Contingencia histórica y mito romántico: Teresa (1941), de Rosa Chacel

Abstract

Teresa (1941), the first novel published in her republican exile by the Spanish writer Rosa Chacel, offers a modern recreation of relevant characters and events of our past. Based on the "real" Teresa Mancha, muse of Espronceda's "Canto a Teresa" (El diablo mundo, 1841), this novel is about that forgotten woman, now transformed into subject of the story and recreated as a new femenine romantic myth. Chacel's fictional translation of Teresa's adultery with Espronceda —a romantic literary icon deconstructed in her novel— is framed in the context of a concrete contingency: the liberal exile and political opposition against Fernando VII. Special attention is also devoted to the strong discrimination of the bourgeois women who dared to break the limits of the double moral standard in that society, and their many problems in that particular "circumstance" (as defined by the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset). Ir also aproaches young Teresa's exile in London and the beginnings of the couple's love in Paris. Her experience abroad is defined by the interaction with two English modern feminine models (the emancipist woman, the woman artist) and the liberal ambience of their affair in France. It also explains the strong difficulties of her adaptation to Spain after exile and her tragic final evolution.