The Functions of Landscape in Jorge Isaacs and Soledad Acosta de Samper

Abstract

Jorge Isaacs's María (1867) and Soledad Acosta de Samper's “Un crimen” (1869) encode landscape in ways that establish or undermine, respectively, hierarchies of class. Isaacs and Acosta de Samper represent landscapes as conveyors of meaning about relationships of dominance and subjugation, and they show how landscapes impose restrictions on their inhabitants in their narratives. Using concepts from cultural geography, this article argues that while Isaacs's text seeks to reproduce existing social conditions of inequality via a nostalgic reproduction of the landscape, Acosta de Samper's story calls into question the complicity of landscape with power and undermines the idyllic, pastoral narrative that María seeks to advance.

Keywords:

• Soledad Acosta de Samper
• class
• cultural geography
• Jorge Isaacs
• landscape
• María
• “Un crimen”

Notes

For another article that brings concepts of cultural geography to bear on a nineteenth-century Latin American novel, see Lindstrom, who uses feminist cultural geography to discuss the spaces of Sab.

For more on Isaacs's use of nature as a Romantic trope, see McGrady (79–85) and Zanetti (32–33).

This is not to discount the extensive and wide-ranging readings of María by numerous critics. Among the many topics that have attracted scholarly attention are Jewish identity in the novel (Faverón Patriau; Jagoe), patriarchy and the role and representation of women (Borello; Cuadra; Díaz Balsera; Jagoe), the interpellated episode of Nay and Sinar and its relationship to the rest of the novel (Múnera; Musselwhite), and national identity (García-Lozada; Lucía Ortiz; María Mercedes Ortiz), not to mention Doris Sommer's expansive treatment of the novel in Foundational Fictions.

Jonathan Tittler likewise notes this phenomenon in María, writing that “las descripciones [de los paisajes…] no son fundamentalmente descripciones, sino más bien expresiones de su estado emotivo, monumentos verbales en honor del sentimiento que sigue abrigando” (509). Tittler also accurately pinpoints the relationship between the narrative's descriptions of nature and Efraín's emotions, calling the text “antropocéntrico” (515).

Pimentel notes that “nature is represented in María as an aesthetic composition in (and from) the eye of the beholder” (170).

Recent years have seen a great deal of scholarship on Acosta de Samper; see, for example, Montserrat Ordóñez and Carolina Alzate's extensive collection Soledad Acosta de Samper: Escritura, género y nación en el siglo XIX, as well as books by Ordóñez and Gonzales Ascorra and essays by Aguirre; González-Stephan; Hallstead; López Cruz; Mesa Gancedo; Ramírez Pontificia; and Serrano Orejuela. On “Un crimen,” however, relatively little has been written; the most extensive works to date are the essays collected in Rodríguez-Arenas, Lecturas críticas, and Rodríguez-Arenas's own “La marginación.”

Rodríguez-Arenas summarizes the situation thusly: “[E]n esa sociedad estratificada que se muestra en ‘El [sic] crimen,’ la moralidad se invierte, los violentos actos que normalmente ubicarían al perpetrador […] fuera de la ley, en ese mundo viciado, (re)construido gracias a la lejanía geográfica del lugar donde suceden los acontecimientos y al lapso temporal […] lo colocan por medio de la manipulación del poder por encima de las leyes, logrando con la violencia crear un imperio de desigualdad, terror e injusticia” (“La marginación” 155).

Rodríguez-Arenas astutely comments on the way in which Bernardino dismisses Luz by announcing, “[e]sta mujer está loca” (“La marginación” 156). Sandra Otto similarly argues that in the story, “hay dos momentos específicos que prueban que la situación idílica al principio de la historia no es tal para las mujeres, en este caso representadas por la esposa. El discurso más poderoso en el relato es el de la subyugación de la mujer; su uso le da a un grupo poder sobre otro” (43). The first of these moments, according to Otto, is when Rafael responds to Luz's plea that he not go to town with the comment, “[y]a tengo quién me proteja” (44); the second is when Bernardino responds to her accusations of murder with “Esta mujer está loca” (46).