It's a gloomy Sunday morning in the Santa Cruz mountains, perfect weather for revisiting some of my favorite Spanish Romantics. This morning will belong to the Duke of Rivas and Carolina Coronado -- author of my favorite Don Juan/Dangerous Lover* story, and favorite Romantic feminist**, respectively. We've been having a particularly dry year, so I need to take advantage of all the overcast gloom and doom I can get. BRING ON THE TEMPEST!!! (and by tempest I mean very slight chance of rain).
* I borrow this term from Deborah Lutz's fantastic 2006 text The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seductive Narrative.
** I find Coronado -- one of a handful of female Romantics who wrote, published, and was active in literary/political circles in 19th century Spain (others being Rosalía de Castro, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda) -- to be especially compelling due to her personal (and physiological) eccentricities. Coronado suffered from chronic catalepsy, and, on various occasions, experienced such violent bouts that she appeared (to those caring for her) to have died. She became obsessed with death, and was particularly terrified of being buried alive. WITH GOOD REASON. As an adolescent, Coronado had a (maybe) imaginary lover named Alberto, to whom she dedicated more than a few poems, and for whom she took a vow of abstinence after his (imaginary) death at sea. She revoked this vow when she married in her early thirties. She would eventually embalm her deceased husband, refusing to bury him, and have various premonitions in which she would predict her own children's' deaths. My kind of spooky, gothic woman.
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