The expression of masculinity that appears in texts in the years surrounding the ‘Disaster’ correspond most closely to that embraced by the educated middle classes, rich in cultural and technical capital. This form of masculinity is counterposed to that of the ‘decadent’ bourgeoisie and aristocratic classes, classes depicted as being characterized by indolence, inertia and laziness, far from the dynamism and modernism of the nobility of other European countries. The Spanish landowning classes and aristoc- racy are depicted as having frittered away their wealth and time in the pursuit of pleasure and decadence. The result is the corrup- tion of even its youngest representatives:
No es la torpe cobardía de evitar peligros personales, casi siempre imaginarios, lo que retiene en la Corte y en las grandes capitales a los más acaudalados terratenientes; es la torpe cobardía, disipada y sedienta de vanas y divertidas novedades . . . En esa torpe cobardía hay muchas debilidades que notar, por algunas de las cuales el sexo fuerte sometido a los caprichos del débil, sea éste representado por impúdicas cortesanas, carcoma y ruina de grandes haciendas, o por virtuosas señoras.4
[It is not the lack of valour before possible personal danger, which is almost always imaginary, that holds sway in the wealthiest landowners in the Court and in the cities. It is the dissipated lack of valour, hungry for the enjoyment of vain and new diversions [that holds sway] . . . In this lack of valour there are many weaknesses to be noted, by means of which the stronger sex is submitted to the caprices of the weaker one, in the form of vulgar courtesans, the cancer and ruin of large estates, or in the form of virtuous ladies.]
Mallada, who was opposed to compulsory military service, recalled that the payment of a certain sum deprived the army of ‘millares de individuos que distan mucho de presenter las formas hercúleas y el vigoroso brazo de los famosos guerreros de la antigüedad’ [thousands of individuals who are far from present- ing the Herculean forms and the vigorous forearm of the ancient warriors].5
One could cite many more references from regenerationist literature which depict the upper classes as victims of a lack of vigour,6dissolution,7passivity,8and their attraction to the city and
its pleasures.9 The weakness and degeneration of the upper
classes is always contrasted with the muscular healthiness of the working classes.10The innate energies of the latter, however, are
corroded by poverty, squalor and brutality, factors which in turn are seen to be derived from poor government and the decadent elites.
The understanding of masculinity as expressed in regenera- tionist texts can be seen, therefore, to hinge on two basic interpre- tations. On the one hand, decadence is seen as the result of a general process of ‘devirilization’ and effeminization of the popu- lation. On the other, the ‘ills of the nation’ are represented as the result of a battle between the powers of masculinity and the weaknesses of femininity. The solution to such a state of affairs is predicated on the restoration of masculinity over and above feminine values.
These dual interpretations are to be found in many examples. In Joaquín Costa’sColectivismo Agrario en España, the decline of the nation is expressed as the inversion of gender roles:
Hace algunos años, cuando más enardecida la guerra, dije de España que era una nación unisexual, compuesta de dieciocho millones de mujeres. Cuando ahora vuelvo la vista atrás y abarco en una mirada las cosas horrendas, inverosímiles, sucedidas en estos cuatro años . . . comprendo el agravio que hice a las mujeres con aquella calificación. No: España no es una nación unisexual; es una nación sin sexo. No es una nación de mujeres, es una nación de eunucos.11
[Some years ago, when war was being waged, I commented that Spain was a unisexual nation, made up of eighteen million women. Now, when I look back and I see what terrible, unbelievable things have come to pass in the last four years . . . I comprehend the injustice I perpetrated against womankind with this notion. No. Spain is not a unisexual nation; it is a sexless nation. It is not a nation of women; it is a nation of eunuchs.]
For his part, Macías Picavea connected effeminacy with the excessive centralization of the Spanish state. Madrid in his under- standing would be a feverous city ‘porque todos los asuntos del país tienen que ser despachados en ella. Existe un desequilibrio entre la agitación capitalina y la parálisis de las provincias’ [because all matters of state must be dispatched there. There is an imbalance between the activity of the capital and the paralysis of the provinces]. Madrid, like Paris, is the ‘brain’ of the nation, but both are ‘neurotic, degenerate’ brains, overexcited by frenetic activity and therefore weakened in spirit. The decadence of the provinces was equated by Picavea to feminine qualities and a ‘falta de salud mental, de virilidad afectiva’ [lack of mental health, and male sensibility].12The city, as emblem of modernity, speed and
rapid reactions, becomes the source of nervous stress, weakness and the undermining of virility.13
Mallada, who as we have already seen equated the Spanish aristocracy with the ‘weaker sex’, now views the Spanish crisis in general as one of a crisis of masculinity. In hisLos Males de la Patria
(1890) it is deemed certain that ‘el pueblo español posee menor virilidad en el presente que en otros tiempos pasados’ [the Spanish people possess less virility than in former times].14 This
Spain in comparison to the Anglo-Saxon and Slavic races that possess more ‘vital energy’ than their Latin counterparts. But the main reason for the inferiority of the Spanish lies in historico- geographical causes such as poor food, the cruel climate of the mountainous areas and the infelicitous racial mixes with invad- ers.15
The accusation of effeminacy is also evoked by these writers when they discuss what they see as another specifically Spanish trait: the tendency to gossip. This ‘chismografía feminista y camarillesca’ [feminine gossiping in groups], Picavea suggests, produces a ‘voluptuosa vibración de los nervios’ [voluptuous tingling of the nerves], similar to that experienced by decadent morphine users. This is contrasted to the natural repugnance that a healthy man feels in the face of gossip which ‘le abruma, le asfixia’ [overwhelms him, suffocates him].16Mallada criticizes ‘la
falta de virilidad, o sea la cobardía, que lleva aprejada consigo la maledicencia’ [the lack of virility, or rather the cowardice, that accompanies evil gossiping].17 Finally, Altamira relates the pro-
pensity to gossip with the ‘carencia de estimación de lo propio’ [lack of self-worth] that washes over the nation with its debilitat- ing effects.18
In the light of this brief survey, two main points can be made. Firstly, the concern with gender inversion as national decline is a one-way process. The problem is always the loss of masculinity in men and not the masculinization of women. While references can be found in this literature to the deficient educational resources available to women, in particular the poor upbringing of the daughters of economically well off families, there is no mention of any decline in specifically feminine values.19 In this sense, Spain
may well contrast with discourse on national decline in other European countries such as England, France and Germany, where concerns about the masculinization of women are present from earlier on, often formulated in response to the rise of the feminist movement. In Spain, such concerns would be voiced later, in the 1920s, in the work of Gregorio Marañón and Roberto Nóvoa Santos, for example. Despite this, it would perhaps be unwise to relate the lack of this discourse to the weaknesses of feminism in Spain at the turn of the century. In France too, feminism was weak at this time, but this did not prevent the articulation of fears with respect to the loss of femininity.20
What is to be found in regenerationist texts is the suggestion that women, being less prone to decline and degeneracy than the Spanish male could constitute a hope for the resurrection of the nation. The Spanish woman is described as ‘la admirable, la santa madre española, que conserva todos los atributos de tal por no haberse contaminado por las corruptoras costumbres’ [the admi- rable, saintly Spanish mother, who conserves all her values because she has resisted contamination by the prevailing habits of corruption]. This pristine figure has not managed to attain the excessive luxuries enjoyed by other women and she will remain faithful to womanly values. She will not succumb to the ‘voto tan frecuente en las madres (especialmente en la burguesía) franc- esas del único hijo, de reducir la familia a un solo vástago’ [desire so frequent in French mothers (especially in the bourgeoisie) to have a single child, to reduce the family to one birth], a practice that is viewed as ‘non-Spanish’.21
This optimism as expressed by Morote with respect to the maintenance of Spanish women’s prolific natalism, is contrasted with the situation across the Pyrenees. In France, the ‘birth strike’ would be one of the main causes of Gallic decadence.22In Spain,
however, decline is not associated with the drop in the birth rate.23This contrast with France allows us to introduce a second
observation. In France, the decline in the birth rate and the increasing blurring of gender differences were often put down to the proliferation of the ‘sexual perversions’.24 In particular,
homosexual relations were viewed as a threat to the recuperation of a vigorous birth rate which, in turn, was supposed to halt any national decline. In Spanish regenerationist thought, however, the sexual ‘deviations’ occupy little space: the prime matter for concern is gender inversion or lack of clarity between the sexes. In Chapter Two we saw how many Spanish doctors viewed homo- sexuality as a ‘foreign vice’. Of more immediate concern amongst doctors and regenerationists, however, was the broad notion of ‘effeminacy’ in males. This quality was associated with passivity, with a lack of vital energy, with an excess of sensibility and bohemian lifestyles in the cities.25
The ‘decadent poet’ was often evoked as someone to be decried. Ramiro de Maeztu contrasts the poet with the stature of the energetic intellectual that Spain needed: ‘¡basta de Tenorios y Cyranos! . . . Las mujeres prefieren los hombres bien nutridos a los golfos escuálidos – y a los poetas decadentes’ [Enough of
Tenorios and Cyranos! . . . Our women prefer healthy men to weakling layabouts and to decadent poets].26 For his part,
Altamira recommended that the male youth undertook ‘useful work’ and a ‘serious undertaking’ instead of ‘wailing lyricism’ and the ‘delusions of erotic delirium’ which could be found in the doctrines and the literature of the modernist generations.27
Instead of this weak modernism, it was necessary to regenerate education itself and allow the universities to ‘crear generaciones de ánimo viril, que no se apoquen ante las dificultades comunes a todos los pueblos’ [forge generations of virile will, which do not cower in the face of those difficulties faced by all nations].28
In Damián Isern’s work, Del Desastre Nacional y sus Causas
(1899), the influence of French degenerationist thought is evi- dent in his allusions to sexual inversion. Isern relies on a topos often used in Europe at the time in order to express the decline of the nation. The decadence of ancient Rome and Greece is invoked to condemn both molitie and homosexuality, which in turn are seen to have occasioned such a decline in the first place: ‘degeneradas aquellas ciudades en las cuales reviven por modo especial los vicios de la decadencia de Grecia y Roma y, en especial, el estetismo’ [degenerate are those cities which rekindle the decadent vices of Greece and Rome and, above all, aestheti- cism].29This swipe at aestheticism was two-pronged. On the one
hand, it allowed Isern to criticize those viewed as ‘aesthetes’ or ‘dandies’ such as Oscar Wilde and Robert de Montesquiou, associated in Spain with literary modernism, and on the other, he could attack the ‘sexual invert’, of effeminate manners who was increasingly visible in European fin de siècle cities.30 What was
thought as repugnant here was not so much actual homosexuality, as sexual practices between people of the same sex, but a much broader set of properties, which implied the reversal of roles between the sexes, including passivity, transvestism and effemi- nacy.31 Homosexuality is contrasted with heterosexuality but
‘inversion’ and ‘aestheticism’ are contrasted with masculinity, whose crisis, linked to the phenomenon of national decline, was what concerned the Spanish regenerationists.