Hysterical Aphonia in La gaviota and Su único hijo

La gaviota was published in 1849, by Cecilia Boehl de Faber, an Andalusian woman of Spanish, German, and Irish ancestry who wrote it first in French under the penname of Fernán Caballero. Su único hijo was written by Leopoldo Alas, a professor of canon law at the University of Oviedo in the North of Spain, who published the book in 1891, under the penname of Clarín. Each novel describes a female character who sings professionally, but for reasons never fully elaborated, loses her voice and can no longer perform. In doña Cecilia's tale, María Santoló, despite her considerable talent and accomplishments on the stage in Seville and later in Madrid, is insistently and disparagingly called “la gaviota” by some of her neighbors in her native village. That bird's raucous cries are a harbinger of her own hoarseness at the end of the novel: as her chief nemesis reminds her: “Gaviota fuiste, Gaviota eres y Gaviota serás” (p. 152). Many characters also refer to her as Marisalada, in part a reference to her undomesticated demeanor and very unfeminine wit (the proverbial Andalusian sal), as well as describing her proclivity to spend so much time in the saltwater. Along the way in her career, the young woman comes under the tutelage (read: control) of various men. These constitute a steady progression: from her father; to her ill-matched husband, Fritz Stein, a German physician who has taken refuge after his role in one of the Carlist wars; to the Duke of Almansa, who discovers and then tries to have an affair with her; to Pepe Vera, the bullfighter, with whom she does have an affair and whose death in the ring precipitates the throat ailment that destroys her voice and silences the applause that had accompanied her wherever she went.

In turn, Clarín depicts Serafina Gorgheggi, an Englishwoman who comes to a provincial capital with a pseudo-Italian opera company. She performs to abject admiration, but, ironically, once the siren-song of the settled, bourgeois lifestyle becomes too enticing to her, she loses her singing voice. Like Marisalada, Serafina had been the darling (read: puppet or plaything) of the men around her. Both women had found a voice, succeeding in a sense in a masculine-dominated world, but for a variety of reasons, each falls from grace, perhaps even precipitating the plunge themselves, while losing gift and status. In Marisalada's case, the silence may come as a result of an unspecified infection, exacerbated by exhaustion, both from performance and from adulterous revelry. Serafina's syndrome also involves a physiological condition, though ultimately, her decline and fall are at least as metaphorical as they are medical. Her talent and popularity finally threaten the order of the town where she has come to roost. From her erstwhile perch as an angel, she falls to the level of a lamia of sorts, a cross between a human being and a serpent, least in the perception of Bonifacio Reyes, her former lover. Her arias are now little more than a hiss, as are the cheers that once greeted her vocal interpretations. Her descent reinforces the notion that women are expected to act as an ángel del hogar, redeeming the male, rather than luring him onto artistic and moral reefs (Aldaraca).

Much like Serafina, Marisalada figures as something of a siren: her liminal existence between the land and the sea reinforces this role, as she lures men to the destruction that finally presages her own. Hers is a preternaturally ambivalent and indefinable, and therefore a dangerous condition, literally no-man’s land, at the frontier between elements. In this regard, both women must be rendered voiceless, so as to lose their appeal. The factors leading to Serafina's silence are no less (and no more) explicitly empirical than in Marisalada's loss; both cases certainly involve some sort of hysteria, particularly in that both women are at least somewhat complicit in their own aphonia. At this point we need to recall that hysteria, in medicine as well as in literature—during the nineteenth century both disciplines were mutually influential—was the great symptomatic catch-all, almost to the point that the term becomes meaningless. From Classical times until now, hysteria has constituted an amalgam of symptoms, usually focusing on neurosis without a clearly-defined organic cause. Often hysteria would manifest itself as some sort of sympathetic paralysis, defect, or loss (sight, voice, tactile sensation, etc.). It would become the corporeal coefficient of an emotional dynamic, the external evidence of an internal conflict or crisis.

Originally, hysteria was considered the result of the wandering womb (hystera is the Greek for womb), which if unsatisfied with sufficient male contact, including coitus and conception, would wander upward, causing the characteristic sensation of choking. Indeed, Plato describes the troublesome uterus as a little animal, whose dependent independence in the centuries since has evidenced itself in female, and later in male, illness. The animal imagery utilized by doña Cecilia and Clarín to describe their respective characters only reinforces this construct: both the female seagull and the bird-like seraph who falls to a condition as a serpent woman (see Gilbert and Gubar) are finally stifled by their very femaleness. They are brought low by the unauthenticated animal which their ambitions and lack of attention to feminine concerns have left to wander unattended. That both women are sterile, or at least childless, is also significant. The hysteria that silences them is figured as the restive womb that one way or another will out (Veith; Ellenberger; Drinka; Beizer; Gilman et al).

From the beginning of La gaviota, María Santoló is depicted as a wild, thoroughly ill-disposed young woman. Her nature is essentially natural, as wild and intractable as the sea where she lives and as the seabird whose name she bears. Her talent is as undomesticated as the other elements in her life. As various writers have pointed out, doña Cecilia clearly felt as conflicted concerning her literary creation as she did concerning her own role as literary creator. She was never completely convinced that writing novels was an appropriate job for a woman (Kirkpatrick; Johnson). In turn, Fernán Caballero allows Marisalada to rise to the heights of artistic glory, only to drop her back down to earth, thereby humbling and disciplining her, not only for her inappropriate behavior with Pepe, the bullfighter, but also because of her presumption beyond her nature and station. The author minces no words when she expresses her judgment: “Marisalada pasaba su vida consagrada a perfeccionarse en el arte,” though not seeking ars pro gratia artis or edification in her roles as wife and potential mother, but rather “un porvenir brillante, una carrera de gloria, y una situación que lisonjeara su vanidad y satisficiera su afición al lujo” (p. 90). So the humanities do not humanize her in the least. Additionally, an element of her punishment may manifest itself as self-censorship or self-castigation, for in some measure Marisalada precipitates her own plunge. Intuitively she restores the balance that her ascension had upset. Her unfeminine behavior causes the mother (as the womb was often termed) to ascend, ending the threat that the siren voice constitutes to society and to the individual.

Early on, Fernán Caballero mentions the throat ailment that has begun to stifle María’s voice, who heedlessly plummets toward the end, attempting to ignore the “sofocón” that will end in her silence (p. 133). The fiebre that finally burns away her voice figures as a physical manifestation of her feverish pursuit of fame and fortune at the expense of her femininity. Her statement to her maid: “Tengo la cabeza loca” (p. 138), indicates her physiological ailment, as well as the underlying psychological disturbance of which it is evidence. The “dengues de princesa” (p. 133; see also p. 139), as Pepe characterizes her infirmity, give physical expression to her psychological dynamic. In other words, Marisalada’s at least tangentially hysterical ailment may arise from her intuition of the effrontery explicit in her attitude, even in her very existence. Nonetheless, the role that María rejects will not be denied, for nature holds ultimate sway in her disease and decline. Ultimately, her art may be the expression, not to mention the catalyst, of her descent, for she cannot escape her own young womanhood: her anatomy—and not just that of her throat—remains forever her destiny.

A similar situation obtains with her husband, Fritz Stein. At least ostensibly, Fernán Caballero depicts him as a much more agreeable character than his wife. Although from the beginning of her narrative, the author drops certain hints concerning her ambivalence about him: Fritz emerges early on as a typical Romantic hero, sentimental, sympathetic, and completely ignorant of how women—especially his wife—really think and really are. As he courts María, Stein mistakes every signal she sends, reading her without any comprehension of her as herself. From ancient times, hysteria was a feminine ailment, afflicting almost exclusively the women who anatomically and psychically were the only gender subject to its insistent vagaries. Nonetheless, from the nineteenth century on physicians and writers of (other) fiction from Flaubert to Charcot to Zola, would conclude that males could also be hysterics.

But the disease was still a female malady (Showalter), effectively feminizing all associated with it. This certainly occurs with Stein, characterized initially as a “Werther llorón” (p. 5), who when it comes time to fight for his wife, prefers to retreat and leave the spoils (ears, tail, and all) to his rival. As another character puts it, “Pepe Vera no se las aviene sino con toros bravos” (p. 135), and Dr. Stein is no toro bravo. Except for a consultation with his friend, the Duke of Almansa, he remains silent, presaging perhaps María's own silence-to-come. The Duke tells him that in similar circumstances, he would kill both wife and lover, but Stein will not, affirming instead: “Yo no los mataré . . . pero me dejaré morir” (p. 136). He then flees to the New World where he dies of “la epidemia” (p. 155), a fever paralleling and perhaps even reprising the one that attacks his wife. Stein's womanly submission may compensate for his wife’s lack of feminine docility. Likewise, the physician does not heal himself, but rather, in typical hysterical display, inscribes his misery onto his own body as it sickens and dies. Thus, Stein’s silent suffering speaks as loudly as that of any otherwise-voiceless female contemporary. His reluctance to vocalize is nothing short of vociferous.

A similar (con)textual malaise occurs in Su único hijo. Once again, hysteria crosses lines of gender and of genre, as Bonifacio Reyes and his wife Emma Valcárcel exhibit symptoms that parallel and ironize those of Serafina. First of all, there is Emma, whose Christian name without doubt recalls that of Flaubert’s hysteric bourgeoise, Mme. Bovary (Valis). Her surname is also significant, calling to mind her feelings, voiced and unvoiced, that the valley where she has been brought up and still lives is nothing short of a jail to her. Her somatic reactions to the limitations within which she lives exacerbate her hysteria in the form of various chronic complaints. Early on in the narrative, Emma experiences a miscarriage and thereafter is a willfully incapacitated hypochondriac. She is treated by a local homeopath, don Basilio Aguado, billed as “especialista en enfermedades de la matriz, y en histérico” (p. 72). To him she explains her symptoms, which include “grandes insomnios y a ratos grandes tristezas, y de repente ansias infinitas . . . y la angustia de un ahogo.” Emma feels that “la habitación en que estaba, la casa entera” are “estrechas, como tumbas, como cuevas de grillos,” and she “anhelaba salir volando por lo balcones y escapar muy lejos, beber mucho aire y empaparse en mucha luz.” Emma further states that her

melancolía a veces parecía fundarse en la pena de vivir siempre en el mismo pueblo, de ver siempre el mismo horizonte; y decía sentir nostalgia, que ella no llamaba así, por supuesto, de países que jamás había visto ni siquiera imaginado con forma determindada" (p. 73).

Certainly, all these complaints could be grouped under different headings than just hysteria, although the male-dominated medical and literary establishments, would readily have joined the homeopath in labeling Emma an hysteric. The basis of all Aguado’s diagnostics (much like essentially all of his contemporaries) is his belief in “la influencia de lo moral sobre lo orgánico”(p. 71). To this end, he affirms to Emma:

Es necesario que vayamos a la raíz del mal. El mal está dentro, en lo que llamamos el espíritu, y el espíritu no se cura con pócimas" (p. 74).

Nonetheless, her inner illness, albeit at times ironically, indicates itself in a variety of overt venues, as the body becomes the text of the soul. To Emma’s query concerning what hysteria actually involves, he retorts:

Sí, señora; pero hay relaciones misteriosas entre el alma y el cuerpo y yo no soy de los que dicen . . . post hoc, ergo propter hoc (p. 74).

But he and his coevals almost unanimously do subscribe to this logical fallacy, in that hysteria plus cuam ultra came to be the causal hoc. In this same vein Aguado states that “el histerismo es un Proteo,” because the complaint “toma infinidad de formas” (p. 74), all of which can fit under his diagnosis, if it serves his purpose. Of course, Clarín's irony is both potent and pervasive, here as throughout the rest of Su único hijo, where hysteria assumes a myriad of self-serving, not to mention self-referential and finally solipsistic guises.

Farther down the novelistic pecking order, there is Bonifacio (or Bonis, as everyone calls him), whose hysterical symptoms likewise manifest themselves in a variety of physical aspects. Dominated by his wife, "el jefe de la familia" (p. 7), Bonis is little more than a soñador, given over almost entirely to his afición for music, particularly the flute. His transports while playing this instrument could easily be considered as hysterical contortions, accompanied by the usual choking:

. . . parecía un náufrago ahogándose y que en vano busca una tabla de salvación; la tirantez de los músculos del rostro, el rojo que encendía las mejillas y aquel afán de la mirada . . . más parecían signos de una irremediable asfixia; hacían pensar e la apoplejía, en cualquier terrible crisis fisiológica (p. 6).

Later, Bonis perceives this same “expresión de asfixia” in his newborn son (p. 157), a child who may or may not actually be his, but in whose wailing features—music to the putative father’s ears—he sees himself and his family lines. Incidentally, such (mis)apprehension is quite in keeping with the general temper of the novel, with focuses extensively on questions of perception, as they mold and are molded by what passes for physical reality.

Bonis’s arguably feminine aspect and inclinations evidence themselves in what theorists from Charcot to Janet to Freud himself would characterize as masculine hysteria. His music and all the bodily exaggerations it entails, offer him a voice by which he can express himself, despite his wife’s authoritarianism. In this regard, the phallic dimension of his instrument of choice ought not to be discounted. For a time, his musical expression will focus on Serafina, though ultimately Bonifacio will renounce even this outlet, as he renounces her, giving himself over entirely to the service of his future hijo. Much as a virtuous woman would, and this in keeping with the dictates of contemporary medical wisdom, Bonis makes himself mute, sacrificing art and expression, to fulfill the demands of nature. Initially, he fetishizes Serafina's voice, disembodying it from the real woman of flesh and blood. Despite this dissociation (or perhaps because of it) Bonifacio is also able to carry on a carnal relationship with her. With a certain relish, the narrator notes how Serafina

se entregaba . . . con una desfachatez ardiente que . . .

pronto, se transformaba . . . en un furor infernal que inventaba delirios de fiebre, sueños de hachís realizados entre las brumas caliginosas de las horribles horas de arrebato enfermizo, casi epiléptico (pp. 48-49).

Perhaps prefiguring her future hoarseness, while recalling also María Santoló’s, the narrator elaborates on Serafina’s “éxstasis amoroso.” In this state she communicates “con una voz ronca, guteral, que parecía salir de la faringe, sin pasar por la boca.” However, after these “transportes báquicos . . . la diabla se convertía en la mujer de la voz de madre.” Bonis, whose Oedipal issues remain unresolved throughout the novel, is awash in "recuerdos de la niñez, de nostalgias del regazo materno" (p. 49). He is not especially troubled by Serafina’s convulsive eroticism (or by his own, when he is with her), whereas he is tormented by Emma’s overt sensuality, as manifested in shocking "noches de valpurgis matrimonial" (p. 126; cf. 61, 91-92). Still, Bonis is never sufficiently stunned not to participate in their marital orgies, albeit as a passive and therefore feminine partner. Until his wife becomes pregnant (whether by Bonis or by one of the opera singers, we never know for certain), Bonis actually considers his adulterous affair with Serafina as his legitimate union, whereas the socially sanctioned relationship to Emma to his mind is illegitimate. His wife's decadent nervousness sets her outside the bounds of the respectable, as the contemporary ideal was female passionlessness. Indeed, such “concupicencia invincible” as Emma’s (p. 121) would figure as a hallmark of female hysteria for the masculine medical community, as would Serafina's passion, though at least initially, her most recent lover by no means perceives her behavior in this vein.

With the long-awaited child on the way, Serafina’s voice is effectively silenced by his internal “voz secreta,” which for the expectant father becomes nothing short of “la Anunciación” (p. 134). He hears or at least tells himself that “se fue la pasión y viene el hijo” (p. 132): in other words, his apparent rejection of passion (or replacement of a carnal one with a supposedly more spiritual one) makes him worthy to become the parent of the offspring he so desperately desires. After the birth, Bonis reiterates his belief that he indeed heard “la voz de Dios” telling him what was to come (p. 158). Moreover, the supposed father figures more as the mother, taking on this gender-transgressing role and assuming an hysterical pregnancy to match Emma's carnal one. When she goes into labor, Bonis feels keenly “la debilidad femenina,” as expressed through “fenómenos fisiológicos" (p. 152). A medical attendant sends him to bed, ostensibly to rest for the birthing-to-be, but also as a sort of sympathetic accouchement (p. 154). Bonifacio must rely on his wife as his biological proxy, but his will finally be a sort of virgin birth in which, through her, he will be delivered of a baby boy, “su único hijo,” much in the Christian tradition Jesus is the Only Begotten of the Father.

In the church where his son is christened, Serafina rehearses to Bonis how her landlord is hounding her for the back rent, offering to accept payment in kind, which she rejects, as she wants no more “amantes ni altos ni bajos” (p. 172). This latest creditor is only one in a long line of men who would curtail or control her vocal expression. Previously, Mochi, Serafina's mentor, had concluded that his pupil “la faltaba algo y la faltaría algo siempre para llegar a verdadera estrella . . . le faltaba la voz y la flexibilidad suficiente de garganta.” After his own assimilation of such “frías lecciones de la realidad,” her tutor, who earlier “había seducido a su discípula para dominarla,” would teach them to her. As the narrator explains it, “se atrevió a comerciar con su hermosura,” effectively prostituting her (p. 47). Serafina sums up her experience with the masculine state of things in these sardonic terms: “Sois unos caballeros” (p. 172).

But it is also Serafina, rather than Mochi, Bonifacio, or any of the other males who attempt to manage (or ménage, perhaps?) her, who will put the seal on her own silence, just as had Marisalada in La gaviota. Serafina tells Bonis that one desperate night:

Yo eché a correr; salí a la calle, como estaba, sin sombrero . . . No sé qué cogí aquella noche, al relente, furiosa, por la calle húmeda . . . (Oh! En fin, la voz que ya andaba muy mal, se fue de repente . . . Desde aquella noche canto . . . como tu mujer" (p. 172).

As Emma Valcárcel’s voice is more like the raucous cry of the seagull, than the sweet singing of the nightingale, this latter simile is telling, calling to mind María Santoló’s vocal transformation into her avian namesake. Additionally, Serafina indicates that she wants nothing more than “paz . . ., a soñar, a desear imposibles,” one of which is “honradez” (pp. 172-73). Earlier, she had explained to her erstwhile lover that in his town she had been transformed from a bohemian artist into a would-be “burguesa” (p. 149). Though even in this apparent accommodation there exists an element of rebellion, as was generally characteristic of contemporary hysteria.

Serafina had also tried to reach Bonis through “expansiones espistolares” (p. 147), but her written prose cannot change his mind. She is “una Dido muy versada,” full of “elocuencia en los reproches.” In turn, Bonifacio recalls Aeneas, driven from his lover by forces he deems beyond his control. Serafina’s vociferous complaints about her former lover's “largo silencio” (p. 148) actually reinforce and recapitulate her own lack of an effective voice. In such vain efforts to communicate, the former operatic artist fallen to songstress recalls the scribbling women of her day, whose literary efforts were so frequently indicative of a proclivity to hysteria, if not an actual occurrence of the illness itself. So Serafina figures as one more madwoman in the attic, or in more mystical and otherwise feminine terms, another loca de la casa. This expression, which originally comes from Saint Theresa of Avila, describing imagination, would be employed in a similar sense, first by Clarín’s contemporary, Benito Pérez Galdós, in an eponymous play (1893), and considerably later by our contemporary, Rosa Montero, in a novel of the same name (2003). Additionally, written texts such as Serafina's, classed elsewhere by the narrator as “lascivia letrada” (p. 101), tend to inscribe themselves out of frustration on the physical body: the hysterical word becomes flesh, all the while retaining its paper dimensions and dementia (Beizer).

Since song is apparently no longer an option available to her, Serafina next attempts to give voice to her feelings via the spoken word. But Bonifacio still will not relent, for his new son's sake, of course. Finally, she tells him what everyone else in town thinks: “Tu hijo . . . no es tu hijo” (p. 173). In his perception she resembles a serpent, hissing out her venomous accusations. Such serpentine imagery certainly suggests hysteria, in her as in him, for the snake has often been associated with this malady (Hertz; Larsen). Yet Bonis remains adamant: he forgives Serafina (an irony not to be lost on the reader), and then for her and for the rest of the world to hear, makes his profession of faith right out loud: “Bonifacio Reyes cree firmemente que Antonio . . . es . . . su único hijo. )Lo entiendes? (Su único hijo!” (p. 174). Like Lazarillo de Tormes before him, Bonis will silence the whispers of doubt and dishonor by his own willful omission. His discourse denies all others, as occurred in picaresque hero’s rejection of rumors concerning his wife and their benefactor, the archpriest.

To conclude, the aphasic or aphonic episodes in La gaviota and Su único hijo interface with numerous other incidents in literary, medical, and even popular culture, contemporary, as well as antecedent and posterior to their publication. At this point George Sand’s Consuelo and George Eliot’s Armgart, musical protagonists, respectively, of an eponymous novel (1842) and a verse drama (1870), come to mind. Incidentally and for whatever it’s worth in this present context, it might be noted that both of these Georges were female. In turn, Fernán Caballero and Clarín, along with the individuals they depict in literature, also anticipate work done by Freud and others in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. Anna O. and Dora, among others whose language or vocal expression were curtailed and then expressed as hysteria, take on additional significance in light of their predecessors, just as these latter mean more in view of those who would shortly come on the scene. Long before the vogue or even the advent of the Freudian talking cure, Cecilia Boehl de Faber and Leopoldo Alas anticipate the founder of psychoanalysis’s privileging of the aural and the oral over the visual. Likewise, they anticipate his understanding of the sexual etiology of hysteria and of the multiple conversions of psychic phenomena to physical ones, saying what otherwise could not be said and at least humming what could no longer be sung (Greenberg; Bernheimer and Kahane).

Kevin S. Larsen

University of Wyoming