Sara Chambers's Letters and Salons

Letters and Salons

Beyond woman’s comprehension

We have stories about heroines, but not much about women thinking about the nation because their ideas were less public than their actions and whatever they wrote have been left out of literary canons. Though the record is hardly there, women were a cornerstone in the construction of national communities in LA. Sáenz, Sánchez, and Arriagada show that through correspondence and friendship, women played an important role as mediators.

Like Benedict Anderson thought, the writing and reading was a catalyst to the imagination of nations, but in the women’s case, it was through the writing and reading of correspondence, and through the socialization in salons. In this way women became intermediaries working toward national unity, and occasional critics of the excess of masculine-driven nationalism.

They were pioneers because the stereotype and the society’s drive was to mold women to the subordinate role of domesticity. Women who publicly thought were ridiculed and demonized. The only positive tendency of domesticity was that women were trained to raise loyal and virtuous citizens.

Even other women writers who published on feminine journals advocated the idea of domesticity for women while, contradictorily, violating themselves such a role by publishing their work. It was on the more private arena of letters that middle-class and elite women vented their frustration more freely.

This study relies mostly on unpublished documents in the form of letters. These letters could not be considered strictly private since they were also meant to be read in public and shared with others.

Sara C. Chambers add an important twist to (or challenge) Anderson’s thesis of the imagined community not only be including women in the creation of the national, but also by arguing that the imagination process happened through social interactions at smaller and tangible communities of “writers, readers, conversationalists, and political conspirators.”

The author does not make the connection directly, but her insistence in the fact that males’ leaders focused on the abstract while women focused on the concrete relationships of friends may be one of the most important contribution of this study since for most people who were not elite male, this was exactly the case.

Sáenz developed its sense of patriotism for Ecuador not from an abstract idea, since she had lived most of her life in Peru and Colombia, but from her personal acquaintances and from her exilic perspective. It is interesting that despite her being the most politically educated and democratically oriented of the three she still supported a military leader who sought to change the constitution to expand his tenure in power. Her contribution was not limited to influencing Simón Bolivar and Juan José Flores, but one that helped create a sense of national identity that favored order over other merits.

Sánchez’s, like Sáenz, spent time in exile, but differently from Sáenz, this augmented her patriotism because she revolved around like-minded people. Moreover, since she did not have competing (provincial) loyalties, as Sáenz had, and Argentine’s early national history was simpler than that of Ecuador and Colombia, it was easier for her to imagine an Argentine that was more homogenous than that of Sáenz. Still, her sense of national identity was rooted in her relationships with other Argentines, and not in any abstract idea of the nation.

Arraigada was the least euphoric patriot of the three. She lived in a southern isolated province, and this isolation may have influenced the way she imagined the nation. It was because she had the least of friends that her extended network did not yield a broader vision of the nation. This distance from the locus of power, however, allowed her to make a more critical appraisal of Chile than the other two writers. Chambers thought that her choice of reading, the romance novel, may have also influenced her lack of strong attachment to the new nation.

All three women, Chambers argued, are not representative of their class, but they are neither unique. This means that through her lives we can get an insight into the role of women in the formation of early national identities. It was not their radicalism that put these women apart, but how they managed to carve a niche of substantial independence in order to affect politics and ideology that make them special to history. Their ideological contribution was the argument that tolerance and negotiation was better than confrontation and personal ambitions.