From Castus To Casticismo: Conceptions Of Purity In

1IntroductionLa gama que se extiende desde lo limpio a lo que no está limpioabsolutamente discurre sobre interpretaciones de muy diferentesgéneros y calificaciones polisémicas. Especialmente, la mujer, lamujer limpia, ha venido siendo, incluso biológicamente, la guíafundamental para establecer el estado de la limpieza.The gamut that extends from that which is clean to that which isunclean absolutely includes interpretations of very different genresand polysemic grades. In particular, woman, the clean woman, hasbecome, even biologically, the fundamental guide for establishingthe state of cleanliness.-- Vicente Verdú “La limpieza de las mujeres” (Thecleanliness of women) El País 10 Nov 2010To examine the discourse of purity is to question the naturalized ordering of society thatrenders certain entities inherently pure and others impure. Both material and symbolicmanifestations of impurity, as anthropologist Mary Douglas argues, are inherently linked toconcepts of danger since they threaten to corrupt states of purity and therefore order. In practice,such hierarchical regimes rely on ideological thinking that attributes value to specificconfigurations of race, gender, sexuality and class while denigrating others. Such configurationshave become iconographic and naturalized to the extent that articulations of purity such ascleanliness (as in the case of the epigraph above) necessarily conjure up the image of a (white,virginal, domestic) woman. She becomes the agent and emblem of all that is pure. Insert anothergender/race in relation to limpieza and the analogy no longer holds water.Figures of purity, of course, are not neutral, eternal bodies, but instead represent aparticular incarnation of race, gender, sexuality and class at a specific historical juncture. AnneMcClintock reminds us of the inseparability of these categories when she states that “[r]ace,gender and class are not distinct realms of experience, existing in splendid isolation from eachother; nor can they be simply yoked together retrospectively like armatures of Lego. Rather, theycome into existence in and through relation to each other – if in contradictory and conflictualways” (5). This dissertation treats articulations of the pure in the last third of nineteenth-centurySpain, as an aperture into the particular ways in which modern formulations of purity emerge inrelation to other historically embedded ideals of identity.Purity, of course, remains neither fixed nor stable, but instead fluctuates as a historicallycontingent construct whose lines of demarcation are constantly being redrawn. Purity takes ondiverse meanings in a given historical context, but each articulation exists as an axis on aspiraling genealogical web. Bridget Aldaraca, for instance, traces how Fray Luis’s rendition ofthe ideal wife in La Perfecta Casada (1583), published during the Catholic CounterReformation, informs the nineteenth-century construction of the ángel del hogar, demonstratingthe persistence of an early modern past within modern fictions of purity. This dissertation builds

2on the important work of such feminist critics as Aldaraca, by examining how gender concepts ofpurity are inflected by race and origin.The discourse of purity in relation to race figures prominently in the context of earlymodern Spanish and colonial Spanish America, taking center stage in the scholarship on limpiezade sangre (blood purity) and the Inquisition (1480-1832) and later in the work on colonialparadigms of race and miscegenation. These more widely circulated narratives of Spanish purityare frequently treated as if they were firmly locked in a pre-modern era, evidenced in part by therelative dearth of scholarship on race and lineage in modern Peninsular studies. With theexception of female chastity, purity in the nineteenth century has rarely been a central categoryof analysis. Although the conceptualization of purity in the nineteenth century takes on markedlymodern characteristics (part and parcel of bourgeois subjectivity) it nevertheless reaches backinto or reanimates this earlier history of limpieza de sangre. In charting articulations of the purespecifically in Restoration Spain, my dissertation calls for a nuanced engagement with MichelFoucault’s first volume of History of Sexuality, in which he identifies the modern period as theage of sex, marked by the shift from “a symbolics of blood” to “an analytic of sexuality.” Whatmy research shows is that the Spanish cultural landscape foregrounds an expansive interval oftransition over the course of the nineteenth century in which the discourse of blood has not yetdissipated. In this way, my work is informed by scholars such as Kathleen Biddick, who seek tochallenge the underlying assumption that the modern is characterized by the “now” of sex ratherthan the “then” of blood (Biddick 451). While there was an undeniable declension of theimportance of blood purity at an institutional level, pure lineage and honorable origins continuedto be valued as a sign of distinction even as the bourgeoisie was emerging as an influential class.Consequently, impure origins figured as a source of shame, suspicion, and moral degradation.The blood purity statutes, I argue, laid the groundwork for this kind of origin-centric,exclusionary thinking and continued to have a latent effect, even if they were, from theirinception, “legal fictions” (Martínez 77). In the chapters that follow, I will argue that purity takescenter stage as a foundational ideological construct for modern subjectivity and national identityin late imperial Spain.The last thirty years of the nineteenth century mark Spain’s uneasy encounter with theprocesses of modernization, punctuated by major political shifts including the establishment ofthe First Republic, the subsequent Bourbon Restoration, the spread of Liberalism, and the revivalof the Catholic Church. Beyond the finite borders of the Peninsula, this was also a time oftransoceanic, geopolitical shifts; by mid-century Spain had lost the majority of its overseasterritories, and struggled to gain a secure foothold in the scramble for Africa. As Spaintransitioned from Empire to (second-rate) Nation-State, it struggled to hold onto its remainingcolonies – Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines – the so-called provincias de ultramar(overseas provinces).1 Today, scholarly discussions on modern peninsular literature seldom treatthe nineteenth century in Spain as a period of empire, with the exception of abrupt transitionalperiod from empire to nation, infamously marked by the losses of the Spanish American War,better known in Spain as the Disaster of 1898. While characterized by colonial protraction on the1For further reading on the governance of Spain’s overseas provinces see: Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s book TheConquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century. Pittsburgh, Pa:University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006 and Josep M. Fradera’s detailed study Colonias Para Después De Un Imperio.Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra, 2005.

3one hand, the Restoration period is also the era of national consolidation and culturalhomogenization. The rise of nationalist discourse in the wake of Spain’s imperial failures createdan environment of national anxieties around questions of inter- and intra- national identities,which hinge on a concept of purity. The diverse articulations that arise in relation to collectiveand individual identities can be linked through what I call the discourse of casta. Beforeaddressing specific texts, it will be fruitful to discuss this key concept.The word-concept casta is an articulation of purity that takes on unique valences in theHispanic context. While casta has no singular or standard definition it is, first and foremost, anarticulation of purity, which I argue can only be understood in relation to a web of sister terms.Stemming from the Latin castus – clean and pure –, casta is most often translated into English as“caste” or “chaste,” depending on its syntactic function as noun or adjective, a profoundlyrevealing ambiguity that drives my analysis. In the chart below, I have mapped out casta’s mostcommon permutations as defined by the Diccionario de Autoridades (1884).Casta (de lat. castus, puro):generación o linaje. Dícesetambién de los irracionales.Caste (from Lat. castus,pure): generation or lineage.It is also said of animalsCastizo,za. De buen origen ycastaCastizo,za. Of good originand lineageCasto,a: puro, honesto,opuesto a la sensualidad.Chaste: pure, honest, averseto sensuality.Castidad: Virtud que seopone a los afectos carnalesChastity: Virtue which isopposed to carnal desiresThis dissertation explores casta’s various semantic permutations: sexual purity (castidad); bloodand lineage (casta/o); and origin and idealized Spanish purity (lo castizo/casticismo).2 The lackof any singular definition makes casta open to the historically contingent processes ofresignification, characterized by what Stoler has called “polyvalent mobility” (Racial Historiesand Their Regimes of Truth 187).Historically, casta intersects with the concept of raza. According to Walter Mignolo, oneof the earliest definitions of raza (race) in the Diccionario de Covarrubias (1611) refers tobreeds of purebred horses (79). The idea of race in the following century would later be extendedto humans and be used not to refer to those of legitimate or pure origin but rather to those withMuslim or Jewish heritage. Raza thus originally took on negative connotations, marking onlythose who were deemed impure. Interestingly, in eighteenth-century Mexico casta took a similar2Miguel de Unamuno blames the debilitating obsession with lo castizo for Spain’s modern demise in his collectionof essays En torno al casticismo (1895). From his conceptualization of casticismo just prior to 1898, I workbackwards historically through the Spanish Restoration period.

4turn. Its colloquial usage moved away from the idea of purity or breed and instead was used toidentify only those who were mixed race, giving rise to the visual, taxonomic ordering ofmiscegenation in the pintura de las castas (caste painting). In the eighteenth century casta in thePeninsula would approximate this early usage of raza, and take on the meaning of both“generation” and “lineage” in reference to humans (“Generacion y lináge que viene de padresconocidos”) (Generation and lineage from known parentage) and also signify breeds of animals,especially horses: “Se llama también el distinto linaje de los caballos y otros animales, porquevienen de padres conocidos por su lealtad, fiereza ù otra circunstancia, señalados y particulares”(It is also said of the distinct lineage of horses and other animals because of parents known fortheir loyalty, ferocity or other indicated and particular characteristics) (Diccionario deAutoridades 1729). Its complex genealogy, thus, refutes the possibility of a transhistoricalconcept of race and also s

together, I argue, is the regulation of gender. Sexual purity, (and later racial, class- and national purity) is an implicit part of what casta evokes across its semantic evolutions. The texts examined here reveal that the discourse of