The Nature of Woman: Spanish Women Poets of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Since a woman's nature, or physical and mental character, was viewed similarly to that of the natural world, the Western European binary construct of nature versus culture is correlated to the discourse on women and their social roles throughout history. Through the study of Spanish women writers' ties to natural elements and female identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, their poetry reveals intimate connections as well as conflicts which demonstrate shifts in the socio-political climate. By approaching their poetry as nature writing, Spanish women poets' work of this period exposes the sometimes contradictory ways they adapted to the social and cultural conventions of the time through the use of natural images. I review the relationship between woman and nature as portrayed in the poetry of Maria Hore, Margarita Hickey, Carolina Coronado, Rosalia de Castro, and Emilia Pardo Bazan. As each writer must confront the dialectic of nature and culture, I analyze whether they embraced the social binary construct of woman's ties to nature rather than to the masculine culture, rejected it completely (and therefore subverted the binary), or searched for a solution outside of this dialectic, and how those confrontations affect their feminist messages.