yo lo hago
con usted” (Letter to Simón Bolívar, 23 Jan. 1826).
It is interesting to note that as a younger woman she downplays such domestic arts in her
diary, representing herself as different (and implicitly better) than the other women because she
did not spend her time with trivial tasks such as sewing. Describing the social calls paid to her by
other women, she writes, “¿Qué fue de esas visitas de cortesía en mi casa? Nada había en las
mujeres que no fuera hablar, coser cadenetes y bordados de encajes. Yo, mientras tanto, leía”
(“Diario de Paita” 3816)
Another feminine domestic duty that Manuela begins to embrace in the context of her
relationship with Bolívar is that of being hostess. Recalling how in this role she helped the
Liberator build and maintain important alliances, she writes, “Bajo mi consejo, intuición y celo;
se aumentaron las fiestas, la vida social mía. Se acrecentaron las reuniones, para saber descubrir
a los enemigos del gobierno. Como espía, de tanto en tanto caía una buena información, la que
inmediatamente le daba conocimiento de ella a S.E.” (“Diario de Paita” 46). While her recourses
for public action were limited, by inviting the public into the private space of her home, Manuela
created a situation in which she could use her role as hostess to extract information from her
guests. This points to two important aspects of women’s participation in the independence
movement, both of which took advantage of the fact that women were more “anonymous” and
less suspect than their male compatriots. The first is that they hosted in their homes the literary
and political tertulias that became a safe and private space for dissidents and politicians to
discuss radical ideas of independence and revolution (Cherpak 220). The second is that they
served as spies, couriers, and informants (Cherpak 223), in other words, they formed a human
network of politically “anonymous” individuals who passed along valuable information to the
leaders that be. Earle identifies espionage as a way in which many plebian women participated in
the independence movement (129). Sáenz’s own accounts allude to specific instances of this
network at work. For example, in a letter to O’Leary, in which Sáenz recalls the details of the
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famous September 25, 1828 attempt on Bolívar’s life, she describes the anonymous woman who,
under cover of night, came to Bolívar’s home in Bogota to warn him of the conspiracy: “Una
noche estando yo en dicha casa, me llamó una criada mía diciéndome que una señora con suma
precisión me llamaba en la puerta de la calle; salí, dejando al Libertador en cama [...]. Esta
señora [...] me dijo que tenía que hacerme ciertas revelaciones nacidas del afecto al Libertador,
pero que en recompensa exigía que no sonara su nombre” (“Descripción del 25 de setiembre”).
What is notable in Manuela’s account is not only the “underground” network of women
involved in the transfer of this invaluable information—the anonymous woman in the street, the
maid, and Manuela—but also the fact that the woman decided to pass this information through
Manuela as opposed to one of Bolívar’s trusted (male) advisors. This episode further illustrates
the liminality (or in-between nature) of Manuela’s position; she is situated somewhere between
this feminine network of information and Bolívar’s intimate circle. In Chapter Four, I analyze
director Diego Rísquez’s representation of this network and of Sáenz’s movement and
participation within it.
Transgressions into Political and Military Spaces
Sáenz was not the only woman to take up arms in the wars for Latin American
independence. Both Evelyn Cerpak and Rebecca Earle note that some women (often called
“Amazons”) did take up arms against the Spanish but that collective female combat was initiated
by the women themselves, it was often aimed at defending the home front, enlistment of groups
of women was not generally encouraged by the Colombian army, and when women did fight
alongside their male compatriots, they did so dressed as men17 (Cerpak 220-22 and Earle 129).
Otherwise, women accompanying the armies served as nurses and spies, helped supply the
troops with necessary provisions, buried the dead, and were companions to the soldiers they
followed, who were often their husbands or lovers (Socolow 176-77). These camp followers,
usually plebian women, were called juanas or cholas (Cherpak 224). As indicated in a letter
written from Secretary of the Interior González Alminati to General Juan José Flores, women
had been highly instrumental both in the wars for independence and in the subsequent political
struggles: “[...] no fueron mujeres las que promovieron la pasada revolución? ¿las que
emparedaron la ciudad; las que hicieron las balas con que fue derrocado a fusilazos el gobierno;
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las que traen hasta hoy divididas las familias; y las que, no obstante nuestros comunes esfuerzos,
atizan aún la hoguera revolucionaria?” (Letter to Juan José Flores 28 Oct. 1835).
What interests me is the way in which Manuela simultaneously embraces her female
corporality and asserts herself in the masculine sphere of the military campaign. This insistence
upon the sustained femininity of the female body, even when that body dresses in masculine
attire and actively participates in the masculine space of the battlefield, parallels Bolívar’s
reference to the women who fought to free Trujillo province in Venezuela, a reference in which
he calls them “el bello sexo, las delicias del género humano, nuestras amazonas” and
synecdochally represents them as “los cándidos y femeninos pechos de nuestras beldades” (qtd.
in Cherpak 232). By portraying the women as innocent beauties whose blood was spilled by “los
monstruos y tigres de España,” Bolívar’s representation of the women participants in the
revolution illustrates what Earle identifies as a tendency to represent the female body as the
passive, sacrificial victim of imperial violence (134-36). Far from passive, Sáenz was notorious
for her brazen spirit and her habits of dressing like a (male) soldier in public, riding a horse like a
man and handling weapons like one, actions that would motivate others, like Ricardo Palma, to
describe her as a “woman-man” or as having a “masculine temperament” (Palma and Bolívar).
However, without denying her more masculine behaviours, Manuela actually represents herself
as a sort of woman par excellance. Consider her September 23, 1823 letter to Bolívar: “Señor:
Bien sabe usted cómo ninguna otra mujer que usted haya conocido, podrá deleitarlo con el fervor
y mi pasión que me unen a su persona, y estimula mis sentidos. Conozca usted a una verdadera
mujer, leal y sin reservas” (Letter to Simón Bolívar, 23 Sept. 1823).
“Fervor,” “pasión,” “estimula,” “sentidos.” In this passage Manuela experiences an
integral relationship between the intense sexual stimulation of her body space and the equally
intense emotive response she has toward Bolívar, to whom she is loyal “sin reservas.” The
subtext of her message is that it is this very intensity of passions (both physical and emotive) that
make her a true woman. Her notion of womanhood, then, is based both in her perception of
corporal space (which she experiences as the female partner in this heterosexual relationship)
and mental/emotive space (characterized by her fervent loyalty and deep love). One wonders if
this dually corporal and mental notion of womanhood is what Manuela had in mind when she
credited her lover for having “awakened her womanly virtues”: “[…Y]o sé que ninguna mujer
sobre la faz de la tierra podría hacerle feliz como yo. ¿Orgullo? Piense usted que sí, ¡pero es la
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verdad más dichosa! Por su amor seré su esclava si el término amerita, su querida, su amante; lo
amo, lo adoro, pues es usted el ser que me hizo despertar mis virtudes como mujer. Se lo debo
todo, amén de que soy patriota” (Letter to Simón Bolívar, 5 May 1825).
In the lived space of her relationship with Bolívar, this brazen woman, who rides a horse
like a man, fights in battles, and scandalizes society with her audaciousness, attributes the
awakening of her “womanly virtues” to the actions of her male lover. With the notion that she
owes him “everything” (to the point of likening herself to a slave), she represents herself as a
subject whose identity is not internally forged but rather dependent upon another. Yet I maintain
that what gives coherence to her gender identity is the fact that her notion of womanhood is not
based on perscribed notions of femininity as equated with passivity and delicateness, but rather
passion and loyalty.
Loyalty, in fact, is one of the principal “womanly virtues” on which Manuela prides
herself. This thought brings us back to the notion of republican friendship and the importance it
held as the basis of citizenship and as a new social space in the emerging republics. What is
noteworthy is that by definition loyalty requires the presence of another subject. A subject is
loyal toward someone or something. Loyalty implies a kind of dependency, or perhaps
codependency. The codependency that characterizes Manuela’s experience of her relationship
with Bolívar is based upon her continual promise of loyalty and his contribution of glory, which
she would enjoy vicariously through him. By accepting her gendered role as the female member
of the pair, she secures her position in a union in which she ultimately enjoys public recognition
and thus becomes, in a sense, ungendered. Sáenz reflects upon this ungendered union in her
journal entry from May 19, 1846: “[James] no comprende que [Bolívar y yo] fuimos amantes de
espíritus superiores. Que vivimos una misma posición de gloria ante el mundo, que vivimos un
mismo sacrificio y una misma manera de ver las cosas y una misma desconfianza de todos. […]
Los dos escogimos el más duro de los caminos. […] ¿A qué mujer cabe todo esto?” (“Diario de
Paita” 41).
In this space, not only was Manuela privy to official government information,
participation, and influence, but she also contributed to Bolívar’s campaign by passing along
valuable information that she acquired in the private, more anonymous spheres of her feminine
activities. As Cifuentes points out, this information was important to the military campaign and
so is the fruit of Sáenz’s political agency: “De suma importancia fue la red de información [...]18
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que estableció Sáenz y le permitió penetrar en varias esferas sociales con implicaciones directas
para las acciones militares del movimiento independista [...]” (140). It is this kind of intimacy
that allowed Sáenz and other women (such as those to whom Rocafuerte alludes) to bridge the
gap between (private) domestic/feminine space and (public) political/masculine space.
But this privileged position was not without consequence. Manuela’s influence in
political matters drew much resentment. This resentment was illustrated in the events
surrounding the Corpus Cristi celebration in Bogota in 1830, when two figures were constructed
and painted to represent Bolívar (identified as “despotism”) and Sáenz (representing “tyranny”),
as well as in the scathing letter subsequently published in the Aurora, in which Sáenz was
criminalized for her habit of crossdressing and for her political activism. Sáenz’s relationship
with Bolívar positioned her in a highly liminal social space located somewhere between feminine
spaces (the woman “behind” the great man) and masculine spaces (real political influence).
Sáenz Aspires to Military Mobilization
Filling pages of her diary in June, 1822, a young Manuela Sáenz recalled the fanfare of
the parade welcoming the triumphant Simón Bolívar into Quito. Five months earlier, Sáenz had
been granted the title Caballeresa del Sol by General San Martín in recognition of her
contribution to the independence movement. Months later, seated on a balcony overlooking the
parade route, she tossed toward the Liberator a crown of roses and laurel branches, which
inadvertently missed his head and hit him on the chest. In her diary she recalls,
Me ruboricé de la vergüenza, pues el Libertador alzó su mirada y me descubrió
con los brazos estirados de tal acto; pero S.E. se sonrió y me hizo un saludo con el
sombrero pavonado que traía a la mano, y justo esto fue la envidia de todos,
familiares y amigos, y para mí el delirio y la alegría de que S.E. me distinguiera
de entre todas, que casi me desmayo (“Diario de Quito” 17-18).
Note that it is the passive reception of recognition from this venerated (male) figure that gives
Manuela a feeling of distinction from among the crowd. This scenario positions Manuela in the
role of the delicate, feminine beauty, the marginalized and passive observer of the political
events of her time, who is so governed by her emotions that she nearly faints from the
excitement. In this description, Sáenz positions herself as counterpart and subordinate to the
strong, triumphant, male hero. Though her subsequent actions and writings will reveal the true
feistiness and subversive brazenness of her strong character, at this particular moment, in this
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particular text, she readily positions herself in a traditionally passive and subordinate, feminine
role.19
Marking the first phase of her eight and a half year relationship with Bolívar, Manuela’s
apparent embracing of this traditional feminine space belies her determination to play an active
and even central role in the revolution. Even before her first encounter with the Liberator, she
comments in her diary on her part in the war effort, a mode of participation that exemplifies what
both Earle and Cherpak describe as patterns of female participation in the wars for Latin
American Independence.20 Sáenz writes, “Los señores Generales del Ejército Patriota no nos
permitieron unirnos a ellos; mi Jonathás y Nathán sienten como yo el mismo vivo interés de
hacer la lucha, porque somos criollas y mulatas, a las que nos pertenece la libertad de este suelo,”
and later adds, “[…] Jonathás y Nathán y yo estamos rendidas. Llegamos de auxiliar a los
heridos y ayudar a calmar sus dolencias con bálsamo del Perú e infusiones de amapola” (“Diario
de Quito” 10). As we saw earlier, wealthy women often provided the troops with supplies, sewed
uniforms, and nursed the wounded. Earle views this form of participation as a way in which
women gave their domestic virtues public relevance (130). Women from lower classes, however,
sometimes followed their male kin and spouses into battle and even took up arms, and, as Earle
notes, “[…] in a number of well-documented cases, large groups of armed women, inevitably
referred to as ‘Amazons’, combined to repel an enemy attack on their town”21 (129). She
explains, “[…T]hese contributions to the war have a meaning beyond their immediate impact on
military events. Their activities subtly repositioned women within the newly emerging republic.
Although political action was not new to the viceroyalty’s women […], the war provided women
of many different classes with an unusually protracted opportunity to act publicly” (129).
Keeping in mind that women’s participation in the independence movement constituted a
“public” act, it is interesting to ponder the distinctions made between public and private spaces in
colonial Spanish America and to consider the implications of this private/public dichotomy on
Manuela’s representations of the part she played in the independence movement. How does this
female subject, who at one point textualizes herself as the passive, observant supporter, reconcile
such a representation with other references to her own ambition, agency and boldness? How does
she gender herself in her writings as she crosses the private/public dichotomy, transgressing
traditional feminine spaces and taking up action in the traditionally masculine spaces of wartime
activity, which in this moment of crisis was opened up to female participation? In other words,
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how does Sáenz gender herself in her writings in a space and time where, as Earle points out,
“Female mobilization during the war […] posed troubling questions about women’s nature and
about their proper place in the new republican society” (132)?
Often in her letters and diaries, Manuela represents her female body as a refuge for her
wandering, (active) military lover: “Presiento que S.E. va a tener mucho trabajo y, como pueda,
yo he de sacarlo de allí para que su alma y su cuerpo tengan un descanso en armonía con mi
esperanza de disfrutarlo todo, como siempre he soñado” (“Diario de Quito” 2522). She is the
harbor, the fortress, the refuge; and he is the hero, the weary, traveling warrior. She is
domesticity and he is mobility. She nurtures and feeds his spirit on the homefront, and he leaves
her behind and goes out into the world to seek the glory that she will enjoy vicariously through
him. The harbor waits (patiently and passively) for the hero to return home.
But the harbor did not always wait so passively. Disobeying Bolívar’s direct orders to
stay out of armed conflict, Manuela clothed and armed her body with objects of masculine space
(the military uniform and weapons), actively fought in battle, and made public displays of
political and personal agency. In response to her actions on one such occasion, when Manuela,
dressed in her military uniform, joined in efforts to suppress an uprising in the streets, Bolívar
writes,
Profunda preocupación tiene mi corazón, a más de mi admiración por tu valentía
al enfrentar sola el anatema de la luz pública, en detrimento de tu honor y de tu
posición. Sé que lo haces por la causa de la libertad, a más que por mí mismo, al
disolver, con la intrepidez que te caracteriza, ese motín que atosigaba el orden
legal establecido por la república, y encomendado al general Solom en Quito.
Though he admires her spirit, Simón takes seriously the social and political ramifications of
Manuela’s scandalous display of her transgressively masculine temperament. In the same letter
he cautions her:
Tú has escandalizado a media humanidad, pero sólo por tu temperamento
admirable. Tu alma es entonces la que derrota los prejuicios y las costumbres de
lo absurdo; pero Manuela mía, he de rogarte: prudencia, a fin de que no se lastime
tu destino excelso en la causa de la libertad de los pueblos y de la república.
Prefiero que vengas a Lima, a fin de hacerte cargo de la seretaría de mi archivo
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personal, así como los demás documentos de la campaña del sur. (Letter to
Manuela Sáenz, 13 Sept. 1823)
Bolívar suggests that her soul (which, as distinct from the body, is gender-neutral) proves how
ridiculous these prejudices are. Still, he is aware of the potential and real consequences of her
intrepidness. Consider too that three years later he would write to his sister María Antonia, “Una
mujer debe ser neutral en los negocios públicos. Su familia y sus deberes domésticos son sus
primeras obligaciones” (Letter to María Antonia Bolívar y Palacios, 10 Aug. 1826). So in order
to avoid further problems and simultaneously appease Sáenz, who insists upon actively
participating in the revolution, Bolívar creates for her a position that will keep her occupied and
involved, yet contained and safe. This position was a prescribed space for Manuela. As a military
assignment, it positioned her within the boundaries (though in the margins) of masculine space.
But as a safe, “home front” alternative to her desire to be on the battlefield, this position also
confined her to feminine space.
The following year, however, Manuela insists on taking up arms once again. I return to
the correspondence between Sáenz and Bolívar from June, 1824, which I discussed in Chapter
Two in order to highlight the ways in which Bolívar tried to dissuade Sáenz from joining the
campaign, warning her of the harsh weather and tortuous path, challenging enough to dissuade
even the most convicted of patriots (Letter to Manuela Sáenz, 9 June 1824). Directly addressing
the sexist subtext of Bolívar’s response, Sáenz sends him a response from Huamachuco, dated
June 16, 1824:
[...] las condiciones adversas que se presentan en el camino de la campaña que usted
piensa realizar, no intimidan mi condición de mujer. Por el contrario, yo las reto. ¡Qué
piensa usted de mí! Usted siempre me ha dicho que tengo más pantalones que cualquiera
de sus oficiales, ¿no? De corazón le digo: no tendrá usted más fiel compañera que yo y no
saldrá de mis labios queja alguna que lo hago arrepentirse de la decisión de aceptarme.
¿Me lleva usted? Pues allá voy. Que no es condición temeraria esta, sino de valor
y de amor a la independencia (no se sienta usted celoso). (Letter to Simón Bolívar, 16
June 1824)
She asserts her moral attributes of fidelity, courage, and tenacity as virtues that outweigh her
physical condition of being a woman (the implication being that she is too delicate and weak for
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the rugged journey). Her ungendered spirit will not allow her feminine body space to impede her
entry into the masculine space of this rugged trek.
Years later, Sáenz reiterates this idea of spirit over body in a journal entry in which she
recalls an episode of her valient participation in battle: “Como oficial del Ejército Colombiano
también me distinguí. Era preciso. Y si no, entonces, ¿qué tendría ese Ejército? Un guiñapo de
hombres, mal olientes, vencidos por la fatiga, el sudor del tabardillo con su fiebre infernal, los
pies destrozados. Ya sin ganas de victoria” (“Diario de Paita” 43). The subsequent paragraph
begins with the assertion “Yo le dí a ese Ejército lo que necesitó…” and recounts her experience
in battle among these male troops. Sáenz highlights the pivotal role she played in inciting the
troops to fight vehemently. Strategy, military knowledge, and politics are traditionally male
spheres in which she participated to some extent, but more so privately than publicly. But
passion, love for the cause, and the fervent discourse of the fight for liberty were spheres of
influence into which she was more readily accepted due to the fact that she, as a woman, was
relegated to the emotional rather than to the rational realm.
How does Manuela experience the multifaceted and ambiguously gendered space of her
involvement in the revolution, her movement between the feminine spaces of nurturing
domesticity and fervent emotion and the masculine spaces of war? Again, I argue that her love
affair was a critically important liminal space that facilitated her mobility between feminine and
masculine spheres. Illustrating this is a reminiscent journal entry written during her exile in Paita
(most likely in the latter months of 1846), in which she enumerates the many roles she played in
the life of Bolívar and in their cause: “Simón sabía que yo le amaba con mi vida misma. Al
principio ¡Oh! Amor deseado…tuve que hacer de mujer, de secretaria, de escribiente, soldado
húzar, de espía, de inquisidora como intransigente. Yo meditaba planes. Sí, los consultaba con él,
casi se los imponía; pero él se dejaba arrebatar por mi locura de amante, y allí quedaba todo”
(“Diario de Paita” 43).
Manuela’s many roles in the life and cause of the Liberator, inasmuch as they drew her
into a variety of gendered spaces, might seem to represent her as a fragmented subject. But by
inscribing all of these roles into the lived space of her memoirs, she establishes a certain
coherence in her gender identity. She does this by drawing all of these roles into the context of
one dynamic, integral relationship: her spiritual, intellectual, and corporal love affair. Their affair
was for Manuela a space of freedom, not only personal freedom (as it liberated her from her
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unhappy marriage), but also political freedom (as they were joined in fighting for independence
from Spain) and social freedom (as it provided opportunities for mobility and public action). Her
perspective of the personal and political relationships as inseparable is evident in the way she
conceptually groups together Bolívar’s legal documents and their personal letters: “Como
soldado húzar fui encargada de manejar y cuidar el archivo y demás documentos de la campaña
del Sur. De sus cartas personales y de nuestras cartas apasionadas y bellas” (“Diario de Paita”
43).
As Earle points out, wartime mobilization provided women with a venue for public
action. Many activities such as cooking, sewing, and nursing, which were normally relegated to
the domestic sphere, were now practiced in the public arena of the military camp and battlefield
(130). Women fostered public, political discourse by creating a private space for tertulias in their
homes and by spreading information through espionage and their work as couriers. And some, as
I have mentioned, even took up arms and spoke out publicly. Manuela Sáenz fought for
independence in all these ways. Official discourse expressing anxiety over women’s
encroachment into public, political space reveals the fact that in real life practices, the boundary
between those two spaces had been blurred. In the next section I examine how Manuela responds
to this official discourse, asserting her “feminine virtues” and her claim to republican citizenship
against accusations of craziness and insurrection and contrary to the fact that women were
systematically excluded from citizenship (Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens 189).
The Trojan Horse
The Enlightenment that inspired the eighteenth and nineteenth-century revolutions in the
Americas centered upon a discourse favoring reason and order. Embracing these values, the
emergent republics relied on a legitimizing discourse of constitutionality that privileged order
and reason and, accordingly, devalued intuition and criminalized disorder. The spaces of order,
disorder, reason, and intuition were gendered spaces. In The Disorder of Women, Carole
Pateman explains the philosophical underpinnings of republican patriarchy, illustrating how they
are systematically excluded from the public sphere because they are perceived as a threat to
political order: “Men possess the capacities required for citizenship, in particular they are able to
use their reason to sublimate their passions, develop a sense of justice and so uphold the
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universal, civil law. Women [...] cannot transcend their bodily natures and sexual passions;
women cannot develop such a political morality” (4). Sáenz herself points to this gendering of
politics, reason, and the feminine counterpart to reason—intuition—in her diary, where she
recalls having advised Bolívar against enlisting Sucre in armed conflict during the late months of
1823: “¿Intuición feminina? ¿Estrategia? Las dos cosas” (“Diario de Paita” 47). Not only does
the word “estrategia” pertain to the masculine conceptual space of warfare, it also implies the use
of intellect and reason, which in this passage is set in contrast to female intuition. Ricardo Palma
alludes to this same masculinization of reason when he notes the rationalist mentality of the
young Manuela Sáenz, whom he characterizes as a masculine woman. Following a tradition in
which women had been positioned in the realm of the emotional, the hysterical, and the
irrational, how did Manuela, as a female subject, position herself within this emergent
constitutional discourse?
As reflected in the above passage, and consistent with other examples of her complex
self-gendering, Manuela embraces both the feminine sphere of intuition (and accordingly
passion, and locura) and the masculine spheres of military strategy and intellect. While this
might imply a gender identity characterized by duality or fragmentation, she actually represents
her proficiency in both masculine and feminine spheres as complementary as opposed to
mutually exclusive. This dual gender proficiency legitimizes her active participation in a
movement that she perceives both as a national struggle and as an opportunity for personal
freedom from certain aspects of hegemonic patriarchy. Rather than reject normative feminine
traits, she embraces the intuition, passion, and loyalty prescribed to her sex as attributes that
enhance her contribution to the revolution, both in the capacity of Bolívar’s lover, advisor, and
refuge, and as a warrior. In so doing, she straddles both masculine and feminine spaces. We
return again to her recollections of fighting in battle, particularly during the summer of 1824,
when she was awarded the rank of Captain of Hussars for the courage and leadership she
demonstrated on the battlefield:
Yo le dí a ese Ejército lo que necesitó: ¡valor a toda prueba! y Simón igual. [...]
Yo no parecía mujer. Era una loca por la Libertad, que era su doctrina. Iba armada
hasta los dientes, entre choques de bayonetas, salpicaduras de sangre, gritos
feroces de arremetidos, gritos con denuestos de los heridos y moribundos; silbidos
de balas. Estruendo de cañones. Me maldecían pero me cuidaban, solo el verme
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entre el fragor de una batalla les enervaba la sangre. Y triunfábamos. ‘Mi
capitana—me dijo un indio--, por usted se salvó la Patria’. (“Diario de Paita” 4344)
With this reference to her personal devotion to Bolívar, Manuela directly links her role as the
passionate, devoted lover to her role as fervent revolutionary, blurring the lines between the
private space of the love affair and the public space of battle. At the same time, she claims “Yo
no parecía mujer,” establishing thus an ambiguous gender identity in which she is neither simply
male nor female, but rather a dynamic individual who moves aptly from one gendered space to
another, a subject marked by an ambiguous gender identity that manages to establish a sense of
coherence by directly linking its feminine descriptors (passionate, loyal, lover, loca) and its
masculine activity as a military official.
But while the revolutionary discourse of her diaries legitimizes Manuela’s “locura” as a
positive contribution to the independence movement, the official discourse of the early
republican governments uses this characterization as a way not only to invalidate her and other
women as capricious and irrational, but also to criminalize them as threats to public order.
Cifuentes notes that Sáenz was denounced and her exile legitimized by first the Colombian and
then Ecuadorian states (1834 and 1835, respectively) on the grounds that she was crazy,
irrational, and immoral (136-38). In a letter dated October 28, 1835, addressed to General Juan
José Flores, President Vicente Rocafuerte (writing from Quito) justifies taking disciplinary
action against Manuela for her “viveza y audacia.” He compares her to other notorious, exiled
women such as Madame de Staël in France and Güera Rodríguez in Mexico. He warns, “Las
mujeres (de moral relajada) preciadas de buenas mozas y habituadas a las intrigas del gabinete
son más perjudiciales que un ejército de conspiradores” (Letter to Juan José Flores, 28 Oct.
1835). By associating Sáenz with other notoriously dissident women, Rocafuerte marginalizes
her, positioning her outside of order, outside of the plan for the emerging nation, and—as
Cifuentes points out—proving her unfit for one of the only acceptable female roles in the new
nation: that of the “republican mother,” the one to pass on to future generations the values of the
emerging republic (137). Likewise, by referring to her as a “mujer de moral relajada,” he places
her outside of normative social (sexual) space. She does not fit into the heteropatriarchal model;
she is disorder in the conceptual space of law and “order,” at a time when Ecuador’s greatest
challenge was establishing political stability and reinforcing social order. Enunciated from the
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center of political power, Rocafuerte’s discourse in this and other letters consistently positions
Sáenz as a site of (femininized) capriciousness and irrationality that should be kept outside the
(masculinized) space of order and reason. A further example of this kind of discourse is in
Rocafuerte’s November 10, 1835 letter to General Francisco de Paula Santander, in which the
Ecuadorian president uses this same discourse to invalidate Sáenz as crazy and to justify her
exile (exile, of course, being a clearly spatial act): “Como [Manuela Sáenz] es una verdadera
loca, la he hecho salir de nuestro territorio, para no pasar por el dolor de hacerla fusilar” (Letter
to Juan José Flores, 11 Nov. 1835).
Rocafuerte is not the only one to express concern to General Flores over the threat posed
by Manuela’s presence; Secretary of the Interior González also debated the matter with Flores,
who had requested that Sáenz be permitted to return to Quito in order to attend to personal
matters related to her property. González’s letter is particularly interesting in the way that it
represents Sáenz’s arrival as an invasion. She is a corporeal entity that invades ordered space
from the “outside,” corrupting the otherwise ordered space into which she has inserted herself:
Apenas se anunció en esta capital la venida de Manuela Sáenz, cuando los
llamados Quiteños Libres,23 dándose repetidos parabienes, concibieron la
esperanza de poder seducir la tropa, por medio de esta mujer, que como usted
sabe, es considerada por nuestros llaneros, que hacían la guardia al General
Bolívar, como la Libertadora de Colombia. (Letter to Juan José Flores, 28 Oct.
1835)
Note how González argues that when she is physically present, Sáenz is the means by which the
Quiteños Libres aspire to “seduce” the army. This description represents Sáenz as an
intermediary space that gives the “disorderly” Quiteños Libres access to the “orderly” army.
Moreover, he suggests that she does this by virtue of her seductiveness, a quality that carries
connotations of corporeality. This resonates with another of Rocafuerte’s letters, in which he
complains about Sáenz’s “prostitution” (no other records, letters, or descriptions of Sáenz even
suggest that she was acutally a prostitute) (Letter to Juan José Flores, 14 Oct. 1835). Both
González and Rocafuerte discredit and criminalize Sáenz by representing her as not only a highly
corporal subject, but as one who is ruled by sexual cravings. In her discussion of the gendered
philosophical underpinnings of democratic theory, Pateman notes that “[...] women, womanhood
and women’s bodies represent the private; they represent all that is excluded from the public
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sphere,” and—as I noted earlier—they are incapable of transcending their corporality and sexual
passions in order to participate in politics (4).
Reading González’s letter, we get a sense of Manuela as a physical presence in the
Ecuadorian capital. González’s letter conveys this when he insists that his addressee (Flores)
needed to be there, in Quito, in order to hear the uproar of the crowd when they heard the news
of her arrival.24 Alluding to the threat to public order posed by this evasive female subject,
González writes that Robelli, the magistrate of Guaranda, had sought authorization to “contain”
her, further limiting her physical—and therefore political—mobility.
Rocafuerte and González characterize Manuela’s activity as exemplary of women’s role
in fueling the continued revolution. While they acknowledge the real impact that women had on
popular political sentiment, their discourse invalidates and even criminalizes Sáenz and other
women like her by representing them as sites of irrationality, disorder, and chaos, the presence of
which corrupts the rationality and order (ideally) characteristic of the emerging republic. Women
are the metaphorical “Trojan horse” of early republican society; as Rocafuerte writes to Flores,
“Si la Manuela estuviera aquí estaría esto ardiendo como Troya, pues solo se buscan pretextos
para la revolución [...]” (Letter to Juan José Flores, 11 Nov. 1835). This Trojan horse metaphor is
another characterization of women as elusive seductresses.
It is interesting to note that in order to effect their “corruption” of social order, these
women rely on intimate, personal relationships; González points out how they incite their male
family members to public action: “[…] no crea usted que hasta aquí han cedido las mujeres una
línea de sus caprichos, pues sabemos positivamente, que constantemente están trabajando por
precipitar a sus maridos y hermanos en otra revolución” (Letter to Juan José Flores, 28 Oct.
1835). Women are capricious: emotional, illogical; they “precipitate” and incite; their influence
in the emotive realm of family give them access to their menfolk, who will become the public
agents of revolution.
“Una Pobre Mujer [...] Amiga del Orden”
How did Manuela position herself with respect to these gendered spaces of rationality
and irrationality, law and order, and capriciousness and dissidence? The letters she wrote in
response to Rocafuerte and González’s accusations show a stark contrast to the diaries she wrote
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from the same locus of enunciation during her exile in Kingston (Jamaica) and Paita (Peru). In an
apologia she writes to General Flores, Sáenz defends herself against accusations made by
Rocafuerte and González that she had been inciting uprisings. Clearly establishing her distance
from the political center and her position outside of political circles, she writes to Flores from
Kingston on May 6, 1834, “Espero que ésta llegue a manos de usted, por ser de esta isla, pues de
Bogotá escribí a usted muchas veces sin tener la más pequeña contestación.” She conjectures that
her letters must have been confiscated and then asks rhetorically, “¿Qué tengo que hacer yo en
política? Yo amé al Libertador; muerto, lo venero y por esto estoy desterrada por Santander”
(Letter to Juan José Flores, 6 May 1834). Cifuentes highlights the strategic significance of this
comment; she points out that, even though she remained firm in her political convictions during
her exile, with this comment, “[...] Sáenz decide comenzar por disminuir su participación política
al enmarcarse ella misma en el discurso de amor romántico como la eterna enamorada de
Bolívar” (139).
Prompted by the assassination of her brother, General José María Sáenz del Campo,25 yet
under the pretense of needing to tend to business related to her hacienda in Cataguango,26
Manuela requests a reference from Flores that would allow her to return to Ecuador. She also
writes to Secretary of the Interior González Alminati, employing republican discourse in her
appeal for her due treatment as a citizen under the law. Sáenz was well aware of the provisions
made by the Ecuadorian constitution, according to which, as Mogollón and Narváez point out,
she was exiled unconstitutionally.27 On October 20, 1835, while President Rocafuerte and his
cabinet, particularly Secretary of the Interior González, dialogue about how to deal with this
dangerous woman, Manuela writes to González in her own defense, demanding that they respect
her rights as a citizen; she legitimizes her appeal by employing the ungendered discourse of
republican constitutionality: “Un gobierno legal no es más que un agente de la Constitución: yo,
a nombre de la Ley, pido la supuesta protesta de vengar a mi hermano; o cualquiera otra prueba
legal” (Letter to José Miguel González Alminati, 20 Oct. 1835).
Not only does Sáenz inscribe herself within the legally-protected space of citizenship
(assuming, incorrectly, that citizenship applied to her as a criolla women), she takes her apologia
one step further by turning around sexist stereotypes in her defense; by reclaiming traditional
notions of feminine fragility, disinterest in politics, and loyal “female” friendship, Manuela
reclaims feminine positionality. But she does this not as a “capricious” and “dissident” woman
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(as Rocafuerte and González had portrayed her), but rather as a “harmless” woman; presenting
her situation to González, she writes, “Una pobre mujer desgraciada iba a visitar su suelo patrio,
a ver amigos, y parientes, y a decirles un adiós, quizá para siempre.” And, representing herself as
a good citizen, she concludes the letter, “[...] a mí me sería indecoroso proponer cosa alguna
derogatoria de estos principios, como amiga del orden y patriota” (Letter to José Miguel
González Alminati, 20 Oct. 1835). As Cifuentes points out, “Sáenz no vacila en utilizar también
el discurso de la feminidad hegemónico y deconstruirlo en el proceso. A la vez que en esta
instancia adopta la voz de una mujer indefensa, mediante este discurso Sáenz reconoce las
limitaciones que como mujer tiene para ejercer sus derechos de ciudadanía y para efectuar
cambios significativos” (139).
In order to appreciate the irony—or perhaps the strategy—of these passages, it is
important to keep in mind that this is the same Manuela Sáenz who, according to the July, 1830
testimony of a few different witnesses, stood with her slaves on the balcony of her Bogota
apartment, harrassing the crowd that had gathered in support of the president. J oaquín Esovar
testified that Sáenz’s slaves “tiraban voladores a la gente igualmente que piedras, mientras que
dicha Manuela Sáenz estaba en el balcón con un arma de fuego apuntando a la gente [...] que
inmediatamente después de haber pasado el Presidente gritó la Manuela ‘que viviera el
Libertador de tres Repúblicas’” (qtd. in Cacua Prada 250). This is also the woman who, later that
year, when faced with imprisonment ordered by Judge Isidoro Carrizozo on the grounds of
“inflammatory and seditious acts,”28 reportedly averted arrest by claiming to be gravely ill.
Lying in her “sick bed” when Alderman Domingo Durán arrived at Manuela’s apartment with
his bailiffs, “she asked him if, gentleman he was, he would be so ungallant as to expose to public
gaze a woman so ill that she lay near death’s door” (Von Hagen 265). According to the legend,
Durán reported this incident to Carrizozo, who insisted that he return to carry out the arrest,
which he did, only to be greeted this time by an apparently well Manuela Sáenz, wearing her
hussar’s uniform and wielding a saber. Instead of pleading weakness, Sáenz threatened to “make
a widow of the fat Señora Durán” (Von Hagen 265). In light of these two episodes, Manuela’s
self-representation as a “poor wretched woman” stands out as a strategic deployment of
femininity. In contrast to her diaries, in which she explicitly acknowledges her political
ambitions and integral role in Bolívar’s political life, in her letters she subverts the offensiveness
of these transgressions into masculine space by, first of all, claiming sanctuary in the allegedly
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ungendered space of law and, secondly, representing her political activity as an act of love in
which she acts from a traditional feminine positionality in the private space of the love affair.
Conclusions: “What about Female Masculinity?”
Two aspects of Manuela Sáenz’s gender identity that I find particularly interesting are the
coherence, or “integrated” and “well-rounded” gender that she constructs for herself, and the
sense of agency that this coherence affords her. Such a coherence is not established in the way
others such as Jean Baptiste Boussingault, Ricardo Palma, and Sáenz’s political enemies
represent her; by assuming that, by biological nature, Manuela rightfully belongs in feminine
social spaces, they wind up concluding that her actions in masculine spheres of activity are
perverse, unnatural, or “crazy.” While these descriptions make note of Manuela’s actions in both
feminine (domestic, corporeal, emotional) and masculine (politics, public, rational) spaces, they
fail to appreciate the mobility that allows her to navigate her way in, through, and between these
various spaces. Her own writings, on the other hand, provide a window into this mobility and the
sense of agency that it produced. These themes of mobility and agency are central to the
principal film studied in the next chapter: Diego Rísquez’s Manuela Sáenz: Libertadora del
Libertador.
Here I explore a bit further the notion of coherence with respect to gender identity. By
coherence I do not mean one definitive, fixed site of gender identity, but rather the ability to
understand the various and diverse sites of one’s gender representation as coordinates within a
fluid social space that is one’s gender. For Manuela Sáenz, coherence of gender identity is made
possible because, as Judith Halberstam argues, gender is performative; it is a fiction that is
continually written and rewritten. Halberstam views gender as “styles rather than lifestyles, as
fictions rather than facts of life, and as potentialities rather than as fixed identities” (759).
By pointing to the infinite number of queer identities that have become visible recently in
popular culture, Halberstam problematizes the premise of the two-gender binary that presupposes
the term “transexual” (and that, as we have seen, underlies nineteenth-century representations of
Manuela Sáenz and her unconventional behaviors). Halberstam argues that “we are all
transexuals except that the referent of trans becomes less and less clear (and more and more
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queer). [...] There is no ‘other’ side, no ‘opposite’ sex, no natural divide to be spanned by
surgery, by disguise, by passing” (760).
Though her primary objective is to discard “the constrictive terminology of crossing”
(763) in the process of building her argument, in which she, like Judith Butler and Teresa de
Lauretis, rejects the notion that gender is determined by biology (Halberstam 759, 767;29 Butler
3, 12; de Lauretis 3), Halberstam prepares a discursive space for new definitions of
“masculinity” and “femininity”; she poses the question, “What about female masculinity or
lesbian masculinity?” (762). Her thesis points to one aspect of gender that is key to my project,
and which warrants the use of spatial theory as a lens for reading representations of gender: its
transivity, movement. Halberstam writes, “[...] gender is defined by its transivity, [...and]
sexuality manifests as multiple sexualities,” and she advocates that we “examine the strangeness
of all gendered bodies, not only the transexualized ones and that we rewrite the cultural fiction
that divides a sex from a transex, a gender from a transgender. All gender should be transgender,
all desire is transgendered, movement is all” (767). Spatial theory focuses our view on the
numerous physical, ideological, and symbolic spaces in which these “multiple sexualities” and
this “transgendering” are realized in the relationships between a subject, other subjects, and the
spaces that circumscribe them. A lens of space encourages us to see the various sites of gender
representation not as antithetical, but rather as sets of coordinates within a dynamic social space
that constitutes one’s gender identity. If we accept the idea that this space is inherently dynamic,
then we can look to other ways of accounting for one’s coherence (in Manuela’s case, her role as
Simón Bolívar’s lover within the geographical and symbolic space of revolutionary Latin
America), and we can step away from fixed notions of dichotomous gender identities.
The life and writings of Manuela Sáenz, a notoriously brazen, headstrong, and
nonconformist individual, illustrate Halberstam’s idea that gender is transgender, that it is
transitive, that it is movement. Rather than limit herself to the physical and conceived
(normative) spaces assigned to her sex by the nineteenth-century heteropatriarchy in which she
lived, she found various physical, intellectual, and social ways to relocate herself within
conventionally masculine space and then, when it served her agenda, reposition herself within
traditional feminine spaces. Likewise, she used her feminine positioning in order to secure access
to masculine spheres of influence and activity. In other words, Sáenz’s gender is transgender; it
is inherently transitive, disruptive, and destabilizing; it is movement.
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To describe Manuela’s gender identity in terms of a male-female duality would be to over
simplify (or actually belie) the complex, multifaced, and dynamic gender identity that she
negotiated for herself in response to her relationship with men, the public, the physical world,
and the ideal of freedom. It is interesting to note that Manuela’s gender undergoes an interesting
series of shifts contingent upon whether she represents herself in public or in private space. This
is due to the relationship between an individual’s identity and the spaces that circumscribe that
identity. A movement between public and private space is clearly evident in the way Manuela
represents her gender in her writings. Manuela asserts herself as having a masculine character, as
Bolívar often points out; she makes a name for herself precisely because she exhibits behaviors
and personality traits conventionally associated with agency, strength, roughness, and,
accordingly, masculinity, characterizations that would lead Ricardo Palma, for instance, to
describe her as a “woman-man.” On the other hand, she constantly renegotiates the social space
of her gender by repositioning herself within more traditional feminine spaces and roles.
In spite of the multifaceted nature of her gender identity, Manuela establishes coherence
in the representations of herself as a gendered subject. She achieves this by directly linking her
public transgressions into masculine political space with her private embracing of feminine
affective space. More specifically, because she sees her public collaboration with “Bolívar” as
indistinguishable from her private love affair with “Simón,” she is able to fight in battle
alongside men, cause scandal with her boldness, and display a certain masculine agency without
denying herself access to that feminine space in which she is passive (or rather, passiveaggressive), sensual, and even domestic. Manuela negotiates this coherent gender identity by
framing her experiences of both masculine and feminine spaces in terms of her love relationship
with Simón and by exercising the constant (and sometimes subtle) transivity highlighted in
Halberstam’s notion of gender.
In short, Manuela neither embraces nor entirely rejects traditional feminine space as
prescribed by the patriarchal triad of Church, Father, and State. Rather, she reclaims that space as
a site of resistance, taking advantage of the social distinction between public and private space,
negotiating at their intersection a personal relationship that provided a forum for her to explore
and to test the notions of “liberty” circulating throughout Latin America during the Age of
Independence. This relationship was formed in the material spaces of the hacienda, the garden,
the bedroom, and her sexed body; challenged normative spaces of marriage and honor; and
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became a lived space in which Manuela experienced a sense of personal freedom and agency,
which she verbalized in her letters and diaries. By highlighting this agency and the mobility on
which it was based, filmmakers Diego Rísquez and Leonardo Padrón represent Sáenz as a
“pioneer for women’s rights,” as we will see in the next chapter.
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CHAPTER FOUR
THE SPACES OF A FREE SPIRIT: DIEGO RÍSQUEZ’S MANUELA
SÁENZ, LIBERTADORA DEL LIBERTADOR
Ahora que la veo así, tan lejos de todo, tan borrada
del mundo, siento que nadie entendió los amores de
Ud. con mi General Bolívar. Fueron...puro siglo
XIX. (Antonio de la Guerra to Manuela Sáenz,
Manuela Sáenz, Libertadora del Libertador)
Fig. 2. Antonio de la Guerra visits Sáenz in Paita.
Diego Rísquez’s Manuela Sáenz, Libertadora del Libertador.
In 2002, Venevision International released two films recasting the lives of Manuela
Sáenz and Simón Bolívar: Diego Rísquez’s dramatic biography Manuela Sáenz: Libertadora del
Libertador, and Jorge Triana’s political satire Bolívar soy yo. Though both films project
revisions of the “official” history of the nineteenth-century campaign for Latin American
independence, each is distinct from the other not only in genre, tone and content, but also in its
representation of Manuela Sáenz as a historical and gendered subject. Only one of these films—
Manuela Sáenz—captures the complexity and fluidity that characterized Sáenz’s gender during a
time when notions of femininity and masculinity were more clearly defined, fixed, and polar. In
this chapter, I examine the ways in which director Diego Rísquez, screenwriter Leonardo Padrón,
and editor Leonardo Henríquez recast Manuela Sáenz as not only Simón Bolívar’s most devoted
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lover, but also as woman who transgressed gendered spaces in order to become an agent of
political change and an early advocate for women’s rights.
Traditional Representations of Manuela Sáenz
Earlier cinematic representations of Manuela Sáenz portray her as merely a supporting
female presence in the life of the Liberator. For example, in Miguel Contreras Torres and Jesús
Grova’s 1942 biopic titled Simón Bolívar,1 the relationship between Sáenz and Bolívar is
trivialized and portrayed as platonic. According to Rafael de España, this film takes a
conservative look at the Liberator’s life, glorifying him as a hero and—accordingly—
downplaying his political controversies and personal discretions, one of which was his affair
with Manuela Sáenz (415). A second film was an international project also titled Simón Bolívar
and directed by Alessandro Blasetti. The joint effort of Spanish, Italian, and Venezuelan
filmmakers and investors, this film premiered in 1969. In this film, the role that Sáenz played in
real life is represented as the fictional character Consuelo Hernández; De España points out that
this character “synthesizes” aspects of several different women—especially Sáenz—who at one
point were Bolívar’s lovers (420). The film historian emphasizes the anonymity embodied in this
character; she is the “reposo del guerrero y soporte del político, siempre junto a él pero en la
sombra, rostro anónimo entre la masa que lo vitorea tras el discurso final” (419). These two
cinematic representations of Manuela Sáenz exemplify the ways in which she has been
trivialized and marginalized in Latin American historiography and in the fictional imaginary
about the Age of Independence.
What’s more, by maintaining Sáenz in this anonymous, subordinate, inconsequential
position, these films represent her as clearly and consistently feminine. This becomes clear when
we consider the gendered dichotomy that in Western thought has characterized the distinction
between public and private spaces. As Steve Stern articulates, the masculine domain has been
viewed as “[the] world of dynamism, consequence, and historical change [...] the arena that
determines social winners and losers.” On the other hand, he points out, “Women’s important
experiences connect primarily to the domain of private life and activity [...]. This is a world of
little social consequence and comparatively gradual historical change. Its conflicts and tyrannies
assume petty dimensions and are in any event rather isolated from the great political issues of the
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day” (8). In light of this distinction, it is clear that these two films deny the historical Manuela
Sáenz any real historical consequence; they maintain her in the historically inconsequential
world of Bolívar’s private life, far removed from the masculine sphere of politics.
Of the two films about Bolívar and Sáenz released in 2002, Jorge Triana’s political satire
Bolívar soy yo resonates more with this gendered distinction between public and private spaces
and Sáenz’s position(s) within those spaces. While the Manuela Sáenz depicted in this film is a
strong character of pivotal importance to the protagonist’s character development, her agency is
based on her supporting role as helpmate to “Bolívar” rather than on her own endeavors, ideals,
and passions. In this sense, while Bolívar soy yo breaks from earlier cinematic representations of
Sáenz by affirming the important role she played in Bolívar’s life, it fails to address the
significant ways in which Manuela asserted her own convictions and ideals by challenging the
restrictions placed on women of her day.
The plot of Triana’s film develops around several pivotal scenes in which Santiago
Miranda, an actor playing the role of Bolívar in a popular soap opera, internalizes the Liberator’s
identity as his own. Once he assumes the Liberator’s identity, Santiago is able to see the farce
that has become of Latin American politics, which have misappropriated Bolívar as a national
icon, using him to legitimize and/or mask the theatricalities of their tragically ineffective and
outright corrupt regimes. Triana’s use of a film within a film structures his deconstruction of
“official” history and creates a situation in which Santiago and Alejandra, the actress who plays
the role of Manuela in the soap opera, assume multiple and confused identities. In this way, the
film represents the historical figure of Manuela on two levels: first, she is represented in a
“literal” way in the select scenes that we see of the soap opera; second, she is represented
metaphorically in the form of Alejandra, whose relationship with Santiago in many ways
parallels that of Manuela to Simón, and who toward the end of the film confuses Manuela’s
identity with her own, in the same way that Santiago essentially becomes Simón. On both levels,
Manuela plays a supporting role.
Besides the fact that Alejandra/Manuela is limited to a supporting role as
Santiago/Simón’s loyal friend, lover and confidant, she is also represented as feminine through
the use of costuming, makeup, and—in a few instances—setting. Two particular scenes stand out
in this regard. The first one takes place at the beginning of the film as part of the soap opera in
which Alejandra and Santiago are portraying Manuela and Simón. In this film-within-a-film,
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Bolívar is set to be executed by firing squad (an historically inaccurate event). On his way, he
passes through the garden of what we assume is the presidential palace in Bogota. There, peering
out from among the flowers, is Manuela, her long curly hair falling down over her shoulders, her
face meticulously painted, and her bust showcased by the open neckline of her dress. Famed
among the flowers of the garden and accompanied by the romantic melody of a flute, Manuela is
represented as soft, delicate, and quintessentially feminine. When she comes out from behind the
flowers and meets Simón on his way through the garden, giving him nurturing support as he
prepares to face the firing squad, she is more firmly established as the feminine member of this
relationship.
Another scene in which Triana establishes Manuela’s definitive femininity comes toward
the end of the film, when Alejandra/Manuela tries to prevent Santiago—who has assumed the
identity of Simón Bolívar—from provoking another revolution. As if joining his armed
resistance, Alejandra appears under a white flag in order to board the boat that Santiago has
hijacked. Though she is dressed in full military uniform, her makeup and earrings mark her as
undoubtedly feminine, particularly in contrast to the other female guerrilleras who have joined
Santiago/Bolívar in the resistance and whose gruff voices and androgynous appearances
downplay their biological sex. In subsequent scenes, this gender contrast is sharpened as
Alejandra lets down her long curly hair and wears stylish “movie star” sunglasses as the events
of the resistance play out.
Fig. 3. Guerrillera with
Santiago/Bolívar in Jorge
Triana’s Bolívar soy yo.
Fig. 4. Alejandra/Manuela in
uniform in Bolívar soy yo.
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Fig. 5. Alejandra/Manuela
pleads with Santiago/Bolívar in
Bolívar soy yo.
While Triana’s film affirms the important role that Manuela Sáenz played in the life of
Simón Bolívar, it does not problematize her gender in any way, nor does it recognize the
personal convictions and passions that motivated her devotion to Bolívar and to the cause (after
all, she was a revolutionary before she ever met the Liberator). On the other hand, the other film
about Sáenz and Bolívar released in 2002, Diego Rísquez’s Manuela Sáenz: Libertadora del
Libertador, affirms Manuela’s agency as a participant in the formation of the new republics. By
taking her out of the supporting role to which she has been assigned by “official” history, and by
highlighting her ability to move from one gendered space to another, Rísquez problematizes
Sáenz’s gender for the first time in her cinematic history.
“Una guerrera entera”: Resituating Sáenz into Official History
As he explains in the “Behind the Scenes” feature released on the DVD of Manuela
Sáenz, Libertadora del Libertador, screenwriter Leonardo Padrón views Manuela as “una
pionera en todos los sentidos, [...] una guerrera entera, [...] un emblema de la emancipación
femenina, [...] la pasión en mayúscula, [...y] el femenino en su mayor traje.” He articulates the
objective that guided his writing: “De alguna manera yo quise celebrar a un espíritu tan libre, tan
poderoso como ella a través del guión.” Likewise, Venezuelan director Diego Rísquez also calls
Manuela “la pionera [...] de la liberación femenina en América Latina” and explains that for him,
“[...] Manuela Sáenz significa un grito por la libertad [...y] el romanticismo del siglo XIX
elevado a su máxima expresión.” The feminist vision of both filmmakers is projected into this
film, which rewrites Manuela into the official narrative of nineteenth-century Latin American
history.
Structured by a series of flashbacks recalling the events between her first encounter with
Bolívar in Quito in 1822 and her exile to Paita in 1834, the film begins, ends, and repeatedly
returns to an aged, impoverished, and forlorn Manuela, confined to a wheelchair in the remote
Peruvian port of Paita. There a visit paid her by the young whaler and aspiring novelist Herman
Melville in 1856 stirs her to reread the letters of her epic love story and relive the events of her
bittersweet past. In exile she is also visited by old friends, such as Bolívar’s teacher Simón
Rodríguez and Venezuelan general Antonio de la Guerra, who comfort Manuela in the days
preceding her death from the plague that had infested Paita. Their comments reflect upon
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Sáenz’s marginalization from history. As a whole, the film is a thoroughly documented drama
that borrows several passages from Manuela’s own writings in its reconstruction of her as a
subject.
The focus of this chapter is an analysis of the ways in which the filmmakers translate the
physical, conceptual and experiential spaces delineated by the subject in her own writings to the
two-dimensional screen space and the three-dimensional diegetic space of the film, primarily
through the use of costuming, the exposure of the character’s naked body, direction (including
gestures, intonation, and movement), editing, and dialogue. In their filmic representations of her,
Rísquez, Padrón, and editor Leonardo Henríquez complicate Manuela’s gender in much the same
way that she does in her own writings: by showing her agile movement from one gendered space
to another while all the while contextualizing her experiences of those spaces within the political
and romantic relationship that she shared with Simón Bolívar, a relationship that, as we saw in
the previous chapter, served as a symbolic—or experiential—space that gave coherence to
Manuela’s complex gender identity.
Additionally, Rísquez’s film reflects upon Manuela’s gendered positioning in Latin
American history in a way that can only be done posthumously and in light of what has been
recorded and remembered as “official” history. His film is a postmodern reflection on the
unfolding of historical events owed in part to the participation of women and other marginalized
groups whose participation has been forgotten, erased, or marginalized from master narratives
due to their subaltern positionality. The film reflects upon Sáenz’s marginalization from both the
centers of political influence during her lifetime and also from subsequent official accounts of
the birth of the independent republics. In this way, Rísquez simultaneously represents the
feminine positionality she has been assigned by history and challenges the justness of this
positionality by representing her as an agent whose actions and character impacted not only
personal relationships and domestic space (both traditionally feminine spaces), but also helped
transform the traditionally masculine political and military spaces of the revolution as well.
A sense for how Rísquez establishes Sáenz’s agency becomes clear when we keep in
mind the previously discussed distinction between private (feminine) and public (masculine)
spheres of activity characteristic of Western cultures. By affirming Sáenz’s agency in the
political sphere of the revolution and by portraying her as a pioneer in the continuing struggle for
women’s rights, Rísquez shows how Manuela Sáenz crosses this divide between the feminine
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sphere of historical inconsequence and the masculine world of political and social agency.
Besides depicting her political activism, he also positions her within that private sphere of
traditionally feminine activity: she is nurturing, at times domestic, and—against her will—
marginalized from politics and official history. As Manuela does in her own writings, Rísquez
bridges this gap between the private and the public, between the feminine and the masculine, by
framing Manuela’s actions and experiences within the context of her personal and political
relationship with Simón Bolívar. In this chapter, I highlight the ways in which Rísquez
represents the social space of this relationship and Manuela’s movement within and through it by
means of the physical, conceptual, and symbolic spaces that give shape to that relationship.
A Body Dressed and Undressed
In Breaking the Frame: Film Language and the Experience of Limits, Inez Hedges
studies films that, unlike the majority of movies, portray the inner lives of women. Prefacing her
series of analyses, she highlights two ways in which filmmakers do this: first, through a
“sophisticated use of narrators” and, second, “by letting us get to know the character by showing
how she relates to the space surrounding her” (xvi). One primary way in which Padrón and
Rísquez portray Manuela’s inner life is through her reflections as narrator; as narrator she gives
symbolic meaning to the various scenes of her past that we see (as viewers) and may already be
familiar with (as students of history). The focus of this chapter, however, is how Rísquez sets,
dresses, and frames Manuela within a variety of gendered spaces and how her relationship to the
contents and contours of these spaces genders her.
Besides setting Manuela within highly gendered physical spaces, such as the home, the
army headquarters, or in the arms of her male lover, the mise-en-scène—or collection of physical
objects that make up the film set—represents Sáenz’s gender in a metaphorical way; as Hedges
explains: “[…] the relationship between the woman character and the mise-en-scène can become
a metaphor for the character’s state of mind” (70). This leads me to ask how Sáenz’s character
resists “the spaces that constrict her” (Hedges 70), keeping in mind that, as Hedges explains, “By
constructing a new relationship to space, [the woman character] changes her self-image” (70).
While Hedges’ studies are more concerned with how female characters are portrayed as complex
individuals and not how gender in itself is represented, the relationship she draws between the
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exterior, material space of the mise-en-scène and the interior space of the female character
resonates with Lefèbvre’s analysis of social space and is therefore a useful model for our study
of the social space of gender as an internalized identity manifested through the subject’s
relationship to and manipulation of material space.
The most clearly identifiable space in which Rísquez genders Manuela’s character is that
of her sexed body, a space marked both by its costuming and, at times, its sensual nudity. The
first striking use of costuming occurs in the scene representing the ball given to welcome Bolívar
into Quito in 1822. It is at this ball that Manuela and Bolívar are first formally introduced, thus
beginning the love affair that through its moments of turmoil would last until his death in 1830.
The ballroom is filled with elegantly dressed patriots: men in military uniform or tuxedos and
heavily jeweled women in ball gowns. But in the center of the dance floor, three couples in
nearly identical dress dance the minuet. Each member of this group, regardless of gender, wears
a gold brocade waistcoat over a white ruffled shirt and either has long curly brown hair or is
wearing a wig fashioned in this way. The men wear dark trousers and the women straight-line
skirts, but due to the framing and the low lighting of the shot, this difference is barely
distinguishable. As they dance, the only real markers of their respective genders are slight
differences in height and their respective roles as leaders or followers in the dance. In contrast to
the other guests, whose rigidly suited men stand in stark contrast to the soft lines of the women’s
bare shoulders, soft ringlets and silky gowns, the uniform costuming of this group of dancers
suggests androgyny.
Fig. 6. Sáenz and Bolívar dance. The “androgynous
ones” can be seen in the background (Manuela Sáenz,
Libertadora del Libertador).
Fig. 7. Sáenz and Bolívar in step with the
“androgynous ones.”
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This established, when Bolívar (in his military uniform) invites Manuela to dance (she in an
emerald green ball gown that reveals her ample cleavage just above a stylish empire waist), and
the couple takes their place dancing among the androgynous ones, there is a suggestion that they
are stepping out of the clearly gendered spaces that they occupy in nineteenth-century criollo
society (as represented by their clothing) and are entering into a relationship that will blur the
boundaries of those gendered spaces. Their identification with the group of “androgynous” ones
is further affirmed when, after Manuela has already dared to begin speaking to the Liberator on
political matters, he takes leave of her, kissing her hand and bowing slightly, mimicking with his
gestures in the foreground the same movements of the dancers in the background. Manuela’s
transgression into the masculine sphere of politics (a transgression of discursive space) is thus
analogically represented by the “female” dancers whose costuming blurs the distinction between
their gender and that of their male partners.
This ballroom scene challenges the viewer to reflect upon clothing as a material marker
of gender. In The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality, Annette Kuhn
examines the representation of gender and sexuality in Hollywood glamour shots, soft porn, and
several classic films, such as Some Like it Hot and The Big Sleep. In the essay titled “Sexual
Disguise and Cinema,” she examines the use of crossdressing, studying its relationship to the
subject’s body and differentiating it from transvestism.1 She explains: “On a cultural level,
crossdressing may be understood as a mode of performance in which—through play on a
disjunction between clothes and body—the socially constructed nature of sexual difference is
foregrounded and even subjected to comment: what appears natural, then, reveals itself as
artifice” (49). Kuhn’s treatment of dress recognizes it as the material representation of an
assumed (gendered) persona, a social space that is potentially distinct from one’s “true” inner
self. She explains:
Far from being a fixed signifier of a fixed gender identity, clothing has the potential to
disguise, to alter, even to reconstruct, the wearer’s self. Clothing can dissemble—it may
be costume, mask, masquerade. Put another way, clothing can embody performance. As
a means to, even the substance of, a commutable persona, clothing as performance
threatens to undercut the ideological fixity of the human subject. (53)
Considered in conjunction with Judith Halberstam’s understanding of genders as “fictions rather
than facts of life, and as potentialities rather than as fixed identities”2 (759), Kuhn’s model for
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studying the cinematic use of dress is helpful in that it emphasizes the distance between dress,
the body, and one’s internalized gender identity. This model is well suited for the study of the
cinematic representation of Manuela Sáenz, who in her own writings constructs a gender that is
fluid and multifaceted, experienced in and through both feminine and masculine sites (her sexed
body, her activity in battle, etc.), and who in her own life used dress as a way to participate in
masculine spaces while at the same time embracing certain traditionally feminine spaces as well.
Returning, then, to the ballroom scene, in which Manuela and Simón dance among the
“androgynous ones,” we see that the use of costuming in Manuela Sáenz is a conscientious play
on the fixity (or rather unfixity) of gender.
This conscientious use of costuming is highlighted in the scene in which Sáenz is first
shown in male clothing. Seated in front of the mirror of her vanity, Sáenz paints herself a
moustache, the final touch to her male disguise of black trousers, white shirt, black tie, and hair
pulled back into a ponytail. The mirror provides a site of both physical and psychological
reflection for Manuela; gazing at the image of her moustached face, she gives a look of
satisfaction, evidence of the conscientious nature of her act of transgendering.
Fig. 8. A moustache completes Manuela’s disguise.
Fig. 9. A masculinized Manuela prepares to hang
flyers stating “Muera la tiranía.”
As Octavio Paz eloquently states in the 1991 film Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, o las trampas de la
fe: “Por obra del espejo, el cuerpo se vuelve visible e intocable. Es un triunfo de los ojos sobre el
tacto. En un segundo momento la imagen del espejo se transforma en objeto de conocimiento,
del erotismo a la contemplación, y de la contemplación a la crítica. El espejo y su doble, el
retrato, son un teatro donde se opera la metamorfosis del [mirar] en saber.”1 Manuela’s reflection
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becomes the lived space in which the exterior, physical space of her cross-dressed body blends
into the interior, psychological space of a woman about to act as a man. This use of mise-enscène is one example of how Rísquez projects the interior space of his subject, drawing together,
as he does this, the physical, normative, and lived spaces of her act of transgendering.
When her slave Nathán enters Manuela’s chambers, bearing material that they will use to
sew military uniforms, Sáenz stands up from her vanity, turns to Nathán, and completes her
disguise by throwing on a black cape. In a surprised tone, Nathán asks if she plans to go out
alone at such a late hour. Securing the ties of her cape and picking up a stack of posters bearing
the words “Muerte a la tiranía,” Manuela affirms: “Esta noche quiero estar a solas con esta
guerra.” Manuela’s use of male clothing in this scene serves not only as a disguise facilitating
her entrance into the public, masculine space of the street at night, but also as a means to
participate in the male discursive space of the revolution, manifested in the material space of the
posters that she is about to hang throughout Lima. By questioning her decision to go out
unaccompanied, Nathán represents the prescribed enclosure that characterizes feminine space.
Therefore, by defying Nathán’s admonishment, Manuela rejects the enclosure of the feminine
social (and domestic) space assigned to her.
The Limits to Manuela’s Masculinization
In light of the fact that gender is a relative term that implies some degree of power
differential, it is interesting to analyze Sáenz’s costuming relative to that of Bolívar in the scenes
in which the two appear together. Looking at this aspect of her representation, I was interested to
see if the relative femininity and reclaiming of female sensuality that characterize Manuela’s
self-representation in her personal correspondence with Simón had been somehow incorporated
into these cinematic representations of her and of their relationship. Curiously enough, of all the
scenes in which Manuela and Bolívar appear together, in only one is she dressed in full military
uniform. In all other such scenes, Manuela’s dress bears some mark of femininity. What’s more,
in the one scene in which she does appear in full uniform in his presence, the two engage in the
most heated argument of the film, an argument that culminates in Bolívar’s outright rejection of
Manuela as both lover and co-revolutionary. Following the scene in which Sáenz, at a party
celebrating Bolívar’s birthday, orders that a dummy representing Santander (who had betrayed
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the Liberator) be shot in effigy, a public display of political propaganda that infuriated Bolívar
for its brazenness, he confronts her in the private setting of his quarters. In full military uniform,
Sáenz paces back and forth in the background, defending her actions to an exasperated Bolívar
who, wearing a loose white shirt and trousers, sits at his desk with his head in his hand. Marking
the moment in which Manuela reaches the limit to her transgressive activity in masculine space,
Bolívar springs to his feet and standing up to face her, he barks, “Manuela, no te metas en
asuntos del estado. Me estás causando problemas.” Facing him in confrontation, her eyes locked
with his, she replies in self-defense, employing the familiar tú (something that she did very
seldom in her written correspondences), “¿Y qué querías? ¿Qué yo estuviera a tu lado nada más
para acostarme contigo y aplaudir tus batallas?” Refusing to cede to him when he insists “Quiero
que te quedes tranquila,” she continues, “Lo siento, pero no puedo estar a tu lado y quedarme
tranquila ante lo que considero una injusticia.” Thunder sounds in the background. Rain begins
to pound against the roof, signaling this as a “beat”2 in the film and a pivotal moment in their
relationship. The shouting has ceased. Bolívar calmly but firmly declares, “Entonces no estarás
más a mi lado.” He has played the trump card of his position as general-in-chief, exercising his
power over her, over their relationship, and over her political participation. The camera pans left
and settles on a medium close-up of Manuela, gazing toward Bolívar with a look of shock,
punctuated by the breath that she subtly takes as she, taken aback by what has just happened,
maintains her composure. Taking a long stride toward him, keeping her eyes locked with his, she
confirms, “Tú estás seguro de lo que estás diciendo?” To this he replies, “Estoy seguro.”
Fig. 10. Confrontation between Sáenz and Bolívar.
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Dressed as a military officer, Sáenz has to some degree publicly participated in political
and military space, confronting with confidence any resistance directed toward her by male
subjects in those spaces.3 But her transgendering has met the limits imposed by hegemonic
patriarchy. As I argue in the previous chapter, Manuela is able to masculinize herself without
rejecting her femininity by representing her activity in masculine space as an act of devotion
toward the revolution and, synonymously, toward Simón. But what happens when her
participation in masculine space becomes detrimental to Bolívar and to his efforts? With this
climatic scene, Rísquez explores the limits of Manuela’s transgression into masculine space by
pitting it against the very entity that legitimizes it: Bolívar as her lover and general.
While this film’s sequencing of scenes highlights the agile transgendering performed by
Sáenz through her activity in various spaces, her confrontation with Bolívar, in contrast, points to
the tendency in nineteenth-century Latin American culture to view a subject’s gender as fixed,
clearly defined, and polarized. We saw evidence of this in Chapter Two; this fixity is the premise
of Boussingault’s and Palma’s representations of Sáenz as “perverse” and a “freak of nature,”
and it also underpins Bolívar’s discourse about the participation of the “fairer sex” in armed
resistance against the Spanish. When in this scene of the film Manuela implies that her roles as
lover and moral support (roles traditionally assigned to women in relation to the male hero) were
limited and in some ways underestimations of her potential to contribute to the cause, she refuses
to restrict her activity to these accepted feminine spheres. As she argues, she cannot fill the role
of lover without the freedom to take public political action in order to defend her lover and
general. This close association between the two roles is reflected in Sáenz’s own writings,
particularly in a letter to Bolívar in which she identifies herself as “patriota y amante de usted”
(Letter to Simón Bolívar, 26 Apr. 1825).
Sáenz insists on the freedom to enter into various gendered spaces in her fight for
freedom (both political and personal). In her diary she claims the right to access various
gendered spaces and legitimizes this claim by pointing to the multifaceted role she played in
Simón’s life. In her reflections from exile she writes:
Simón sabía que yo le amaba con mi vida misma. Al principio ¡Oh! Amor deseado...
tuve que hacer de mujer, de secretaria, de escribiente, soldado húzar, de espía, de
inquisidora como intransigente. Yo meditaba planes. Sí, los consultaba con él, casi se los
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imponía; pero él se dejaba arrebatar por mi locura de amante, y allí quedaba todo (“Diario
de Paita” 43).
Returning to this pivotal scene in Rísquez’s film, we see Sáenz’s refusal to remain silent and her
claim to the masculine space of public political discourse comes face to face with an obstacle
that forces her to redirect her revolutionary energies: the order and mandate of Bolívar himself,
her lover and general.
The subsequent scenes see Manuela slipping back with agility and determination into the
prescribed feminine spaces of the home, the role of hostess, an elegantly dressed and jeweled
body, and celebrated female sensuality. Even her contribution to the war effort falls along more
traditionally feminine lines: that of informant and spy.4 Dressed in a scarlet evening gown that
reveals her elegantly-jeweled bosom, Sáenz hosts a party at which she uses coyly flirtatious
behavior and a seductively gentle voice to gather information from one of her guests: Dr.
Niniano Ricardo Cheyne, the physician attending to the Liberator.
Fig. 11. Manuela flirts with Dr. Cheyne
and gains information about Bolívar. The scene
takes place at a party hosted by Sáenz.
Catching her eye in a mirror, Nathán—who represents the network of communication that often
relied upon women and slaves—passes along to Sáenz the rumor of the assassination attempt
planned against Bolívar at a masquerade ball taking place that very night. Sáenz’s agile
movement in this feminine space, as part of this underground network of communication, makes
her privy to information of vital importance to the Liberator and to his cause. Acting upon this
information, Sáenz causes a scene at the ball (thus subverting the assassination attempt). This act
that, together with her role in averting the famous September 25, 1828 assassination attempt,
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earned her the title “Libertadora del Libertador,” which is not so coincidentally the subtitle of
Rísquez’s film. The agility with which Manuela has stepped out of masculine spaces and has
reappropriated feminine spaces is represented once again in the sequencing of this series of
scenes.
Transgendering Manuela through Costuming
As I stated earlier, in only one of the scenes depicting Manuela and Simón together is she
dressed in entirely masculine costume; in all other scenes featuring the two of them, even those
scenes representing her revolutionary activities, her costuming bears some mark of femininity.
This hardly seems coincidental when considered in light of two particular scenes in which
Manuela alters her clothing—in a way that either feminizes or masculinizes her body space—as
she either approaches or takes leave of Simón.
The first of the two scenes takes place in 1827. Responding to Bolívar’s summons, Sáenz
dons her military uniform to make the ride to Bogota on horseback. Reminiscent of a previous
scene, she is announced as “coronela” as she enters frame left into the army headquarters, where
she encounters several generals on her way to Bolívar’s private quarters. As Manuela travels
toward frame right (toward the space-off5 of Bolívar’s private quarters) she meets two obstacles,
the first of which is General José María Córdova, who rejects her presence, sneering at her: “El
Libertador está ocupado.” Manuela, arriving at the second obstacle to her movement into the
space of central authority, the door to Bolívar’s quarters, stops, turns around, and with a sly smile
removes her uniform jacket, giving herself a more feminine appearance by revealing the looslyfitting white shirt underneath. She retorts “Claro que está ocupado.” She rolls up one of her
sleeves: “Muy ocupado.” Manuela opens the door and enters Bolívar’s chamber. The implication
here is that her feminine role as Bolívar’s lover subverts the obstacles to accessing him at a time
when even the highest-ranking generals of his army, his inner circle of advisors, are left waiting
outside, unauthorized to pass through the physical barrier (the door), which stands between them
and the highest voice of authority. The door in this sense becomes a liminal space (an in-between
space of transition) for Sáenz’s transgendering.
Furthermore, since this film is a text within a cultural tradition of reading from left to
right, Manuela’s movement from screen left to screen right presents a logical progression.
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Conversely, the obstacles that challenge this progression approach her from the opposite
direction (frame right). This is an example of how the framing and direction of the film makes
use of Western culture’s privileging of left to right reading in order to depict Manuela’s
transgendering as an activity that she uses to “progress” naturally and easily toward privileged
space and subvert obstacles to that progression.
Fig. 12. “Claro que está ocupado. Muy ocupado.”
Manuela at the army headquarters in Bogota.
Having clothed her body in masculine attire in order to make the ride from her protected
space in Lima into this masculine space of the military headquarters, she now transgenders
herself once again as she navigates out of this official space into the private space of her love
affair. In the social space of this affair, Manuela reclaims a female positioning, a point that is
emphasized when she disrobes herself, and bearing her naked breast as she sits on the floor,
reclining against Bolívar as he lies in a hammock. The impact of her presence in the army
headquarters (or her “trespassing” as some may perceive it) is revealed in Córdova’s infuriated
complaint that she is distracting the Liberator from war.6 Acknowledging their relationship as
“una historia de amor,” General O’Leary points out that Sáenz has fought in the same war as
they have and has lost just as much as a result. His commentary affirms Sáenz’s simultaneous
participation in both military (masculine) and romantic (where she is feminine) spaces.
The second of the two scenes in which Manuela alters her clothing in response to
Bolívar’s presence (or in this case absence) takes place in Bogota, 1830. Having been exiled
from Colombia, Bolívar is forced to leave his home in Bogota, where he had been residing with
Manuela for several months. In spite of her pleas to take her with him, he insists that Manuela
stay behind, yet another instance in which Bolívar exercises his masculine privilege of mobility
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while Manuela is assigned to stay in stationary, domestic space.7 Crossing the veranda together
in the moments leading up to his departure, the two wear white pants and riding boots, Bolívar in
a white jacket, and Manuela draped in a white crocheted shawl, which softens as it partially
covers her white uniform shirt and riding pants. When the shawl begins to drop, she pulls it back
over her body, veiling the sleek lines of her riding pants with the feminine laciness of the shawl.
In her hands she carries a white hat, which she puts on Simón’s head as the two say good-bye
and he then rides away. The scene of his departure depicts him in the foreground, riding toward
the camera but looking back toward Manuela, whose still, shawled figure, flanked by her female
servants, shrinks in the distance. Again, he is mobile while she is stationary.
Fig. 13. Bolívar is exiled from Bogota.
The moment Bolívar is gone, Sáenz casts off the shawl, taking on, as she does, a more
masculine aspect, and marches back across the veranda, her long determined strides putting
distance between herself and her servants. Intent on restoring the presidency to Bolívar, she
orders Nathán and Jonatás to go through the streets declaring his name, and she sets out to begin
her campaign (which subsequently lands her in prison and then exile). Just as Sáenz had
feminized her appearance before entering Bolívar’s personal quarters in the earlier scene in the
army headquarters, here she casts off the feminine aspects of her attire the moment he departs.
She thus takes on a more masculine aspect as she prepares to reenter the public space of political
campaigning, particularly during this period of his exile, when she essentially represents the
Liberator among his enemies in Bogota.
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From Voyeur to La Maja Desnuda
Just as the dressing of Manuela’s body space marks her as a gendered subject, the
undressing of her body space positions her as an unquestionably feminine subject. In this section
I analyze two scenes in which Manuela appears either “naked” or “nude”—the difference being a
subtle but important one. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger offers a perspective on the
representation of female nudes in painting, pointing out the power relationships at work between
the active spectator and the passive, commodified female figure. Rose synthesizes Berger’s ideas
about the “masculinity of the gaze at the nude” into her study of the feminization of landscape in
geography, reiterating that “This particular masculine position is to look actively, possessively,
sexually and pleasurably, at women as objects” (88). Annette Kuhn also applies Berger’s
perspective to explore the differences between “nakedness” and “nudity” in a comparative study
of Hollywood glamour shots and photographs of prostitutes from the early part of the twentieth
century. Reiterating Berger’s ideas, Kuhn explainins that “[...] the transformation of the
unclothed woman from being naked to being nude (one of the major ‘achievements’ of the
European high art tradition) also brings about, in all forms of representation, the transformation
of woman into object, the site of structures both of exchange and of looking” (11) Here she
explains that through this process, the spectator-buyer who possess the image of the nude woman
also, in some ways, possess that woman’s sexuality and enjoys a kind of power over her. With
this distinction in mind, we can see how scenes depicting a nude Manuela feminize her in a more
dramatic way than scenes in which she is simply naked. We can also see a shift that takes place
in Sáenz’s gender when she goes from being the object of the male voyeur’s (or the spectatorbuyer’s) gaze, to being the voyeur herself.
One of the scenes in question shows Manuela being bathed in an outdoor tub by Jonatás.
The scene is established with a wide shot, camera angle-down, a perspective that suggests the
viewer’s dominant position over the subject. Jonatás’ sensual caressing of Manuela’s body
during the bathing, the latter’s visual signs of pleasure, and the revelation of Manuela’s naked
breast above the waterline, together with the declining tilt of the camera and the implied distance
of the viewer work together to construct Manuela as the object of the voyeuristic gaze of the
implicitly male viewer. The fact that she is engaging in an activity (bathing) that requires her to
be naked contributes to the sense that our voyeuristic gaze is in some way intruding upon her
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private space. While this gaze constructs Manuela as the passive female object of the active male
gaze, it does not go so far as to imply the viewer’s possession of or authority over her naked
body (the viewer is, in fact, an intruder). Here Manuela is gendered by her naked female body.
One way in which Rísquez represents the complexity of Manuela’s gender is by shifting
her from this feminine position as object of the voyeuristic gaze to the active (masculine) role of
voyeur. This is the scene of the symbolic execution of Santander. The setting: evening, the patio
of Bolívar’s quinta near Bogota. Firelight breaks up the darkness that surrounds the boisterous
group of officials who gather around a dummy representing Santander. As they drink, laugh and
cheer her on, Manuela gives the order that “Santander” be executed, after which she declares,
“Esta es la mejor manera de celebrar el cumpleaños del Libertador.” Ordering her female slaves
to dance “like only they know how,” she watches as Jonatás and Nathán, following the drumbeat
of African rhythms, throw their bodies into the sensual gyrations of their native dance. Sáenz,
dressed in full military uniform and having just demonstrated her authority by ordering the
symbolic execution, stands beside the slave women, posturing her body and fixing her gaze in a
way that suggests sexual attraction8 to these female bodies, one of which showed a bare breast
that had come out of the woman’s blouse during the dance. Together with her masculine attire,
Sáenz’s posture and gaze, which are mimicked by some of the men observing the dance,
construct her as a masculine voyeur, a gendered position in which she exercises power over the
dancing women. This power differential is multiplied by the fact that she, as slave owner, holds
legal authority over the women. By the end of this scene, Sáenz is more “masculine” than at any
other point in the film. Sáenz enters the following scene (that of her climatic argument with
Bolívar over her involvement in state affairs) still in this masculine positionality, a positionality
that clashes with Bolívar’s authority, resulting in an argument that reveals to Manuela the
limitations to her activities in masculine political/military space.
But the central theme of Rísquez’s gender representation of Manuela Sáenz is that she
was a very complex and dynamic subject. While the scene of Santander’s symbolic execution
positions her in clearly masculine social space, there is another scene in which she is positioned
in the clearly feminine space of her not merely “naked” but “nude” female body; here she shifts
from being colonel, revolutionary, and voyeur, to being the “Maja Desnuda.”
This scene alludes to Francisco de Goya’s famous paintings La Maja Vestida and La
Maja Desnuda (examples from the European high art tradition mentioned by Kuhn) in its
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representation of Manuela’s reclining body. The establishing shot of the scene depicts Manuela
as the Maja Vestida, a shot that in its evocation of the famous painting objectifies the female
subject and produces the sense of “spectator as buyer” described by Kuhn.
Fig. 14. Manuela as La Maja Vestida.
Directing her comment toward the camera, Manuela says, “Cierra los ojos.” Cut to Bolívar,
establishing that the point of view we hold is his. He closes his eyes, and when he opens them,
we once again assume his point of view, this time gazing upon Manuela depicted as the Maja
Desnuda. In this allusion to Goya’s paintings, Manuela is objectified as a female body now in
possession of the spectator/buyer. Her nudity (as opposed to mere nakedness) implies the
viewer’s possession of and authority over her sexuality, to which she as a subject has been
reduced. This scene positions Manuela into a densely-constructed feminine positionality that
builds upon the notions of woman as reducible to her sexed body (a vessel for reproduction) and,
as such, as the possession of her husband, Father, Church, or in this case, lover.9 Taken in
context of the rest of the film, this scene represents the most extreme instance of Manuela’s
representation as a feminine subject.
The Use of Editing to Convey Mobility
Early in the film there is a sequence of scenes that—taken collectively—convey the
dynamic nature of Manuela’s constant transgendering. In one of these scenes, Manuela, elegantly
groomed, jeweled and dressed in a green silk gown, sits in a window seat in the home she shares
with her husband, James Thorne. As she gazes longingly out into the nighttime, we see behind
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her the wrought iron grillwork that covers the window, a typical feature of Spanish colonial
architecture, but nonetheless a reminder of the enclosure and imprisonment that she feels in her
marriage10 and a visual metaphor11 for the subordination of married criolla women, as they are
subjected to patriarchal control.12 In a voiceover she rejects the behavioral codes to which she is
legally and socially bound by her marriage vows: “Adúltera. En eso me convertí. Acaso me
importaba.” Enter her husband, berating her for her scandalous affair with Bolívar and
demanding the sanctity of their marriage as a private space and not as the object of public
rumors. In this scene, Manuela’s dress, makeup, and hair represent her as a feminine subject,
while the grillwork covering the window and the reprimands of her husband, who is initially
standing while she remains seated, remind the viewer that the social and physical spaces
occupied by this criolla are by prescription enclosed, private and subordinate. Here her actions
are closely monitored by her husband, a representative of the hegemonic patriarchy responsible
for the systematic confinement and silencing of married Latin American women during the
nineteenth century.13
Fig. 15. Thorne insists that Sáenz end her relationship
with Bolívar.
Fig. 16. Sáenz and Bolívar recline in a hammock as
she expresses her desire to be with him.
In the previous chapter, I explored ways in which Manuela experiences her love affair
with Bolívar as a site of liberation from the patriarchal hegemony that confines her through her
marriage to Thorne. In her diary entry for June 22, 1822 (in Quito), for example, she writes: “Yo
no sé que me pasó, pero me sentía liberada de James, y en cambio retribuida en la gloria de este
señor, S.E. Simón Bolívar, que se ha fijado en mí y que me hace sentir la vida intensamente”
(“Diario de Quito” 21). In the film, the scene immediately following Manuela’s window seat
confrontation with James visually represents this sense of liberation. In contrast to the rigidity
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and tension reflected in the iron grillwork, formal attire, confrontational positioning, and heated
dialogue of the previous scene, the subsequent scene between Manuela and Simón is visually and
audibly relaxed, warm, and romantic. Accompanied by a cheerful score, the scene opens with a
medium close-up of Manuela, reclining across Simón’s chest as he lies in a hammock. The warm
lighting, earth-tone palette (Manuela in a rose-colored dress), and the inverted framing of her
body create a relaxed tone that suggest the inversion of the rigidity and formality of the social
space of marriage, as represented in the previous scene. The medium close-up provides a more
intimate look into Manuela’s character as she articulates to Simón the feelings of frustration and
longing she feels as a result of her being forced to stay behind as he goes off to war. When she
expresses her desire to go with him, it is understood that this desire is related to the love affair
visually represented by the positioning of their intertwined bodies. But in light of what we
already know about Manuela’s interest in the revolution,1 it is also possible that part of her
frustration is related to her exclusion, as a woman, from armed participation in the war. This
gender ambiguity establishes their affair as a site both for Manuela’s personal, sexual
“indiscretions” and her public, gender “transgressions”; it is a site in which her transgendering is
most dynamic, always carried out in relation to Bolívar’s needs, desires, and privileged male
positioning.
It is immediately after this hammock scene that we cut to the scene of her first crossdressing (in which Sáenz paints herself a moustache in front of the mirror). When, as I described
earlier, she turns away from the mirror and insists on going out unescorted, Sáenz (this time
dressed as a man) exercises the mobility and public agency that are privileges of masculine and
not of feminine space. Dress becomes a way for her to move from private, enclosed, feminine
space out into the public, open masculine spaces of the street at night and of politics. It is a way
for her to subvert the frustration she expressed in the previous scene when she lamented having
to stay behind (in domestic space) as Bolívar actively fought the war. Her transgression of this
space, made possible by the virtual masculinization of her female body, exemplifies what Kuhn
explains is clothing’s ability to “disguise, to alter, even to reconstruct the wearer’s self” (53).
Clothing becomes a performance in which Manuela’s female body becomes codified as a
masculine body space, through which she is free to interact with the public spaces of the street
and of politics. What’s more, the more masculine aspect of her gestures while she is so dressed
suggests her internalization of this transgendering.
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As I discuss in Chapter Three in reference to Manuela’s textual self-gendering, the arena
for her gender transgressions is her relationship with Bolívar within the context of the revolution,
which provided an aperture for the questioning of gender relations, thanks to the discourse
related to liberty and the mobilization of women as part of the war effort;2 in other words,
Manuela’s cross-dressed body becomes a site of resistance within the broader arena of the
revolution, which for her is not only political and economic, but also social. In this scene, she
alludes to her personal investment in the revolution when she states: “Esta noche quiero estar a
solas con esta guerra.”
The sequencing of this mirror/moustache scene with the next three, which in alternating
fashion show Sáenz dressed in feminine, then masculine/military, then feminine clothing once
again, reflects the transgendering evident in her own writings by representing her as a dynamic
subject who moves easily from one gendered space to another. Immediately following Sáenz’s
transgressive, transvested escapade of political propaganda, the film cuts, once again, to the
interior of the Thorne home, where an irate James scolds his wife for her rebellious behavior.
She marches through a series of parlors, heading toward the camera and away from her husband;
having just returned from her transgressions into masculine dress, the street and political
activism, Manuela moves more deeply into (feminine) domestic space, transgendering her body
once again by dressing it in a silk nightgown and lace-trimmed robe. Defending her integrity as
an individual, however, she contests the silencing confinement of marital space, yelling at her
husband, “Mi nombre es Manuela Sáenz,” to which he angrily responds, “De Thorne. Doña
Manuela Sáenz de Thorne.” With this, James reminds her of her social position as his wife, a
position whose verbal construction (“de Thorne”) reflects the patriarchal hierarchy that frames it.
Fig. 17. Thorne chastises Sáenz for her revolutionary activity.
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As Manuela asks her female slaves Nathán and Jonatás to assist her in adjusting her robe, James
continues to reproach her, reminding her that as the daughter of not only a Spaniard but of the
alderman of the royal court of Quito, her political actions are not only jeopardizing her life, their
property, and his name, but are also acts of rebellion against her own father. With his back to the
window, through which moonlight enters as the only source of light in the darkened parlor,
James moves in and out of the light, as his imposing figure casts its shadow on the wall behind
Manuela and her servants. Standing illuminated in the moonlight, Manuela retorts back that she
is also the daughter of a patriot (her mother), and she insists that no Spaniard will control her life
or her death. By emphasizing the synecdochal references to her father as representative of the
Crown and her mother as a republican patriot, by casting patriarchal metaphors in the shadows
and Manuela’s revolutionary discourse in the moonlight, and by equating Manuela’s political
rebellion to familial dissent, this scene frames Manuela’s personal and political rebellion within
the highly gendered framework of patriarchy. It also reflects the tendency of both royalists and
republicans to incorporate the patriarchal model into their political discourse.3
A few stark contrasts between this scene and the prior one reflect the complex nature of
Manuela’s gender representation. In the previous scene, Sáenz dresses herself as a man and, so
dressed, goes out alone into public space, where she voices her political opinions. Acting as an
individual, she displays political and social agency. In the subsequent scene, her female servants
help her with the lacy (feminine) robe that covers her body, which we already know has
transgressed normative social space by engaging in an extramarital affair with Simón and now by
being disguised as a masculine body and traveling unescorted through public streets at night. As
Sáenz covers her female body with appropriately feminine attire, she passes from parlor to
parlor, entering deeper into domestic (i.e., enclosed and private) space, where rather than stand
alone as “Manuela Sáenz” she is repositioned by her husband’s discourse within the patriarchal
framework that assigns and confines her to a subordinate social space as criolla wife: “Manuela
Sáenz de Thorne.” But establishing continuity between the “masculine” and the “feminine”
Manuelas is the revolutionary discourse that in her mind legitimizes her transgressions and
provides a framework in which she associates political and economic liberty with personal
freedom and an idea of honor now open for renegotiation.
From the interior of the Thorne home, we move my means of another flashback to
official military space: first the office of General Daniel F. O’Leary, who informs Manuela that
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she has been appointed as guardian of the Liberator’s personal archives and as such will be
enlisted as part of Bolívar’s High Command; and second, the republican military headquarters,
where Generals Sucre, Urdaneta, O’Leary, Lara, and Córdova are gathered around a map,
strategizing. Formally announced as “La Coronela Manuela Sáenz,” she approaches the circle of
generals with a confident, masculine stride appropriate for the full military uniform that she
wears. Córdova strikes his fist against the map, indicating the resistance faced by Manuela as she
assumes her position within this masculine sphere; he asks her with a sneer, “¿Se puede saber
quién te ha nombrado ‘coronela’?” Lifting her chin high, (a gesture with which she claims to
have equal power and authority to her male colleague) she replies with a confident tone and a
slight smile, “Yo misma,” after which she turns and continues on her way, maintaining the same
confident stride, now accentuated by the rhythmic taping of her riding switch against her
shoulder. Manuela has been formally positioned within official military/masculine space, and in
order to integrate her body into that space, she not only assumes masculine/military dress, but
also the masculine gestures and posturing appropriate to that gendered space. The generals’
reactions remind us that not only do her movements within masculine space transgress gender
norms, but also that in so doing, they are confronted by very real, physical resistance in the form
of striking fists, gruff voices, and sideways glares.
Fig. 18. La Coronela Manuela Sáenz.
Again, what I want to emphasize here is the way in which director Diego Rísquez and editor
Leonardo Henríquez splice together a series of scenes from Manuela’s life, using editing to
represent the agility with which she moved from one gendered space to another. Framing these
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scenes as flashbacks, episodes from the exiled Manuela’s memory of her epic love affair with
Bolívar and her participation in the revolution, this film gives coherence to the series of spatial
experiences that constitute both Manuela’s transgendering and the agency that she enjoyed as a
result.
“A Pioneer for Women’s Rights”
Fig. 19. Sáenz confronts Azuero, who condemns her to death.
She is flanked by a mestiza woman and a nun,
who accompany her when she exits.
Toward the end of the film, as Manuela recalls the events following Bolívar’s exile, and
leading up to her own exile in 1834, we see a scene in which Manuela stands in representation of
all Latin American women, particularly those whose participation in the revolution (represented
by her military uniform) challenges women’s traditional positionality within Latin American
colonial society. The scene takes place in the office of Vicente Azuero who, in response to
Manuela’s continued activism, orders that she be put to death.4 Seated at his desk, screen left,
Azuero declares his order to several witnesses, standing opposite him, screen right. Among these
witnesses are a mestiza woman modestly dressed in a white shawl and simple skirt and a nun in
full habit. As none of the witnesses to Azuero’s declaration speak or take any action, their
identities and reasons for being present are unclear. It is particularly unclear why a mestiza and a
nun are present in this privileged space of patriarchal political authority. With Azuero positioned
space-off, frame left, Manuela enters from frame right, dressed in full military uniform and
moving toward him with confident strides. Approaching his desk, she steps between the mestiza
and the nun, taking a position between the two women and Azuero, whose screen-left to screen-
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right gaze (coinciding, once again, to the left to right reading that has been naturalized in
Western culture), is contested by her defiant screen-right to screen-left gaze. This gaze, Sáenz’s
confident stance (standing tall with her hands behind her back), her position over the seated
Azuero, and the revolutionary ideology connotated by her military uniform combine to define
Sáenz’s body as a site of resistance within the physical and ideological space of this government
office. By standing in front of the other two women, whose presence, if not symbolic, begs
explanation, Sáenz represents colonial Latin American women as a whole. Azuero’s violent
response to her continued political activity recalls Ecuadorian president Rocafuerte’s
condemnation of women as the inciters of revolution.5 Accordingly, the verbal text of her selfdefense draws from a flyer written and posted around Bogota by the historical Manuela Sáenz on
June 20, 1830, in response to public attacks against her person, recriminating and delegitimizing
her revolutionary activity on the grounds that she is a woman;6 in Rísquez’s film, Manuela’s
character challenges Azuero: “¿Por qué llaman hermanos a los del sur y a mí extranjera? Mi
patria es todo el continente americano. Yo nací bajo la línea ecuatoriana.”7
As María Cifuentes points out, with this declaration, Manuela directly questions “al
Estado patriarcal establecido a base de lazos de hermandad fraternal [...y r]eclama su
nacionalidad y ciudadanía tanto ecuatoriana como americana y su derecho a participar
abiertamente en el proceso político, concretamente en defensa de los ideales liberales
bolivarianos” (136). The united front presented in the film by Manuela, the mestiza, and the nun
reflects the historical solidarity among women who supported Manuela and who perhaps shared
her aspirations for political and social liberty, a solidarity reflected historically in the publication
of a flyer signed by “Unas Mujeres Liberales” subsequent to and in support of Manuela’s 1830
declaration of self-defense.8 The framing of these three women as a unified cluster references
this historical solidarity and represents Manuela as spokesperson for women’s rights.
This solidarity is further emphasized when Manuela turns and exits the room, and both
the mestiza and the nun follow her. I am inclined to interpret both the mestiza, and the nun as
symbolic references to the exploitation and oppression of women within the heteropatriarchal
system. The mestiza, who brings to mind the image of the Malinche,9 represents the
miscegenation resulting from sexual exploitation of indigenous women and the maternal role of
women in general. The nun represents another form of female sexual oppression, in this case by
means of her enclosure by the Catholic Church. Standing together, the nun, the mestiza and
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Manuela question the authority of the patriarchal triad of Church, Father, and State, respectively.
Remaining silent, the mestiza and the nun reflect the political, social, and discursive silencing of
women that persisted into the republican era while Manuela, the only one who exercises her
voice, presents the possibility of the revolution as an ideological movement that opened up a
space for the questioning of women’s social positioning.10 As Cifuentes points out, “Si bien
levanta la misma bandera política de Bolívar, el discurso no es el mismo; en el momento de
incorporarse Sáenz redefine el proyecto bolivariano al abrir un espacio relativo para las mujeres
criollas que podía rebasar los límites de la maternidad cristiana-republicana” (138).
As we saw in Chapters Two and Three, however, Sáenz—and women in general—were
excluded from the privileged social space of fraternal, republican friendship. The struggle over
space in the emergent republics is dramatized in this confrontational scene between Manuela
(and all the women she represents) and Azuero, who reacts to the women’s exit with rage: “No
puede ser. Ahora hasta las mujeres de Bogotá están con Manuela Sáenz. Las mujeres que
siempre hablaron pestes11 de ella.” Unable to subvert her expulsion by the government, Sáenz
nonetheless maintains some degree of agency in the form of sustained (and supposedly
collective) resistance to patriarchal authority, an agency visually represented by the women’s
standing position and voluntary exit, as opposed to Azuero’s stationary position seated behind
his desk. Regardless of their protest, the sustained silence of the other two women and the
subsequent exile of Sáenz remind us of one of the film’s central themes: that women collectively
(and Sáenz as an individual) have been erased from history. I will explore this theme in greater
detail in the next section of this chapter.
All of the previous examples of Manuela’s gender representations in the film Manuela
Sáenz: Libertadora del Libertador are taken from the flashbacks that collectively form the
memory of the aged, crippled, and impoverished Manuela, who lived in exile in the remote
fishing port of Paita, Peru from 1834 until her death in 1856. As I previously stated, the
sequencing of these flashbacks emphasizes the agility with which Manuela transgenders herself
according to the public, private, political or amorous spaces she intended to inhabit, experience
and utilize. As flashbacks, these scenes reveal the interior space of Manuela’s memory, a space
in which she has experienced gender as a dynamic, flexible self-representation. This said,
Manuela’s agile transgendering is only one of the themes present in Rísquez’s representation of
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the gender of this historical figure. Another theme, as I will explore in the following section, is
that of a woman erased from official history.
Exiled in Paita, Erased from History
The synopsis provided on the back cover of the DVD case in which Manuela Sáenz:
Libertadora del Libertador12 is distributed in the United States reflects (in an ironic way) another
driving theme of Rísquez’s representation of Manuela Sáenz: that of a woman erased from
history. The synopsis reads:
Es 1856. En Paita, un oxidado puerto pesquero de Perú, se encuentra una mujer que
escandalizó a todo el continente treinta años atrás. Su presencia fue borrada de los libros
de historia: se trata de Manuela Sáenz, el gran amor de Simón Bolívar, héroe venezolano
que comandó la gran revolución suramericana en la primera mitad del siglo XIX, llamado
desde entonces El Libertador.13
Meant to summarize a film that represents Sáenz as a dynamic, influential, active participant in
Latin American history, the synopsis actually resituates her within the margins of that history. It
does this by representing her in passive terms and identifying her not as a “pioneer for women’s
rights” (as stated on the front of the case), nor as a fervent revolutionary (as depicted in the film),
but rather simply as Bolívar’s lover, a highly-gendered positioning that silences the very voice
that the film attempts to restore.
This synopsis does, however, point to some of the spaces into which Rísquez locates
Sáenz’s character in order to develop the theme of the female subject whose political and social
agency has been negated and forgotten in collective national memory. These spaces include Paita
(the remote fishing village where Sáenz experiences the political and social isolation of exile)
and, once again, her love affair with Simón Bolívar. This relationship, as Manuela’s character
states in the film, has led others to condemn her; lamenting her situation to Jonatás and to
Herman Melville, she claims, “Este continente no me perdonó que fuera la mujer que le secaba el
sudor al héroe, que le sufrí su toz, su tristeza. [...] Nadie me perdonó el amor.” In this way,
Manuela’s positioning in the physical and mental spaces of exile, which Rísquez represents as
the master narrative framing the series of flashbacks that constitute a large portion of the film,
positions her within the gendered (feminine) spaces of the margins of history.
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The film opens in Paita, a setting established on the rocky Pacific shore of Peru. We go
below deck of a whaling vessel, where a motley crew of whalers, each one speaking in his native
language, complains of his arduous voyages. Through a voice-over we meet Manuela, who
states, “Estoy en Paita, un puerto triste del Perú.” The scene is shot in black and white washed in
sepia, an aesthetic that establishes this place as a site of memory, of history, and of oblivion. This
idea is articulated by one of the whalers temporarily docked in Paita, Herman Melville, who calls
Paita “un rincón olvidado del Perú” where there once lived a woman he would have liked to
meet: Manuela Sáenz. With this statement, Melville’s character establishes the fact that Sáenz,
an internationally recognized figure, is marginalized in this forgotten corner of the world, where
she and her contributions to Latin American history are all but erased.
Delightfully surprised to discover that Sáenz is still alive, Melville pays her a visit in the
humble cabaña where she lives, impoverished and confined to a chair. Upon seeing her he asks,
“¿Es Ud. Manuela Sáenz?” to which she replies, “No; yo sólo soy su sombra.” When Manuela
asks Melville why he wants her to recount events of the past, he tells her “Porque siempre me
han interesado las leyendas, y Ud. es una leyenda.” A legend in her own time (a fact reflected in
her references to others who have come asking her to retell the past), Sáenz represents herself as
having had already passed away: “Hace 26 años que morí. [...] Ya soy lo que ves, una mujer
entrada en carnes, inválida [...].” Associating her death with that of Bolívar, Sáenz not only
expresses the deep love that she had for Simón, but also anticipates the way in which she will
fade into history now that she is without the Liberator’s endorsement and glory, which she
enjoyed vicariously through him.
Fig. 20. “Ya soy lo que ves, una mujer entrada en
carnes, inválida [...].” Sáenz speaks with Melville in Paita.
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Letters written during this time period by the historical Manuela Sáenz to her friend and
former president of Ecuador General Juan José Flores express a sense of frustrating remoteness
experienced during her exile. Rísquez materializes these feelings of remoteness, abandonment,
and death through the aesthetics and the mise-en-scène of the scenes representing Manuela’s
exile. Besides the previously mentioned palette of black and white washed in sepia, Rísquez uses
the setting of Manuela’s modest home and the chair14 to which she is confined in order to
underscore these themes. Confined once again not only to domestic space, but also to a chair
within that domestic space, Manuela assumes a position of immobility and passivity. She
emphasizes this when she first arrives at her home in Paita; settling into the chair for the first
time she comments, “Esta es una buena silla donde morir.” What’s more, in this chair, in this
house on the beach, visitors come to her. In this film, the majority of these visitors are men,
specifically Melville, Simón Rodríguez, and Antonio de la Guerra, each one representing some
kind of connection to the outside world, some kind of agency in masculine public space that
Manuela will not enjoy while she is confined within the private space of her home.
Each one of these visitors points to a different aspect of Manuela’s silencing as a
feminine subject. While Manuela is “erased” in Paita, Melville will go on to write of his
experiences there in the novel that he mentions during their conversation (Moby Dick). Many of
Manuela’s letters and diaries will be burned to avoid the spread of the plague from which she
died. The ones that remain will be carefully guarded in archives and personal collections, but
none will reach an audience as widespread as that of Melville’s novel. A second visitor, Simón
Rodríguez, who was the teacher of Simón Bolívar, tells Sáenz, “Tú eres mi único vínculo con lo
mejor de los sueños de esta tierra.” Though Rodríguez links Manuela to Bolivarian ideals and
dreams, he is also a reminder that her legacy is one that died with Bolívar.
Finally, a third visitor, Antonio de la Guerra, who enters her home asking for “La
Libertadora del Libertador,” alludes to Sáenz’s marginalized state by updating her on the
political happenings of Venezuela (an arena in which she once aspired to be an active
participant). His military uniform stands in gendered contrast to Manuela’s white blouse, skirts,
and shawl and is verbally reflected in his addressing her as “doña” Manuela as opposed to
“Coronela,” which is a title she no longer enjoys and that corresponds to a masculine space that
she no longer occupies. Their conversation articulates Sáenz’s tragic silencing as opposed to
Bolívar’s immortalization as a national hero; de la Guerra begins, “Sabes, a mi General Bolívar,
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lo quieren ahora como a un dios. Todo el mundo lo venera como el mayor de nuestros héroes.”
He later laments, “Ahora que la veo así, tan lejos de todo, tan borrada del mundo, siento que
nadie entendió los amores de Ud. con mi General Bolívar. Fueron puro siglo XIX.” Manuela,
identifying herself once again as Bolívar’s female lover and partner, represents herself in some
of the most passive terms presented in the film: that of the Maja depicted in Goya’s famous
portraits, “Yo fui su Maja Vestida...y su Maja Desnuda.” She smiles, shaking her head with
nostalgia, “Fueron los únicos ocho años en que estuve realmente viva.”
This passage reflects two key aspects of Manuela’s gender representation both in
Rísquez’s film and also in her own writings. The first is the fact that Manuela, on her own
accord, lacks access to political space, is accordingly excluded from the historical developments
of the new republics, and is relegated to the silent margins of official history while her male
counterparts occupy the privileged spaces within that discourse. In her letters from exile to
General Flores and to González Alminanti, Sáenz communicates the frustration she felt as a
result of this exclusion. Driven by her political convictions, Manuela used her correspondence
and friendship with Flores as a way to maintain access to the political sphere. As María
Cifuentes notes, “Sáenz hizo uso de todos los medios a su disposición para insertarse en los
debates políticos; en donde no habían espacios, los creó” (140). This aspect of Sáenz’s political
agency during her exile is not represented in Rísquez’s film.
A second way in which this conversation genders Manuela is in the fashion of the tragic
heroine of the nineteenth-century romanticism that characterized the cultural production of the
era depicted in this scene; it underscores her tragically passive, misunderstood, and dependent
positioning with respect to Bolívar. In this way, this scene communicates to the viewer that, in
spite of her agile transgendering during the revolution, Manuela has ultimately been repositioned
by the historical discourse of hegemonic patriarchy into the subaltern (read “feminine”) site of
erasure from official history. She is, as Rísquez says, “el romanticismo del siglo XIX elevado a
su máxima expresión.”15
On the other hand, as guardian of Bolívar’s personal and official archives, of the letters
exchanged between the two, and of privileged and intimate knowledge about Bolívar and about
the past, Manuela also embodies a site of memory. Simón Rodríguez points to her positioning
within this space when he tells her that she is his only link to the ideals of the past, and Sáenz
herself acknowledges this role when she presumes that, just like everyone else who comes to
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visit her, Herman Melville is there looking for information about the past. The trunk full of
Bolívar’s letters that Manuela keeps is the visual marker of this space of memory, which is also
contained in the physical space of her body, the body that had moved within the spaces of those
historical episodes. As a woman marginalized out of her own story, Manuela represents the
feminine space of memory that her male visitors (including Rísquez) reintegrate into the official
historiography of nineteenth-century Latin America.
Conclusions
Fig. 21. Final scene of Manuela Sáenz, Libertadora del Libertador.
Following Manuela’s death, Melville sees her image as he prepares
to set sail from Paita.
Rísquez’s film is a unique and long-awaited synthesis of the life of Manuela Sáenz
Aizpuru. It joins Luis Zúñiga’s novel Manuela, María Cifuentes’s article “Lo que soy es un
formidable carácter,” and Sarah Chambers’s study “Republican Friendship: Manuela Sáenz
Writes Women into the Nation” in responding to Nela Marínez’s call for a reconceptualization of
Sáenz as a complex individual. By drawing from Sáenz’s own writings and by exploring the
relationships between the physical, conceptual, and symbolic spaces of her experiences, the film
captures the mobility that has characterized Sáenz’s constant transgendering in her own selfrepresentations. Just as in her letters and diaries Manuela repeatedly asserts herself in masculine
social space and then reclaims feminine spaces, Rísquez’s film makes use of editing, mise-enscène—especially costuming—and dialogue in order to constantly reposition Manuela within the
various gendered spaces of her experiences of oppression and transgression. Moreover, by
establishing Manuela’s gender representation in relation to her interaction with Simón Bolívar,
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and by establishing a real ideological connection between their love affair and her active
participation in the revolution, the film portrays Sáenz as a coherent subject who, in spite of her
marginalization from official history, demonstrated real agency as a “guerra entera” and a
“pionera de la liberación femenina.”
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CHAPTER FIVE
CONCLUSIONS
This study has to explored the ways in which Manuela Sáenz Aizpuru has been
represented by herself and others as a gendered subject. It serves as a case study of how an
individual is gendered by the ways in which she is described within the physical, conceptual, and
symbolic spaces in which she moves, interacts with others, and experiences the world. This study
relies on a poststructuralist notion of gender as a constructed aspect of a subject’s identity. Such
a notion has underlain feminist and queer theories in recent years, such as those of Judith Butler,
Teresa de Lauretis, and Judith Halberstam, who has taken this idea of the socially-constructed
nature of gender one step further by dismantling the term transsexual and by pointing out that
transitivity is an inherent aspect of gender. Stating that “[...] gender is defined by transitivity,
[...and] sexuality manifests as multiple sexualities [...],” Halberstam argues that the distinction
between gender and transgender is a “cultural fiction,” that all gender is transgender, and that
movement is inherent in the construction of any gender identity (767).
Another perspective on gender at the base of this project is that it is constructed—in other
words represented and experienced—by the ways in which the subject interacts with the spaces
around her. Mediating between the interior (the cognitive and emotional) subject and the people,
objects, ideas, and symbols that surround her is her body, which, as Henri Lefèbvre points out,
not only mediates between the mental and social spheres of a subject’s existence, but also
produces and reproduces the space around it (199). As Elizabeth Grosz argues, a subject’s
corporeality is essential to her identity; the study of an individual’s embodiment helps us to
understand how that individual’s consciousness or interiority is related to other entities in the
socio-natural world (83-4). These ideas draw my attention to the physical, conceptual, and
symbolic space of the body; to its movement through the other spaces that constitute the
subject’s world; and to the ways in which this movement—and ultimately the subject—are
represented in relation to those spaces. This relationship, as de Lauretis points out, is the
subject’s gender, which is relative to the spaces around it. A gendered subject is an embodied
entity constantly positioned and repositioned within the physical, mental and social spaces
around it.
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In this project I have examined how these two aspects of gender—transitivity and an
inherent relationship to space—have factored into gender representations of a woman whose
behaviors contradicted those considered proper of her sex. This perspective has meant applying
poststructuralist ideas about gender and space to nineteenth-century texts representative of a
culture based on a heteropatriarchal ordering of society. In that social context, gender was
directly linked to biological sex, and gender traits are conceptualized in terms of binaries in
which the feminine realm is one of passivity, domesticity, historical inconsequence, irrationality,
and subordination to the masculine. This approach has also meant looking at degrees of mobility
in the gender representation of a woman living in a culture in which public mobility was the
privilege of men. But this aspect is particularly interesting because Manuela Sáenz lived in a
time and space of revolution, of political and economic upheaval, and of the temporary
mobilization of women for the purpose of contributing to the fight for Spanish American
independence.
The perspectives presented in Chapter Two are those of three men who illustrate some of
the ways in which the culturally gendered distinctions between public and private spaces have
been used to represent Manuela Sáenz as a perverse individual. I began with a look at the
memoirs of Jean Baptiste Boussingault, the French scientist who spent a great deal of time
describing Manuela’s body and illustrating how that body was perverted because of the way it
was dressed, by the way it moved, and by the way it betrayed the sacred symbolic spaces of
maternity and wifehood. With his highly sexualized representation of Manuela’s body and
repositioning of that body within feminized domestic space, Boussingault maintained that Sáenz
was essentially feminine and that any movement, use, or representation of her body outside of
the physical and symbolic spaces of hegemonic femininity were perversions of that body. Rather
than reconcile the masculine and feminine aspects of Sáenz’s behavior into one coherent identity,
Boussingault portrayed her as an almost split personality whose movements within masculine
and feminine spaces were nothing more than a kind of metamorphosis facilitated by a daily dose
of alcohol.
Also unable to reconcile the masculine and feminine characteristics of Sáenz’s identity,
Ricardo Palma categorized her as a woman-man, a vague category that he had also used to
describe another woman of a very different gender experience (the cross-dressed María Leocadia
Álvarez/Antonio Ita, who had embraced masculine social space to the point of becoming a
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husband). Palma’s inability to find coherence in Sáenz’s complex gender identity is reflected in
the fact that each part of the essay in which he describes Sáenz represents her gender in a distinct
way; she is either the venerable—almost grandmotherly or regal—woman who feeds him sweets
and tells him of her past, the vivacious young beauty who had captured Bolívar’s heart and
whose activities in the masculine spheres of politics and warfare did not alter her essential
gender, or the unnatural woman-man whose gender was shifted toward the masculine by how her
body was dressed, how it was at home and under control in dangerous and public (i.e.,
masculine) spaces, and how her mind connected to the masculine intellectual spheres of
rationality and history. At no time in Palma’s description does Sáenz move freely between
masculine and feminine social spaces.
Just as the war for independence opened up a space for female mobilization in early
Spanish America, Sáenz’s personal and political relationship with Simón Bolívar opened up an
arena in her life for her to test the limits of her participation in traditionally masculine spheres of
activity. For this reason, in the personal correspondence between Sáenz and Bolívar we can
follow the negotiation that takes place between these two individuals as Sáenz tries to assert her
agency in masculine spaces and Bolívar, representing the heteropatriarchy still firmly in place in
spite of Spanish American independence, reminds Sáenz of her place in traditionally feminine
spaces. He represents Sáenz as a highly corporal and sensual entity, comparing her to
mythological figures, situating her in the garden and home, insisting on her passivity in battle,
and contrasting her female condition to the tenacity required for survival on the arduous military
campaign. On the other hand, we also see the way he responds to Manuela’s transgressions of
these gender norms: when she demonstrates valor in battle, he allows her entrance into the
conceptual space of military rank (granting her the titles captain and later colonel), and he further
validates her position within these ranks by using military terminology in flirtatious passages. At
the same time, Bolívar’s representation of Sáenz to other individuals, such as to General José
María Córdova and his sister María Antonia, points to the truly transgressive and controversial
nature of this gender negotiation, which—along with the love affair—bridges the gap between
private/feminine and public/masculine spaces.
The multifaceted relationship between Sáenz and Bolívar, the way in which Manuela
wrote about it, and the way in which she represented her own gender in this context was the
focus of Chapter Three. In this analysis I incorporated the notion of republican friendship, that
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homosocial, horizontal, fraternal relationship between criollo men that formed the socio-political
foundation of the emerging republics. Sarah Chambers has argued that, in her letters to Juan José
Flores, Sáenz fostered this kind of friendship in order to “write herself into the nation.” I analyze
the ways in which Sáenz wrote herself into the independence movement in much the same way:
by representing herself as an active participant in events of historical consequence. To do this,
she took advantage of her intimate relationship with Bolívar, a relationship that, as pointed out in
Chapter Two, was both personal and political, private and public. On a personal level, Manuela
and Simón were invested in a love affair that fostered in her a sense of devotion, obligation, and
desire. But they had also established a mutually-beneficial political alliance in which she
provided him with information and military service, and he gave her access to active
participation in military activities, knowledge of important political information, and public
recognition as the primary woman in his life. In this way, the relationship was based on a private,
heterosexual love relationship in which Manuela affirmed her femininity in compliment of
Simón’s masculinity; this is a how she solidified this alternative form of “republican friendship.”
On the other hand, Bolívar, as we saw in Chapter Two, was stuck between the demands of his
lover and the demands of the revolution, and so he essentially negotiated with Sáenz the limits to
her participation in the masculine spheres of politics and military activity. As the two negotiated
Manuela’s ever-shifting social space, they established for her an ever-shifting gender that was
characterized by its mobility.
Keeping in mind that Being is experienced as a site or a place within space (Massey 9),
we can see how Manuela’s gendered Being is (re)created as it is positioned and repositioned in a
variety of spaces. Following Henri Lefèbvre’s concept of the triad of social space, I understand
these spaces of Manuela’s Being to be physical, conceptual, and symbolic spaces, all of which
overlap and operate in dialogue with one another. In her letters and diaries, I have found that
Manuela established herself as a gendered Being by positioning and repositioning herself within
both feminine and masculine spheres of activity. In order to foster the relationship that gives her
a sense of agency in public affairs, she reclaims the physical space of her female body and its
sensuality, she positions that body within the garden and the home, and she describes the
traditional female handiwork that her hands create. At times she affirms her body as a site of
(feminine) passive waiting and refuge, but at other times she asserts the tenacity and
determination of her spirit to mobilize that body in the masculine spaces of the battlefield, public
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demonstrations and the military campaign through the Andes. Likewise, when government
authorities physically and socially remove her from the center of political activity—and even
from national citizenship—she uses a variety of strategies in order to reposition herself within
these physical and conceptual spaces: she reaffirms her feminine positionality as a “poor helpless
woman”; she claims sanctuary in the theoretically and ideally ungendered space of republican
citizenship; she counters attempts to categorize her as a crazy, irrational woman by calling
herself a friend of order (which implies her embodiment of the masculine quality of rationality);
and she legitimizes her transgressions into the masculine sphere of politics by maintaining that
the motivation behind her involvement and her subsequent exile was her love and veneration for
Simón Bolívar (a feminine positionality). Over the course of her writings, then, we see a constant
shift in the way she represents her own gender, which is manifested in the ways she describes her
relationship to the physical, conceptual, and symbolic spaces around her. It is also in constant
dialogue and negotiation with others’ representations of her.
What is most interesting in Manuela’s writings is not just the ever-shifting nature of her
self-representation within gendered spaces, but also the coherence that she is able to establish for
that gender identity by legitimizing all of her actions through the emotional and ideological
relationship she shares with Simón Bolívar. This relationship is an arena in which Manuela
rejects patriarchy on several levels: by leaving her marriage, by challenging the codes of sexual
morality according to which she had lost her honor but Simón had not, and by using the affair as
a way to secure her participation in the War for Independence. Regardless of the outcome—that
the new republics would reinforce feminine domesticity, passivity, and subordination in an effort
to maintain traditional social order—for Manuela the revolution was a period of personal
mobility and the possibility of breaking out of the traditional spaces and patterns of female
activity. Manuela’s personal agency lies in this mobility, and this is why she represented such a
threat to government officials of the emerging republics, the socially conservative society that
followed independence, and any who would paint Simón Bolívar as a demigod. As Doreen
Massey states, “ [...] in certain cultural quarters, the mobility of women does indeed seem to pose
a threat to a settled patriarchal order. [...] One gender-disturbing message might be—in terms of
both identity and space—keep moving!” (11).
In Chapter Four I studied the ways in which a postmodern representation of Manuela
Sáenz, Diego Rísquez’s film Manuela Sáenz, Libertadora del Libertador, picks up on the
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transitivity that characterizes Manuela’s self-gendering; communicates it through the use of
costuming, mise-en-scène, gestures and movement, dialogue, and editing; and celebrates it as the
agency that made Sáenz a “pioneer for the liberation of Latin American women,” a “cry for
liberty” and “the epitome of nineteenth-century romanticism.” This focus on transitivity portrays
Sáenz as a dynamic individual, someone who challenges the dichotomous gender stereotypes
inherent in patriarchy. And just as Manuela does in her own writings, the film contextualizes
these gender shifts within Sáenz’s relationship with Simón Bolívar, a relationship that both grew
out of her transgressions of hegemonic femininity and facilitated further transgressions into
masculine spheres of activity. In the film this relationship is lived out through a series of
flashbacks that are given coherence by becoming the life story that an aged Sáenz tells her
visitors as she herself reflects back on her life. This relationship also bridges the gap between
private and public space, providing a forum in which Sáenz’s personal acts of love and devotion
toward Bolívar become indistinguishable from her contributions to the public cause of
independence. This is emphasized in the final scenes of the film, when an aged and exiled
Manuela is pleased to hear that Bolívar has been embraced as a hero, even though she herself has
been largely erased from official history.
Throughout the course of this project, my attention has been drawn repeatedly to the
question of mobility. When we compare texts in which Sáenz is portrayed as perverse, unnatural,
or criminal to texts in which she is portrayed as multifaceted yet coherent, it becomes clear that
the key to this coherence is mobility. My study underscores the importance of a subject’s ability
to be dynamic. This is a view of gender identity as an ever-shifting site of internal experience,
physical embodiment, and social relationships, and as such it points to the inherent relationship
between a subject’s gender identity and the spaces around her.
Limitations of the Present Study and Direction of Future Research
There are several points of interest related to this study that have not been thoroughly
developed in this study but that invite further investigation in the future. The first has to do with
the texts examined, all of which—in this case—are literary or cinematic. For a thorough
intertextual study of the relationship between physical, conceptual and symbolic spaces, it would
be helpful to incorporate into the project an analysis of the non-literary cultural “texts”—the
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clothing, architecture, art, and objects of daily use—that constituted the physical and symbolic
spaces of Manuela’s daily experiences. This kind of intertextual and interdisciplinary study
would not only enhance a reading of literary representations of gender—such as the texts studied
in this thesis—it would also enrich the study of cinematic texts, allowing for a more thorough
analysis of mise-en-scène and its relationship to gender representation. This research would also
provide the foundation for the study of museums and memorials, such as the Museo Manuela
Sáenz in Quito, and of how Manuela is gendered by the selection, arrangement, and description
of objects used to represent her in these sites of national memory.
A second limitation to the scope of this project is related to the film analysis. First, of the
four films that have portrayed Sáenz, only two were available to me for this project: Diego
Rísquez’s Manuela Sáenz, Libertadora del Libertador and Jorge Triana’s Bolívar soy yo. The
other two—biographies of Simón Bolívar by filmmakers Miguel Contreras Torres (1942) and
Alessandro Blasseti (1969)—are housed in archives, such as the film archive at the Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México. Due to the amount of detail required for me to conduct a
thorough analysis of the gender representation in Rísquez’s film, I chose to focus on this
particular film alone (his being the only biography of Manuela Sáenz). But the other three films
present an opportunity for a comparative study of representation, not only about Manuela
specifically, but also about the representation of masculinities and femininities in relation to
revolution, independence, violence, and history. My analysis in this area also lends itself to a
comparative study of gender representation in other films portraying women in early Latin
America, such as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Catalina de Erauso, Micaela Villegas (“La
Perricholi”), and Santa Rosa de Lima.
Future research on Manuela Sáenz will also be enhanced by a more thorough analysis of
other texts—both nineteenth-century accounts and more recent books—that address Manuela’s
gender. For example, the new millennium has seen a resurging interest in Sáenz. Since 2000,
there have been more than seven novels and biographies published about her. The perspectives
presented in these novels, together with those of Rísquez and Triana’s films, could be studied in
light of the current state of feminism and women’s issues in Latin America (specifically in
Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, and Peru). Additionally, the novels about Manuela’s slaves—
Luz Argentina Chiriboga’s Jonatás y Manuela (1994) and Reinaldo Miño’s Las esclavas de
Manuela (1999)—could be studied in light of the intersections of gender, class and race.
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The question of class, in fact, is another critical problem that would enhance my analysis
of the gender representations of Manuela Sáenz. The norms of feminine behavior that I have
discussed in this project were those assigned to a specific group of women: the elite women of
Spanish descent living in late colonial and early republican Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia. The
norms of femininity for these women were not only a factor of biological sex, but also of class.
Further research into the class-specificity of these gender norms would shed further light on the
relationships between criolla, plebian, and slave femininities and the spaces in which those
femininities were performed.
Another critical problem that was beyond the scope of the present study but that will
enhance my future research is that of masculinity. When discussing norms of femininity, and in
particular transgressions of feminine spaces—it becomes clear that femininities are constructed
in contrast to masculinities; in order to appreciate the spatial transgressions of a feminine subject
such as Sáenz, it would be helpful to understand more fully the norms of masculinity and the
boundaries of masculine spaces. I address this question frequently in my analysis when I discuss
hegemonic patriarchy and the regime of heteropatriarchy (particularly in reference to republican
citizenship and “republican friendship”), but the problem of masculinities and of the contours of
masculine spaces can be further developed.
Another theme that inspires future research in this area is the relationship between gender
and sexuality, particularly in the representation of women who transgress the spaces and
behavior norms of prescribed femininity. For example, in Boussingault’s description of Manuela
Sáenz and of her sexual behaviors, the question of gender perversion is closely linked to that of
sexual perversion. The scientist suggests that Sáenz maintained a sexual relationship with
Jonatás, one of her female slaves. In his description of that relationship, he makes it a point to
indicate Jonatás’ masculine attributes, which, by contrast, imply Manuela as the feminine partner
in the relationship. The assumption that female masculinity necessarily equates to lesbianism is
an idea that calls for further research, particularly in the case of women who cross-dressed and
took on masculine personae in order to gain social or political agency.
Boussingault’s memoirs point to another aspect of gender representation that invites
future research: the embodiment of femininity in Latin America during the Age of
Enlightenment. This question emerges in Boussingault’s text in the way the author positions
Manuela’s female body within nature (which he views through a scientific lens) and in his
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allusion to maternity when describing the scene in which Sáenz’s pet bear cub was clutching her
breast. In Ricardo Palma’s text, it emerges in his naturalized association between femininity and
lack of control over one’s body, which, as I explained in Chapter Two, was a gender stereotype
found in medical discourse about hysteria and the treatment of hysterical women. One question
that emerges in this regard is the representation of the female body as a biological and symbolic
site of maternity.
Specific to research on Manuela Sáenz, by focusing on the dynamic nature of Manuela’s
transgendering, this project points to the question of mobility in identity formation and to further
research on the relationship between time and space in the way identity is constructed and
experienced. I addressed this point briefly in Chapter One, where I discussed Törsten
Hägerstrand’s perspective of time-geography. Hägerstrand states that “on the continuum between
biography and aggregate statistics, there is a twilight zone to be explored [...]. With concern for
the individual, it follows that we need to understand better what it means for a location to have
not only space coordinates but also time coordinates” (9-10). The Swedish geographer maintains
that “location in space cannot effectively be separated from the flow of time” (10). These ideas
are the premise for his time-geography perspective, which has been applied by Gillian Rose as a
way to study the spatiality of women’s everyday lives and to focus on the intersections between
the “paths” women take in their daily activities and the physical, ideological, and institutional
aids or obstacles they encounter at various points in time and space along those paths (22).
Hägerstrand calls these obstacles “constraints” and classifies them into three types: capability
constraints (the physical limitations to movement), coupling constraints (which compel
individuals to convene at certain times and in certain places), and authority constraints (which
are rules through which society regulates temporospatial behavior).
While I employ Henri Lefèbvre’s triad of social space in order to analyze the dynamic
process of negotiation taking place in representations of Sáenz’s gender, this analysis could be
taken one step further by applying Hägerstrand’s perspective on constraints. This would be
particularly helpful in identifying the physical and ideological barriers to Manuela’s movement
through and among the physical, conceptual, and ideological spaces of her gender performance.
For example, one capability constraint to Manuela’s performance of masculinity is the relative
weakness of her female body compared to a typical male body. This constraint is articulated in
Bolívar’s refusal to bring her along on the dangerous journey through the Andes, to which she
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replies that she has “más pantalones” than his male officers. What is interesting here is the way
in which Manuela redefines strength and masculinity in order to justify her transgression of
gendered space. She downplays the capability constraint on her body and affirms a notion of
strength equating it to mental tenacity (metaphorically represented by the male genitalia) rather
than physical force.1 Another way in which capability constraints affected Manuela’s gender
performance was the way in which Bolívar’s need for food and rest (the two primary capability
constraints mentioned by Hägerstrand) compelled her to reclaim the feminine role of nurturer.
Evidence of this is found in her many letters, where she encourages him to eat the food she has
packed for him and to return to the hacienda, where he will find repose with her.
A discussion of coupling constraints would further my analysis of Sáenz’s experience of
gender in public and private spaces. It would also be helpful in the analysis of Sáenz’s
interactions with other individuals. The most obvious examples of this kind of constraint are the
romantic rendezvous that Sáenz and Bolívar describe in their letters. In order to realize these
encounters, Sáenz performs femininity, which is opposite and complementary to Bolívar’s
masculinity. On the other hand, in a scene in which director Diego Rísquez wants to emphasize
Sáenz’s masculinity, he brings her together with her female slaves, whose sensual dance
highlights their female sexuality. The underlying premise in both instances is that prerequisite to
sexual coupling is the presence of both femininity and masculinity.
Finally, Hägerstrand’s notion of authority constraints would bring into focus the role of
devices which he calls “control areas” or “domains,” and which he defines as “time-space
entit[ies] within which things and events are under the control of a given individual or a given
group” (16). Domains place restrictions on movement: “Those who have access to power in a
superior domain frequently use this to restrict the set of possible actions which are permitted
inside subordinate domains” (16). These notions of authority constraints and domains would
enhance an analysis of Sáenz’s response to marital and domestic space and the ways in which
she confronts the legal, economic, and moral restrictions imposed upon her through marital law.
It would also be valuable for a study of gender and class.
The objective of this project has been to focus on the use of space in order to perform and
describe gender. By taking this approach, this study adds a new dimension to the previous
literature on Manuela Sáenz, most of which consists of biographies structured chronologically,
and many of which attempt to explain Sáenz’s eccentric and bold behaviors as products of her
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experience as an illegitimate, motherless child. Applying Hägerstrand’s time-geography model
would acknowledge the fact that Sáenz’s performance of gender was not only spatial, but
temporospatial. This would further my investigation into the complexities of Sáenz’s gender
identity, responding to Nela Martínez’s call for a reexamination of Sáenz as a complex
individual.
A central theme of this project has been mobility: both in the sense of gender as
transgender and in respect to the opportunity presented by wartime mobilization for Manuela—
and perhaps other women—to test gender boundaries. The time-geography model would enhance
this study of mobilization and enrich the development of a model for studying gender
performance and representation during periods of substantial social, political, and/or economic
shift, such as the Middle Period spanning the Spanish American Revolution (1750-1850), to
which Victor Uribe-Uran (2001) has called our attention for further study. In this way, I hope
that my research into the gender representations of Manuela Sáenz contributes to the dialogues
on gender, identity, and space in early Spanish America.
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NOTES
Introduction
1
This passage is quoted in Hedges (88).
2
The exact date of Manuela’s birth has been disputed. According to Antonio Cacua Prada, Sáenz
was born on December 28, 1795 (29-30), but Victor von Hagen, who has been cited by several
subsequent biographers, affirms a birth year of 1797 (299). Manuel Espinosa Apolo claims she
was born on December 19, 1797. But according to Cacua Prada, who based his statement on
death records, Manuela’s mother died on January 25, 1796, rendering impossible a 1797 birth
date.
3
Jorge Villalba argues that, while several biographers include this detail of Manuela’s life, it is
undocumented, just as her stay at Cataguango is not recorded (Manuela Sáenz en la leyenda y en
la historia 14). On the other hand, Cacua Prada points out that her maternal grandfather, Dr.
Mateo José de Aizpuru, had paid for the restoration of the convent following the earthquake of
1755, which makes it reasonable to think that, considering her relationship to the benefactor, as
well as the social customs surrounding criolla education, she would have been admitted as a
student in the convent (Cacua Prada 36).
4
Von Hagen is one of these biographers (8-9, 237), as is Espinosa Apolo (28).
5
Cacua Prada cites Cornelio Hispano’s Historia secreta de Bolívar (Bogotá: Bedout S.A., 1944.
261-62) as his source for the fragment of the letter that he reprints in his biography of Sáenz
(306).
6
Due to the controversial nature of Álvarez Saa’s edition, I focus more heavily on Manuela’s
letters and present my discussion of the Diarios with a disclaimer.
7
These publications include Based on a True Story: Latin American History at the Movies edited
by Donald F. Stevens; Rafael de España’s Las sombras del encuentro: España y América: cuatro
siglos de Historia a través del Cine; Mediating Two Worlds: Cinematic Encounters in the
Americas, edited by John King, et. al.; La memoria filmada: América Latina a través de su cine,
edited by María Dolores Pérez Murillo and David Fernández Fernández; and Luis Trelles
Plazaola’s Imágenes cambiantes: Descubrimiento,conquista y colonización de la América
Hispana vista por el cine de ficción y largo metraje, not to mention several articles and
conference presentations.
8
The “Forum” featured in the December 1988 issue of The American Historical Review is
devoted to reflection upon the role of film in the study of history. This forum brings together
leading historians such as Robert Rosenstone, Hayden White, and John E. O’Connor, among
others, in a discussion about how film as a medium serves, disserves, and changes our study and
147
understanding of history. The persistence of this scholarly debate continues, as evidenced in the
2005 Florida State University Conference on Film and Literature, titled Trans/National Film and
Literature: Cultural Production and the Claims of History. The program for this conference
includes an address by Alan Rosenthal titled "Making the Historical Documentary: Problems and
Possibilities.” The conference called for reflections upon, among other themes, the claims of
history made by (trans)national film and literature and also the effect of such cultural texts upon
our sense of history. (See conference website: <http://english3.fsu.edu/~filmlit2005/>.)
9
This is an issue that Rosenstone explores in greater depth in Revisioning History: Film and the
Construction of a New Past. Ed. Robert A. Rosenstone. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995.
Chapter One
1
In other words, she has been created as an icon by the texts that have represented her.
2
Carlos Álvarez Saa organized the Casa Museo Manuela Sáenz, which opened about a decade
ago in old downtown Quito.
3
Las Tres Manuelas daycare center for abused women opened in Quito in 2000. Named after
three women perceived to be influential figures in Ecuador (Manuela Sáenz, Manuela Canizares,
and Manuela Espejo), the center provides support for women and children who have been
victims of domestic violence and abuse.
4
According to Manuela’s accounts of the September 25, 1828 attempt on Bolívar’s life, the
Liberator told her that, as she had saved his life, she was truly the “Libertadora del Libertador”
(“Descripción del 25 de setiembre”).
5
These titles are summarized on the inside jacket of Lindy Arriaga Díaz’s 1999 novel Manuela
(first edition), published by Arango.
6
This title was bestowed upon her by General San Martín on January 21, 1822.
7
According to the announcement made by the Venezuelan Department of Foreign Affairs, “El
concurso forma parte del programa ‘La Fiesta Bolívar 2004’, que se celebrará durante el mes de
julio con motivo del natalicio de El Libertador Simón Bolívar, el 24 de julio [2004].” See the
online article titled “Concurso andino Manuela Sáenz se realizará en Ecuador,” listed under
References.
8
For example, see Pilar Moreno’s biographies Santander (1989) and José María de Córdova
(1977).
148
9
The translation is Murray’s. The original sentence is “Doña Manuela era una equivocación de
la naturaleza, que en formas esculturalmente femeninas encarnó espíritu y aspiraciones
varoniles” (Palma 197).
10
Murray elaborates on this aspect of Miramón’s interpretation (297).
11
Lecuna’s original statement reads “con su noble conducta [...] Manuela Sáenz purificó su vida
y se redimió de todos sus pecados” (498).
12
Murray points out that this biography, as well as other previously published texts about
Manuela, inspired a series of short essays and articles during the mid-1940s, many of which are
listed in Simón Aljure Chalela’s “Bibliografía de Manuela Sáenz” (1981).
13
See also Gonzalo Humberto Mata and Victor Wolfgang Von Hagen’s Refutación a “Las
cuatro estaciones de Manuela, los amores de Manuela Sáenz y Simón Bolívar” (1959).
14
Rojas Millán’s book includes several letters sent between Manuela and Simón, a discussion of
the representation of Sáenz in Venezuelan poetry, and an essay in which the author clarifies and
rectifies details from previous bibliographies.
15
Some earlier novels and fictionalized biographies include María J. Alvarado Rivera’s Amor y
gloria: el romance de Manuela Sáenz y el Libertador Simón Bolívar (1952); Olga Briceño’s
Manuela Sáenz, la divina loca: biografía novelada (1950-1959); Raquel Verdesoto de Romo
Dávila’s Manuela Sáenz: biografía novelada (1963); Demetrio Aguilera Malta’s La caballeresa
del sol: el gran amor de Bolívar (1964).
16
Manuela’s letters have been published individually in other volumes, such as in General
Florencio O’Leary’s Memorias and in Gerhard Masur’s article “‘The Liberator is Immortal’—
An Unknown Letter of Manuela Sáenz,” which appeared in the August 1949 edition of The
Hispanic American Historical Review, to name only two examples.
17
There has been some controversy and doubt surrounding the authenticity of some of the
documents—namely the diaries—included in Álvarez Saa’s volume. Historians Fernando Jurado
Noboa and Jorge Villalba Freire, S.J. “doubt the authenticity of the documents in this volume,
noting Álvarez’s refusal to have the originals examined by outside experts as well as numerous
discrepancies between them and other documents recognized as authentic” (Murray 310). Also,
see Gustavo Vargas Martínez, “Bolívar y Manuelita: con los puntos sobre los íes.”
18
While the term “transgender” often refers to an individual who has undergone medical
procedures to alter his/her biological sex, if we understand gender to be a social aspect and not a
biological one, then we can apply the term to individuals who alter their social behavior in a way
that transgresses norms of masculinity or femininity.
19
Class in this context is understood not as social class, but rather as “a group of individuals
bound together by social determinants and interests—including, very pointedly, ideology—
which are neither freely chosen nor arbitrarily set” (de Lauretis 4).
149
20
Here Mitchell draws from Gillian Rose’s “If the Mirrors Had Bled: Masculine Dwelling,
Masculinist Theory and Femininist Masquerade” from the volume of essays edited by Nancy
Duncan: Body Space: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality (New York:
Routledge, 1996. 56-74). In her article, Rose synthesizes the theories of Luce Irigaray, citing a
number of her texts, including This Sex Which Is Not One (Trans. C. Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
UP, 1985); Speculum of the Other Woman (Trans. G. C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985);
Elemental Passions (Trans. J. Collie and J. Still. London: Athlone P, 1992.); An Ethics of Sexual
Difference (Trans. C. Burke and G. C. Gill. London: Athlone P, 1993.); Sexes and Genealogies
(Trans. G. C. Gill. New York: Columbia UP, 1993); and Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of
Difference (Trans. A. Martin. London: Routledge, 1993).
21
The term heteropatriarchy refers to a system of sociocultural organization and control in
which heterosexual men are both the privileged holders of power and also the standard of
normalcy. In such a regime, femininity is viewed as complementary and subordinate to
masculinity. Feminism, homosexuality, and bisexuality are perceived as threats to social order
and are therefore criminalized and/or seen as deviant.
22
Gillian Rose, who finds that “time-geography refers to masculine bodies and spaces” (13)
explains that this perspective is one that brings into focus the “temporospatial structuring of
social life...[describing] the paths taken by individuals to fulfill their everyday tasks, or projects,
using representations of three-dimensional time-space” (21).
23
Here Arias and Meléndez cite Soja’s Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in
Critical Social Theory. London: Verso, 1989.
24
As Arias and Meléndez explain in the introductory chapter, “Space and the Rhetorics of Power
in Colonial Spanish America,” the essays included in the volume utilize the “[...] theoretical
contributions of scholars in the fields of cultural geography and literary theory, including such
critics as Doreen Massey, James Duncan, David Ley, Denis Cosgrove, Gillian Rose, and
Elizabeth Grosz, who all have, in some capacity, revived interest in ‘space and place’ in an
attempt to bring together geographical, sociological, and cultural imaginations” (15). In the
introduction, Arias and Meléndez list other recent spatially-oriented literary studies of Colonial
Spanish America, such as those by Antonello Gerbi, Angel Rama, Serge Gruzinski, Mary Louise
Pratt, Margarita Zamora, Walter Mignolo, and Verónica Salles-Reese (15).
25
This phenomenon is discussed by Rebecca Earle in “Rape and the Anxious Republic:
Revolutionary Colombia, 1810-1830” and by Sarah C. Chambers in From Subjects to Citizens:
Honor, Gender, and Politics in Arequipa, Peru, 1780-1854.
26
Other biographies and social histories of women warriors include John P. and Maria Dever’s
Women and the Military: Over 100 Notable Contributors, Historic to Contemporary (1995),
Lyn Webster Wilde’s On the Trail of the Women Warriors: The Amazons in Myth and History
(2000), Stanley B. Alpern’s Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey
(1998), Robert B. Edgerton’s Warrior Women: The Amazons of Dahomey and the Nature of
150
War (2000), Alfred F. Young’s Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson,
Continental Soldier (2004), Rick Bragg’s I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story (2003)
and Jessica Amanda Salmonson’s The Encyclopedia of Amazons: Women Warriors from
Antiquity to the Modern Era (1991), to name only a select few.
27
See Vida i sucesos de la Monja Alférez, with introduction and notes by Rima de Vallbona
(1992); The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire and Catalina de Erauso (2000)
and Stephanie Merrim’s Early Modern Women’s Writing and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1999).
28
Regarding its gendering of Erauso, Aguirre’s film stands in stark contrast to the 1944
production by Mexican filmmaker Emilio Gómez Muriel. In the former, the subject is
characterized by an ambiguous gender identity that is constituted more by her actions and
attitude than by biology. In the latter, the subject’s gender identity is ultimately determined by
her biological sex.
29
Uribe-Uribe explains that this new, more inclusive perspective on the Spanish American Age
of Revolution was spurred by discussions among historians such as Jeremy Adelman, Sarah
Chambers, Arlene Díaz, Michael Ducey, Deborah Kanter, Frank Safford, Susan Socolow, and
Charles Walker, among others, at an annual meeting of the American Historical Association and
an international congress held by the Latin American Studies Association (xiv).
Chapter Two
1
According to Boussingault, the episode in question took place in Bogota late one night when,
on her way to be with Bolívar at the palace, Sáenz made a detour in order to engage in sexual
play with a squad of soldiers, including the drummer (Boussingault 114). Lecuna calls this a
“loathsome kind of fabrication” (“infame especie [de] invención”) (497).
2
Lecuna’s assessments of Boussingault should be taken with a grain of salt, especially since a
central axis of his denouncement is the depiction of Boussingault as a “satanic spirit,” and in
contrast, he represents Manuela Sáenz as a kind of Mary Magdalene, who “purified her life” by
nobly saving Bolívar, remaining faithful to his memory, living with dignity in the face of public
disgrace, and rejecting the inheritance left her by her estranged husband (497-98). This is clearly
an example of the extreme, beatified “heroine” view of Sáenz, which Pamela S. Murray explores
in greater detail in her article “‘Loca’ or ‘Libertadora’?: Manuela Sáenz in the Eyes of History
and Historians, 1900-c. 1990.”
3
The Salto de Tequendama is a 132 meter-high waterfall located about 30 kilometers from
Bogota.
4
Underscoring the important role that this gendered curricular practice played in the shaping of
the new Latin American republics, Mogollón and Narváez cite Ecuadorian Secretary of the
Interior and of Foreign Affairs Manuel Bustamante’s 1867 address to Congress, in which he
151
maintains that it is Divine will that women dedicate themselves “happily” to domestic chores
appropriate for their sex (Mogollón and Narváez 72).
5
By establishing this male-female dichotomy, Boussingault sets Manuela apart from the rest of
the expeditionary group. I will analyze this distinction later in this chapter, when I study the
homosocial relationship established between the narrator and another man in the expedition, both
of whom admire Manuela’s semi-naked female body.
6
This is a Colombian term for “mestiza” or “mulata.” According to Von Hagen, it is also a very
suggestive dance that was once denounced by the Bishop of Quito, who having witnessed it said,
“‘That is not a dance [...] that should be called the resurrection of the flesh’” (36).
7
Perhaps Boussingault is referring to the cachua, which is a “dance performed by the Indians of
Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, in which pairs of dancers move in a circle following a very slow
beat” (my translation) (“cachua”).
8
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick defines the term “homosocial” in her introduction to Between Men:
English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire: “‘Homosocial’ is a word occasionally used in
history and the social sciences, where it describes social bonds between persons of the same sex;
it is a neologism, obviously formed by analogy with ‘homosexual’, and just as obviously meant
to be distinguished from ‘homosexual’” (1). In her study of English culture as seen through
novels from the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth-century, Sedgwick argues that changes in male
“homosocial desire” were closely related to shifting relationships of class (1).
9
Dr. Cheyne was a young Scottish doctor who became Bolívar’s personal medic, attending to
him in his final months. Boussingault claims that he and Manuela were lovers (118).
10
It is important to keep in mind that questions of gender are inherently tied to class differences,
particularly in the case of nineteenth-century Latin America. The gender norms of which I write
in this chapter are those of upper-class criolla women.
11
Villalba argues that, while several biographers include this detail of Manuela’s life, it is
undocumented, just as her education at the Convento de Santa Catalina (Manuela Sáenz en la
leyenda y en la historia 14).
12
I use the terms corporeal and corporeality rather than corporal and corporality in order to
emphasize the body as a concrete, physical (perceived) space.
13
Citing Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity (New York: Oxford UP, 1986), María Cifuentes
notes that Sáenz was subject to the early republican concept of woman as the spiritual salvation
of her spouse: “La mujer criolla será la salvación espíritual del hombre quién por estar fuera del
hogar y de la protección familiar es más susceptible a sucumbir a las tentaciones del mundo”
(132). According to this model, the home is a site of spiritual renewal; it is wholesome, and the
woman who inhabits it passes this wholesomeness on to her husband and children.
152
14
In her article “Rape and the Anxious Republic: Revolutionary Colombia, 1810-1830,”
Rebecca Earle analyzes how early republican discourse made use of the representation of women
as victims. She finds that “Women’s bodies, especially elite women’s bodies, were a matrix of
republican suffering. [...T]he suffering woman in Colombia became the ‘distinctive feminine
image of revolutionary virtue’” (134; Earle quotes Bloch 45). She points to images of virgins
raped in sacred places—such as a church—and argues that such images “epitomized the image of
women as passive victims, countering the reality of them as active participants in wartime
activities” (136). While Earle’s study deals with republican discourse and wartime propaganda in
Colombia (and as such considers texts guided by a specific agenda), and the French scientist’s
memoirs are obviously a different kind of literature, the association between the feminine body,
passivity, and victimization is widespread and naturalized enough that I feel its implications in
this text are clear.
15
Palma’s tradiciones are literary portraits of local customs. They combine the real with the
imaginary and are marked by the narrator’s ironic attitude and sense of humor. The majority of
Palma’s tradiciones are about the institutions and characters of the Viceroyalty of Peru. While
most of these texts were published between 1872 and 1883 as the author’s Tradiciones peruanas,
“La Protectora y la Libertadora” was one of the Tradiciones en salsa verde published
posthumously in 1973. These were not published during Palma’s lifetime because they were
considered unacceptably vulgar and bold (Garganigo 211).
16
The “Protectora” was the nickname given to Rosa Campusano (1798—c. 1859), who became
the lover of General San Martin, the “Protector.” Though the extent to which she actually
contributed to the independence movement has inspired some doubt, she is said to have acted as
a spy, obtaining information from Spanish soldiers with whom she was romantically involved
(Palma 191-92).
17
In her discussion of Ricardo Palma’s “poética de neutralidad” and his promotion of literature
as non-political and non-utilitarian, Francesca Denegri explains, “[...] para el tradicionista, el
discurso literario no solamente debía tratar de temas ‘neutrales’ sino que además debía ser
formulado en condiciones [necesariamente] aisladas del quehacer social y político” (27).
18
The legend of Eloísa and Abelardo is based on the twelfth century love letters of French
philosopher Peter Abelard (1079-1142) and his pupil Heloise (1101-1164), whose tragic love
story (the two were ultimately separated and each entered into the religious life) reflects the
religious and political climate of medieval Europe. Nineteenth century Spanish doctor of
medicine Pedro Mata published the novel Eloísa y Abelardo in the periodical El Clamor. Heloise
and Abelard’s letters were also made available in a Spanish edition translated by “M. de B.” and
published in Philadelphia in 1826 (no publisher given).
19
Juan Bautista de Arriaza y Superviela (1770-c. 1837) was a Spanish poet of monarchist
political leanings. He published political essays and poetry with moralistic themes. His books of
poetry include Las primicias (1797) and Poesías patrióticas (1810 and 1815).
20
Juan Meléndez Valdés (1754-1817) is one of the most renowned poets of the Spanish
Enlightenment. His poetry reflects a variety of themes, styles, and inspirations and merges the
153
neoclassical and rococo traditions, the latter being reflected in his amorous poetry and inspiration
in the work of ancient Greek poet Anacreon, who was known for his light lyrical poetry about
life’s pleasures. Meléndez Valdés’ philosophical and religious writings reveal preromantic
underpinnings (Arias Solís).
21
Born circa A.D. 56, Cornelius Tacitus was a Roman senator, consul, and eventually governor
of Asia. His histories include Historiae, which covers the period between A.D. 68 to A.D. 96,
Annales, in which the historian describes the history of the Julio-Claudinian emperors; the
ethnographic study Germania; and Dialogus De Oratoribus, which comments on the decline in
the practice of oratory (“Tacitus”).
22
Plutarch (c. A.D. 46-c. A.D. 120) was a Greek biographer and essayist. He also lectured on
philosophy and was a priest of the temple at Delphi. His well-known text The Parallel Lives is a
series of biographies that compares Greek and Roman figures. He also wrote Moralia, a series of
dialogues and essays on ethics, literature and history (“Plutarch”).
23
Solís (1610-1686) wrote Historia de la conqvista de México, poblacion, y progressos de la
America Septentrional, conocida por el nombre de Nveva Espana, which was published in 1684.
24
Gómez Suárez de Figueroa was born to the Inca princess Chimpu Ocllo and Spanish captain
Sebastián Garcilaso de la Vega in 1539. Known as Garcilaso de la Vega el Inca, he is best known
for two histories: La Florida del Inca (1605), and Comentarios Reales; the latter was published
in two parts: the first in 1606 and the second—posthumously—in 1617 as the Historia General
del Perú.
25
Father Mariana (b. 1536 in Talavera de la Reina, Spain) joined the newly formed Society of
Jesus when he was seventeen years old and later became a well-renowned professor of theology.
Mariana was also well-versed in classical and oriental languages, letters, economics, and politics.
He wrote prolifically but is best known for his Historia de España, De rege et regís institutione,
and Tratado y discurso sobre la moneda de vellón.
26
Nicasio Álvarez de Cienfuegos (1764‑1809) was a Spanish poet whose works reveal both
neoclassical and romanticist influences, themes, and innovations.
27
Manuel José Quintana (1772-1857) was a Spanish poet and man of letters who also wrote
tragedies and biographies and who was employed in civil service. His biographies (Vidas de
españoles célebres) and poetry reveal a sense of patriotism.
28
José de Espronceda Delgado (1808-1842) is the highly-celebrated nineteenth-century Spanish
poet who is perhaps best known for his Pirate’s Song (1835), a prime example of Spanish
romanticist poetry, that is commonly memorized to this day. It is worth mentioning that his
political tendencies were Republican and Democratic and that some of his contemporaries
labeled him an anarchist (“José de Espronceda and the Poetry of the Beginning of the Nineteenth
Century”).
154
29
Ecuadorian poet, diplomat, and politician, José Joaquín Olmedo (1741-1847) represents
Bolívar as a military hero in this epic poem published in Paris in 1826.
30
The translation is mine.
31
Taking advantage of the darkness provided by the lunar eclipse on January 25, 1827, several
Colombian troops, organized by Colonel José Bustamante, rebelled against their generals,
surrounding their Lima homes and blocking off all entranceways into the city during the middle
of the night. Generals Jacinto Lara and Arthur Sandes were arrested along with five colonels and
were imprisoned in the Castles of Callao. General Francisco de Paula Santander is suspected of
being the instigator of the rebellion (Von Hagen 160).
32
In a letter to Bolívar from Guayaquil, dated February 7, 1827, Sáenz writes, “Al día siguiente
(el 27) me aparecí vestida con traje militar al cuartel de los insurrectos, y armada de pistolas, con
el fin de amedrentar a [Bustamante] y a librar [al General] Heres” (Andrade 131). Unlike
Palma’s account, Sáenz does not represent herself as “disguised,” but rather acting openly as
herself, represented by her uniform as a member of the Colombian army.
33
I am also thinking here of the famous “tapadas limeñas,” colonial women of various classes
and races who appropriated the burka-inspired “sayas” in order to enjoy anonymity as they
traveled through colonial Lima’s public spaces. In El abanico y la cigarrera: la primera
generación de mujeres ilustradas en el Perú, Francesca Denegri discusses the figure of the
tapada in the satirical literature of colonial Peru; referring to Esteban de Terralla y Landa’s Lima
por dentro y por fuera (1792), she notes, “La figura de la cortesana toma múltiples formas [...]
Su repertorio incluye a inocentes mozas a punto de perder su honor, viejas damas que se resisten
a la jubilación, y a negras, indias, cuarteronas y criollas que, escondidas tras el célebre manto,
aparecen deslizándose furtivamente por las calles de Lima para participar en el arte de seducir al
hombre abstraído e indefenso” (30).
34
Though Venus is the Roman counterpart to the Greek goddess Aphrodite, goddess of not only
love, beauty, fertility, and sexual desire, but also of all nature, this Roman goddess is most
closely associated with sexual desire.
35
The term “hussar” (“húsar” in Spanish) comes from the Hungarian word “huszár” (plural:
“huszárok”), referring to lightly-armed, highly manouvrable cavalry that were adopted first by
the Polish-Lithuanian Union in the sixteenth century and then later by other European nations
such as England and France. The highly mobile hussars were ideal for reconnaissance, securing
provisions for the army, harassing enemy troops, and pursuing retreating troops. From the
eighteenth century onward, hussars were often identified by their colorful uniforms of Hungarian
inspiration (“Hussar”). In his description of Manuela Sáenz, Ricardo Palma refers to the
dolmán—or short jacket, typical of the hussar uniform—that she often wore: “A [Sáenz] se la vió
en las calles de Quito y en las de Lima cabalgada a manera de hombre en brioso corcel [...] y
vistiendo dolmán rojo con brandeburgos de oro y pantalón bombacho de cotonía blanca” (197).
36
Evelyn Cherpak names a few other women who dressed up like men and participated in battle
but identifies only one other who earned official rank in the Colombian army: Tunja native
155
Evangelista Tamayo, who fought at the Battle of Boyacá in 1819, earning the rank of captain
(221-22).
37
Bolívar quotes this phrase but does not reveal its source. Though it would seem logical that it
be a citation from Sucre’s laudatory letter of recommendation, this phrase does not appear in the
letter reprinted in Cacua Parada’s biography.
38
As part of the festivities planned for the 1830 Feast of Corpus Cristi, to be celebrated in the
plaza of Bogota, two figures were constructed to represent Bolívar and Sáenz, the former
representing “Despotism” and the latter “Tyranny.” They were covered with fireworks to be lit
on the vigil of the feast day. Infuriated, and accompanied by her slaves Nathán and Jonatás, a
uniformed and armed Manuela charged the firework displays (the “castillos pirotectónicos”) in
an attempt to destroy them. In the attempt, the women drew armed resistance from the soldiers
surrounding the displays. Following the incident, Bogota’s liberal newspaper La Aurora ran an
article condemning the women, particularly Sáenz, whom the writer identifies as, “[u]na mujer
descocada [...] que se presenta todos los días en el traje que no corresponde a su sexo, y del
propio modo hace salir a sus criadas, insultando al decoro y haciendo alarde de despreciar las
leyes y la moral,” and he called the incident, “Un crimen tan enorme y de tan funesta
trascendencia a las tropas de la República, impunido con escándalo general!” (reprinted in Cacua
Prada 239: 13 Jun. 1830).
39
Bolívar’s nickname for Sáenz, which was commonly known—at least among those who knew
them personally—appears in at least two of the texts that I reference for this project. The first is a
letter from the Liberator to General José María Córdova (from August, 1828), in which he asks
Córdova, “En cuanto a la amable Loca. [sic] ¿Qué quiere V. que yo le diga a V.? (reprinted in
Cacua Prada 193). Another is an account written by French colonel Luis Perú de Lacroix, an
officer in the Colombian army and a good personal friend of Simón Bolívar. Perú de Lacroix
stayed with Bolívar in Bucaramanga in the spring of 1828, where he documented the life and
trials of the Liberator from April 1 to June 26 of that year. Part of the original text of this Diario
de Bucaramanga has been lost. Carlos Álvarez Saa published what he identified as a recovered
fragment of this diary, in which Perú de Lacroix retells Bolívar’s confessions about Manuela
Sáenz. Antonio Cacua Prada explains that, while it is doubtful that this document is part of the
lost diary, historian Jorge Núñez Sánchez affirms that the “confessions” are authentic and are
most likely an account of another conversation that took place between Perú de Lecroix and
Bolívar between April and May, 1830 (Cacua Prada 187-88; Álvarez Saa 50-53). Recalling the
one time that the Liberator spoke candidly with him about his relationship with Manuela, Perú de
Lacroix writes, “Hubo un silencio largo y Su Excelencia, exaltado los ánimos, se fue sin
despedirse. Iba acongojado, triste, balbuciendo: ‘Manuela, mi amable loca’” (“Diario de
Bucaramanga”).
156
Chapter Three
1
El Garzal was a hacienda located in Los Ríos, on the Babahoyo River. It belonged to doña
Eugenia Llaguno de Garaycoa, who lent it to Bolívar as a personal favor in 1822. Bolívar and
Sáenz used the hacienda together as a private retreat from the 6th to the 31st of August, 1822
(Cacua Prada 63).
2
In a letter to his sister María Antonia, Bolívar writes about Sáenz: “[...] ella en su afán de
servicio, se muestra como una noble amiga de alma muy superior: culta, desprovista de toda
intención de ambición, de un temperamento viril, además de feminina. [...T]e hago esta
declaración. ¡Simón se encuentra enamorado!” (Letter to María Antonia Bolívar y Palacios, 30
Jan. 1823).
3
What’s more, don Simón Sáenz was a fervent realist, making this connection between Father
and State even closer.
4
Chambers focuses on Sáenz’s experience in exile after Bolívar’s death. She bases her study
primarily on the correspondence between Sáenz and General Juan José Flores.
5
For a definition, see Chapter Two, endnote 8.
6
As Pateman reminds us, theorists of the fraternal social contract (such as Locke and Rousseau)
agreed that female subordination and subjection to male rule was not a matter of politics, but one
of nature (39).
7
Manuela’s love for Bolívar was noted by those who knew the couple; for instance, in his
Memorias histórico-políticas, General Joaquín Posada Gutiérrez writes, “[...] Bolívar estaba
enfermo [...] la bellísima señora doña Manuela Sáenz, que le amaba con delirio, le acompañaba
[...]” (qtd. in Mogollón Cobo and Narváez Yar 42).
8
Cherpak explains that despite their participation in the independence movement, the women of
Gran Colombia did not collectively fight for any change in their social status: “The failure of
women to move to expand their privileges or to raise any challenges to their traditional roles
arose from their own lack of consciousness, which led them to to accept their status, the negative
attitudes of men toward female role change and, thus, reciprocal role change, and the politically
conservative atmosphere of the postindependence period” (229).
9
In a letter written on May 9, 1825, she debates with Bolívar the question of honor: “¿Por qué
privarse del goce infinito del amor? ¿Qué tan alta es la honra para que sobrepase a la del gran
Bolívar y cuál es la cordura y la templanza que obligan al Libertador a enjuiciarse a sí mismo? Si
una de las virtudes primordiales es la obediencia del amor, que la misma Providencia auspicial
en todo ser humano” (Letter to Simón Bolívar, 9 May 1825).
157
10
In a discussion of the increased divorce rate in late eighteenth-century Latin America, Socolow
mentions a growth in the idea of personal happiness and a related shift in values, implying that
they contributed to this increase (175).
11
I have cited this letter from Lecuna’s publication of documents related to Manuela Sáenz.
Lecuna notes that this version of the letter was written in Manuela’s own handwriting and was
not dated. Relying on historical data, he assigns the letter the estimated date of October, 1823.
The historian also notes that another version of this letter appears in the appendix of General
Daniel F. O’Leary’s Memorias, though with some orthographic and grammatical changes.
Another difference between the two letters is that O’Leary’s version claims that Manuela had
been with Bolívar for seven years, making the date of composition 1829. But as circumstances
would have it, Manuela at one point sent Bolívar a copy of the letter, to which he later referenced
in his correspondence with her from La Plata (Chuquisaca, present day Sucre) dated November
26, 1825. For these reasons, I am using the version published in Lecuna’s article and am
identifying it as dated 1823.
12
According to Cacua Prada, it was Thorne’s social prestige and economic stability that led
Manuela’s father, Simón Sáenz de Vergara y Yedra, to hand his daughter over in marriage and
convinced Manuela to accept the marriage (45).
13
Persuaded by Manuela’s arguments about honor, Bolívar writes in a subsequent letter, “La
moral, como tú dices, en este mundo es relativa; la sociedad que se gestó y ha surgido en esa
desatrosa época de colonialismo es perniciosa y farsante; por eso no debemos actuar, como tú
bien dices, sino al llamado de nuestros corazones” (Letter to Manuela Sáenz, 16 June 1825).
14
Perhaps some would look at the long list of lovers that Bolívar left on three continents and say
that really Manuela, in spite of her rebellion against the institution of marriage, remained
confined to the subordinate space reserved for women in a patriarchal society such as her own.
But the object of study here is her representation of that relationship, her representation of the
space that—as the woman in this love affair—she had negotiated for herself.
15
Note that this is according to her perspective, and that what is relevant here is Manuela’s
understanding of the spaces of her experiences.
16
This entry was most likely written in late 1843. No specific date is provided in Álvarez Saa’s
edition.
17
There were some women whose actions on the battlefield earned them official recognition.
Besides Sáenz, Cherpak mentions Evangelista Tamayo, who fought under Bolívar in Tunja,
earned the rank of Captain, and later died in the battle at San Luis de Coro; Teresa Corneja,
Manuela Tinoco, and Rosa Canelones, who were among the ranks (dressed as men) in the battles
of Gameza, Pantano de Vargas, and Boyacá; and the women who fought at the pivotal battle of
Pichincha in 1822 (221-22).
18
Here Cifuentes mentions the term “centro de inteligencia,” citing Rojas Graffe’s Manuelita
Sáenz: Ángel tutelar del Libertador.
158
19
Bolívar does the same as he flirts with her during the ball following the parade. As Manuela
recalls: “‘Señora’—me dijo—‘insisto en que usted ha tocado hoy justo en mi corazón. Su
belleza es el mejor regalo que un héroe puede recibir, pues su encantamiento se halla en su
agradable vivacidad’” (“Diario de Quito” 19).
20
The case studied by Earle is that of Colombia between 1810 and 1830. Cherpak looks at Gran
Colombia between 1780 and 1830.
21
Earle illustrates that republican authorities often tried to represent women’s military initiatives
as merely symbolic acts. She cites an example from the province of Barinas, in Venezuela, where
in 1811 a group of women wrote to the governor requesting that he enlist them into the
republican army. The governor’s rejection of their petition was published in the Gaceta de
Caracas as a way to discursively transform their petition into a symbolic act of patriotism (138).
22
Though Álvarez Saa’s edition does not provide a specific date for this entry, it appears to have
been written from the hacienda El Garzal sometime in 1822.
23
The movement known as Quiteño Libre was founded in 1833 by Manuela’s half brother,
General José María Sáenz del Campo, in opposition to the government of General Juan José
Flores (Cacua Prada 278).
24
González’s letter to Flores reads, “[...] habría sido la bisoñada más grande dejar entrar a
Manuela Sáenz en Quito en estas circunstancias. Para que usted pudiera juzgar con exactitud
sobre ésta, habría sido preciso que estuviera aquí, y que hubiera oído las chispas y la alarma en
que puso a todos solo la noticia de su venida y cuanto se decía sobre ella” (Letter to Juan José
Flores, 28 Oct. 1835).
25
For his activities with the Quiteño Libre movement, Sáenz del Campo was exiled to Peru by
then president Flores. He then went to Colombia, assembled an army, and returned to Ecuador,
where he was defeated by Colonel Manuel Zubiría and was later executed by firing squad in
April of 1834 (Cacua Prada 278).
26
After a legal struggle, Sáenz had inherited from her mother a hacienda at Santa Bárbara de
Cataguango, which she subsequently rented out. According to her complaints in several letters to
Flores, as well as in a letter to González, she was not receiving proper payment for the property,
and when she tried to sell it, she had a very difficult time doing so (Letter to José Miguel
González Alminati, 20 Oct. 1835).
27
Mogollón and Narváez cite the Ecuadorian constitution in place in 1834: “No puede el
Presidente de la República privar a un ecuatoriano de su libertad, imponerle pena, ni expulsarlo
del territorio; detener el curso de los procedimientos judiciales, impedir elecciones (...) sin previo
consentimiento del Congreso” (Mogollón and Narváez 37). Several of Sáenz’s letters to Flores
give testimony to her fervent interest in contemporary politics and are evidence that she was
aware of this constitutional provision. Her claim of protection under that constitution as a citizen
159
is yet another example of how she asserts herself—a woman—into the ideally ungendered but
realistically masculine space of republican citizenship.
Manuela remained accutely interested in politics during her exile. She often commented
on news she had read in newspapers such as El Peruano and also requested that Flores send her
newspapers and documents, such as a copy of the Bolivarian Constitution (Letter to Juan José
Flores, 12 July 1840). What’s more, she continued to act as spy for Flores, relaying to him
information about the people and the talk around Paita (which was home to many political
refugees).
28
Sáenz’s arrest was prompted by her supposed authorship of an anti-government flyer signed
“Un amigo de Bolívar” and afterward referred to as the Tower of Babel. The flyer had been
printed by Bruno Espinosa de los Monteros, who told the authorities that Sáenz had authored the
flyer (Cacua Prada 255). The phrase “inflammatory and seditious acts” is taken from Von
Hagen’s translation of Judge Carrizozo’s written orders to Alderman Durán (264).
29
Halberstam writes, “The post in posttransexual demands [...] that we examine the strangeness
of all gendered bodies, not only the transexualized ones[,] and that we rewrite the cultural fiction
that divides a sex from a transex, a gender from a transgender. All gender should be transgender,
all desire is transgendered, movement is all” (767).
Chapter Four
1
This film premiered in Mexico in May of 1942.
1
Kuhn explains,
When perversity substitutes for performance [i.e. sexual disguise identified as
performance], sexual disguise becomes transvestism – a practice constituted, in
the clinical discourse which names it, as pathological. The sexually disguised
character is constructed as sick, or criminal, or both: and cross-dressing, far from
being comic, becomes threatening. (58)
2
For more on how Halberstam’s gender theories relate to my project, see the conclusion to
Chapter Three.
1
“By means of the mirror, the body becomes visible and untouchable. It is the triumph of sight
over touch. In a second the image in the mirror is transformed into an object of knowledge, from
eroticism to contemplation, and from contemplation to critique. The mirror and its double, the
portrait, are a theater where observing becomes knowing.” [My translation]
2
In reference to films, a “beat” is a pivotal moment in the plot development. It marks a moment
in the film when key information is revealed, a pivotal choice is made, a character undergoes a
substantial change, etc.
160
3
Recall the scene in which she entered the army headquarters and had her title questioned by
General Córdova.
4
For more on female participation in the wars for independence, see Cherpak 220-24 and Earle
128-29.
5
The space-off is the space that does not appear on the screen but that is part of the diegetic
space of the film. In other words, it exists in the viewer’s (and characters’) mind as a space
within the world of the film.
6
The generals’ resistance to Manuela’s military activity is articulated in a previous scene by
General Lara, who argues that “En esta guerra no caben mujeres.”
7
As seen in Chapter Three, Sáenz’s frustration at constantly being left behind to wait for his
return or summons is a recurring theme in her letters to him. Rísquez touches on this theme in an
earlier scene, in which the lovers recline together in a hammock and Manuela, in anticipation of
his departure, laments, “[…] te necesito, pero Perú también.” She confesses that she’ll want to go
with him but knows that he will tell her “no,” so she’ll wait, or follow him (she doesn’t know
which), loving him the only way she knows how “en este endemoniado ritmo de guerra donde
sólo se te puede amar.”
8
This scene, together with the scene in which Jonatás bathes Manuela, hints at the possibility of
Manuela’s bisexuality. Viewed in the context of the rest of the film, however, and considering
the solid foundation of the film in Manuela’s own writings (which at no time hint at bisexuality),
this hardly warrants serious consideration as a possible theme of Manuela’s gender
representation.
9
This scene, with its unmistakable identification of the viewer with a male gaze, seems out of
place in this film, which as a whole goes to great lengths to represent the interior space of its
woman character (for more, see Hedges xvi, 1-2) and even includes one scene (the ballroom
scene) in which the camera takes on Manuela’s point of view.
10
In a letter to Simón, she complains about her life as a matrona (see Chapter Three).
11
This is in spite of the fact that wrought iron grillwork was a common architectural feature of
Spanish American colonial architecture.
12
See Chapter Three in this regard.
13
In “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Gender and the State in the Long Nineteenth
Century,” Elizabeth Dore discusses this issue as she argues that “changes in state policy
increased more than decreased gender inequalities” in nineteenth-century Latin America (5).
1
See Chapter Three.
2
See Earle 132.
161
3
As Elizabeth Dore explains:
[…B]oth royalists and republicans claimed for themselves the patriarchal
tradition. […] In a classic formulation of the contingent nature of patriarchal
privilege, Simón Bolívar declared that because the king had violated his familial
duties and obligations, the population had the right to rebel. In a more absolutist
vein, royalists demanded obedience to the king and called on the population to
“honor thy father.” (14)
4
Historically, Vicente Azuero acts in response to president General Francisco de Paula
Santander’s order that Manuela be exiled in order to “‘prevenir cualquier alboroto que ella pueda
suscitar en negocios políticos, puesto que hace alardes de ser enemiga del gobierno, y ya en
1830, ensayó sus fuerzas para contribuir a la fatal revolución de aquel año’” (Viteri qtd. in
Cifuentes 136). On the same date as that of Santander’s decree, January 7, 1834, Azuero signed
the order for expulsion, in which, citing elmalpensante (3), María Cifuentes points out that
Manuela is characterized as “ una mujer de ‘extrema peligrosidad y atrevimiento’ e inclusive
‘[l]a acusada debe ser conducida en silla de manos fuertemente custodiada’ (Cifuentes 136).
5
Rocafuerte would agree. That same day he wrote to Flores,
[…] las señoras principales son enemigas declaradas de todo orden y […] tienen
tanto influjo sobre las almas débiles de sus hermanos, maridos y parientes; al ver
que aún existen todos los elementos de la pasada revolución; y que sólo necesitan
una mano que sepa combinarlos para darles nueva acción; y por el conocimiento
práctico que tengo del carácter, talentos, vicios, ambición y prostitución de
Manuela Sáenz ella es la llamada a reanimar la llama revolucionaria; en favor de
la tranquilidad pública, me he visto en la dura necesidad de mandarle un edecán
para hacerla salir de nuestro territorio, hasta tanto que la paz esté bien
consolidada. Esta dura medida la he consultado con los Ministros, y todos han
convenido en la necesidad de tomarla. (Letter to Juan José Flores, 14 Oct. 1835)
Two weeks later González writes to Flores,
[…] no crea usted que hasta aquí han cedido las mujeres una línea de sus
caprichos, pues sabemos positivamente, que constantemente están trabajando por
precipitar a sus maridos y hermanos en otra revolución […] todos [los facciosos]
juntos no tienen ni el valor, ni el desprendimiento, que esta señora, que bien
considerado, es la única, que en las actuales circunstancias, y cuando los cuerpos
no están ni con muchos cubiertos de sus haberes, podía hacer alguna cosa, y dar
impulso a los constantes esfuerzos de los facciosos. A la verdad que parece
ridículo temer nada de una mujer ¿y no fueron mujeres las que promovieron la
pasada revolución? ¿las que emparedaron la ciudad; las que hicieron las balas con
que fue derrocado a fusilazos el gobierno; las que traen hasta hoy divididas las
familias; y las que, no obstante nuestros comunes esfuerzos, atizan aún la hoguera
revolucionaria? Desengáñese usted, mi querido General, habría sido la bisoñada
más grande dejar entrar a Manuela Sáenz en Quito en estas circunstancias. Para
que usted pudiera juzgar con exactitud sobre ésta, habría sido preciso que
estuviera aquí, y que hubiera oído las chispas y la alarma en que puso a todos solo
162
la noticia de su venida y cuanto se decía sobre ella. (Letter to Juan José Flores 28
Oct. 1835)
6
See Cifuentes 133.
7
The text of Manuela’s written self-defense reads: “¿¿¿porqué [sic] llama hermanos a los del Sur
y a mí forastera???... seré todo lo que quiera: lo que s[é] es que mi país es el continente de la
América, he nacido bajo la línea del Ecuador” (“Al público”).
8
For more see Cifuentes 136.
9
The Malinche—or doña Marina, as she was named by the Spanish who arrived at the Yucatan
Peninsula with Hernán Cortés in the sixteenth century—was the daughter of a noble Aztec
family. She had been turned over by her family to the Cacique—or military chief—of Tabasco.
While she lived among the Mayan people, she learned their language. She was given to Cortés as
a slave and became his interpreter and sexual partner, for which reason her name has come to
represent the mestizaje—or racial mixing between Spanish and Amerindians—characteristic of
Mexican heritage.
10
Cifuentes mentions Manuela’s historical role as the voice for women’s rights as a warrant for
her study of visual representations of Sáenz, a study that she proposes will “[...] comenzar a
construir una representación crítica de la relación de las mujeres y la formación de la nación en
América Latina. Más concretamente, nos permitirá considerar la lucha de Sáenz por abrir un
espacio para su voz y participación en la región colombiana” (124).
11
In a previous scene, Manuela alludes to these derogatory comments when she complains to her
slaves that the other women call her a “ramera” (whore).
12
The DVD has been distributed in the U.S. under the title Manuela Saenz: Simon Bolivar’s
Love Story. The change in subtitle reflects the tendency to keep women in the margins of official
history, in this case by erasing Manuela’s nickname of “Libertadora” and representing her story
as Bolívar’s.
13
Even more telling is the English translation provided below the original synopsis in Spanish.
This second version downplays Manuela’s role in history even further by giving her only brief
and vague mention between the more detailed descriptions of Herman Melville and Simón
Bolívar:
It is 1856 and a whaler approaches Paita, the last redoubt of Peru—a rusty fishing port
where only poverty and oblivion are to be found. Among the ship’s crew is Herman
Melville, a young sailor hatching up the idea of writing the story of a whale called Moby
Dick. In Paita lives a woman who, thirty years before, had shocked the continent and
whose name had been erased from history books. She is Manuela Saenz, Simon Bolivar’s
most passionate lover. An everlasting Latin American hero, Bolivar commanded the great
Latin American Revolution during the first half of the 19th century. Since then, he has
been known as The Liberator.
163
14
During her residency in Paita, Manuela fell and was left paralyzed by the accident. From then
on she was confined to her bed and chair.
15
Rísquez makes this comment during an interview included as a special feature on the Manuela
Sáenz, Libertadora del Libertador DVD.
Chapter Five
1
This redefinition of strength brings to mind Isabel Dyck’s study of suburban Vancouver
mothers, who also confronted capability constraints with redefinition: they faced the limitations
to their diverse daily activities by redefining good mothering (Rose 25).
164
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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
HEATHER R. HENNES
Winthrop King Fellow, Florida State University
Education
• Ph.D. in Spanish, Florida State University, Tallahassee, August 2005
• Dissertation: The Spaces of a Free Spirit: Manuela Sáenz in Literature and Film
Director: Dr. Santa Arias
• Specialization in Early Latin American Literature
• Latin American and Caribbean Studies Advanced Certificate (fields: literature, history and
anthropology)
• Reading knowledge in Latin and Portuguese
• M.A. in Spanish Language and Literatures, Florida State University, Tallahassee, August 2001
• B.A. in Spanish, John Carroll University, University Heights, OH, May 1997 (Summa Cum Laude)
• Teacher Certification for the State of Ohio, Spanish K-12
Other Education
• Architecture and Undergraduate Studies, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, 19931994
• Spanish language and culture, La Universidad de Salamanca, Spain, 1996
Areas of Research
Manuela Sáenz, early Latin American literatures and cultures, cinematic representations of Latin
American history, critical theory and cultural studies (particularly gender, space, and representation),
translations
Teaching and Related Experience
• St. Joseph’s University, Philadelphia: Assistant Professor of Spanish, beginning August 2005
• The Florida State University, Tallahassee: Instructor of Spanish, 1999-2004
• Courses taught:
SPN 2240/ Intermediate Spanish Conversation
SPN 2200/ Intermediate Spanish
SPN 1150 (1130)/ Accelerated Elementary Spanish
SPN 1121/ Elementary Spanish II
• Program Assistant; Spanish Language Program Office, summer 2002
Responsibilities included creating exams, syllabi and ancillary materials; reviewing
176
textbooks and curriculum; articulating course objectives; and fielding student and
instructor concerns and inquiries
Published Translations
• “Land Markets, Social Reproduction and Configuration of Urban Space: A Case Study of Five
Municipalities in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area.” Juan D. Lombardo, Mercedes Di
Virgilio, Leonardo Fernández, Natalia Da Representaçao, and Victoria Brushchi. Dialogues in
Urban and Regional Planning, vol. 1. Eds. Bruce Stiftel and Vanessa Watson. New York:
Routledge, 2004. 95-136.
• “Dark Ritual.” Antonio Correa Losada. Mississippi Review: World Poetry Edition 28.3
(2000): 149.
• “The Foolish Country.” Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda. Mississippi Review: World Poetry Edition 28.3
(2000): 115.
• “Hara-Kiri.” Rafael del Castillo Matamoros. Mississippi Review: World Poetry Edition 28.3
(2000): 153.
• “A Question of Statistics.” Piedad Bonnett Vélez. Mississippi Review: World Poetry Edition 28.3
(2000): 173.
Book Reviews
“Ancient Miamians: An Imaginative Recreation of the Lives of Native Floridians.” H-net Reviews in the
Humanities and Social Sciences. Ed. Melvin Page and Robert Cassanello. Sept. 2002. Humanities &
Social Sciences OnLine. <http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=10471035619128>.
Review solicited by H-Florida
Work in Progress
Translation of Retórica, Historia, Polémica: Bartolomé de las Casas y la tradición
intelectual renacentista, by Santa Arias. Lanham, MD: U P of America, 2001.
Conference Presentations
• “It’s not a ‘Lesbian Love Film’: Marketing Latina Biographies in the U.S.,” The Florida State
University Film and Literature Conference (proposal under review), Tallahassee, FL, Jan. 27-29,
2005
• “Letters from Florida: The Emergence of Proto-Creole Agency in the Epistles of Father Baltasar
López,” The Middle Atlantic Graduate Student Conference on Latin America, Johns Hopkins
University, Baltimore, MD, Oct. 18-19, 2002
• “The Christian Ethos of Martyrdom in Juan Francisco Manzano’s Autobiografía de un esclavo and in
Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s La última cena,” The Florida State University Film and Literature Conference,
Tallahassee, FL, Jan. 24-26, 2002
• “Reading Demons in Turn of the Century Galicia: Ramón Valle-Inclán’s “My Sister Antonia,”
(co-presented), The Florida State University Film and Literature Conference, Tallahassee, FL, Feb.
1-3, 2001
177