Absent mother, mad daughter, and the therapy of love in «La delirante» of María Rosa Gálvez

Daniel S. Whitaker

In Goya's painting, La familia de Carlos IV (1800), the pivotal figure is not the King but the Queen, who, with resolute gaze and sumptuous gown lays claim to the exact center of the royal family portrait (she is flanked by six figures on each side). Perhaps María Rosa Gálvez, as a frequent visitor to the Bourbon court, had seen this painting or, as a close friend of Manuel de Godoy, was personally aware of María Luisa's position of power in the government of Spain during the last years of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Whether or not the consort of Carlos IV indeed inspired Gálvez to write a tragedy about another, albeit more competent ruler, Elizabeth I of England, remains unknown, since the playwright from Málaga has left no written records concerning the specific sources of her plays. Nevertheless, in 1804, Gálvez published La delirante, a tragedy focusing on the efforts of the sixteenth-century authoritarian Tudor Queen to secure her throne against the menace of the Scottish Stuart family as well as ambitious suitors.

La delirante along with five other tragedies, three comedies, three short works, and a zarzuela form the impressive dramatic repertoire of María Rosa Gálvez (1768-1806), a contemporary of Leandro Fernández de Moratín. Seven of her plays were produced on the Madrid stage between 1801 and 1805 for the leading theaters of her day, such as the Príncipe and the Caños del Peral. The production of these plays is significant, since, as David Gies notes, even a formidable literary figure such as Nicolás Fernández de Moratín (the father of Leandro) was only able to produce one play for the theater-going public¹. Of special interest in the theater of Gálvez are themes that concern eighteenth-century women, such as sexual abuse and rape (Amnón, Florinda, Blanca de Rossi), the pitfalls of arranged marriages (Los figurones literarios, Un loco hace ciento), the right of a wife to separate herself and her children from an irresponsible husband (El egoísta), the dangers of the cortejo (El egoísta), and the role of sex and love outside the tradition bonds of marriage (Safo)². In all, the theater of Gálvez offers an alternative view of women that differs greatly from the feminine roles in plays by her masculine counterparts, such as Raquel, Lucrecia, or even El sí de las niñas³.

In La delirante, Gálvez continues to scrutinize the feminine psyche amid the intrigues of the Elizabethan court. As the tragedy opens, an unexpected visitor roams the halls of the Queen's palace -Leonor, the mad daughter of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth recently had executed. Adding to the confusion is the belief that Leonor had died three years earlier, a view fostered by the compassionate Lord and Lady Pembroke in order to protect the unfortunate Leonor from the Queen's executioner. Moreover, prior to Leonor's faked death, the Queen had married her to Lord Arlington, thus separating Leonor from her lover Essex, who is also favored by the Queen. Thus, the appearance of Leonor once again fires the jealousy of Elizabeth as well as the ambition of Arlington; this pretentious nobleman hopes to place Leonor on the throne as rightful heir (and himself as King). In the last act, Leonor regains her sanity, reveals the plot of her evil husband, and with Essex saves the Queen from rebel forces. Leonor forgives the Queen for beheading her mother, but, in the last moment of the play, Arlington slays her.

In many aspects, La delirante is a typical example of serious drama written for the Spanish stage at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. The play closely adheres to the unities of time (12 hours), place (the throne room of the palace), and action (the rivalry of Elizabeth and Leonor). In addition, the tragedy warns the public against the danger of vengeance, an exemplary moral lesson which, according to René Andioc's reading of Luzán, was the sine que non of the Spanish neoclassic tragedy (400-401). Even the melodramatic, maquiavelian Arlington, assassin of the tragedy's heroine, parallels other rather overdrawn evil beings which Ivy McClelland notes populate many tragedies of the times (219). La delirante also addresses one of the most popular themes of the contemporary Madrid theater, epitomized in Moratín's El sí de las niñas (1806): the precarious nature of marriages concocted by parents. Finally, Gálvez chooses as her meter the somber romance heroico, the verse form favored by many neoclassic tragedians⁴.

Gálvez orchestrates the conflict between Elizabeth and Leonor superbly. As the action of La delirante unfolds, the English Queen repeatedly demonstrates her most positive traits: courage, boundless self-confidence, and a sense of historical purpose as leader of a people confronted by powerful foreign adversaries. However, the public gradually perceives that one of Europe's most powerful monarchs is handicapped by her own vindictive nature, her capricious abuse of authority, and an irrational fear of a multitude of adversaries, both real and imagined, both male and female. Leonor throughout the play reminds Elizabeth that the Queen, in the words of Marianne Hirsch, «chooses masculine instead of feminine identification, masculine instead of feminine power, masculine instead of feminine nurturance»⁵.

Leonor, on the other hand, lacks the Queen's chutzpah and ability to control the patriarchal labyrinth of the court; an overwhelming desire for vengeance clouds her mental health. Yet, from her first appearance on the stage (Act II, scene II), Leonor's most admirable qualities shine forth in her great capacity to love and her renunciation of personal ambition (she does not want to be Queen). She is also able to discern scheming courtiers from loyal friends. In effect, Leonor is Elizabeth's perfect double, in whom the Queen experiences «an immobilizing recognition of the self one might have been» (Guerard 3). In the loving, conciliatory embrace of Elizabeth and Leonor at the end of play (Act V, scene VIII), both women have learned much of each other and of themselves.

The portrayal of Leonor, above all, is certainly the creative tour de force of Gálvez in La delirante. While the other major characters of the tragedy are based at least in part on verifiable historical figures, Leonor is evidently an invention of Gálvez, since Mary Queen of Scots (referred to as «la Estuarda» in the play) did not have a daughter⁶. Thus, in the poetic creation of the role of Leonor, the dramatist from Málaga follows well the advice of Aristotle, as highlighted by Russell P. Sebold, that «no es oficio del poeta el contar las cosas como sucedieron, sino como debieran o pudieran haber sucedido» (247-248). In the unhappy daughter of Mary Stuart, Gálvez creates a perfect foil, a worthy antagonist, and finally a close confidant of the most famous Queen of the sixteenth century. Gálvez, in other words, develops the character of Elizabeth through the fabrication of the perfect other, endowing Leonor with those precise qualities that the Queen lacks. In Linda Hutcheon's words, Gálvez «totalizes» the personality of the strong Queen: the dramatist from Málaga follows the lead of other writers of fiction or history who «render their materials coherent, continuous, unified -but always with an eye to the control and mastery of those materials, even at the risk of doing violence to them» (62).

The theatergoer of La delirante, then, may be justifiably tempted to focus on the face-off of Elizabeth and Leonor as the most significant dramatic conflict of La delirante. Yet it is also true that many other dramatic circumstances and events of the tragedy seem unrelated or at the most marginally connected to the clash of these two women. To begin with, the title alerts one that the central figure in the drama is Leonor and not her famous royal adversary. Likewise, the fact that Leonor is mad for the first three acts of the play and then regains, by Act V, her complete mental capacity seems at first glance a superfluous, perhaps even a melodramatic addition to characterization of Leonor: to develop fully the rivalry of the Queen and the young woman, madness would not appear to be necessary. Moreover, Leonor appears in many scenes to be obsessed by the memory of the late Mary Stuart; in her least lucid moments, the young woman believes that in fact she herself is dead and has returned to the world to torment Elizabeth for murdering her royal parent⁷.

In reality, Leonor throughout La delirante is locked in combat with an even more powerful figure than Elizabeth: this larger-than-life adversary is an opponent who never physically appears on the stage and whom, ironically, Leonor dearly loves, respects, and honors: her deceased mother. In other words, La delirante has a «deep structure» or, employing the terminology of Marianne Hirsch, a «submerged» mother-daughter plot in which Leonor fights for and finally achieves her own selfhood and an identity independent from that of her famous mother (21).

In the last few years, several critics, especially Julia Kristeva, Nancy Chodorow, Adrienne Rich, and Marianne Hirsch, employing a feminist psychoanalytic approach, have examined carefully the very complex relationship between mother and daughter. Chodorow's inquiry into the nature of the mother-daughter bond captures many of the central aspects discussed by other analysts⁸. To begin with, she notes that there exists an extremely close relationship between the girl and her mother during the preoedipal stage, a pre-verbal state in the life of the girl in which the boundaries of self are blurred with that of the mother. Despite the closeness of this bonding, however, the girl must move away from her mother in order to free herself from the latter's overwhelming influence. Yet, even as the girl turns away from her mother towards her father and passes through the rites of the oedipal complex, she nonetheless, «does not give up this preoedipal relationship completely, but rather builds whatever happens later upon this preoedipal base» («Mothering Object» 140). Chodorow concludes that for a young girl, «autonomy and separation from her mother, along with ambivalent attachment to her, are central to the feminine oedipus complex» (155). In other words, for a girl to become a woman and function in the patriarchal (male, symbolic) order, the girl must maintain not only a tenuous link with her mother but also sustain an independent self. As Jessica Benjamin summarizes, «In the earliest struggle for recognition, the mother must at some point actually remove herself from the child's sense of control, of omnipotence. She must establish her existence as another subject, as a person, that the child too can have a sense of selfhood» (qt. in Hirsch, Mother/Daughter 161).

It should be emphasized that the mental health of the young woman who has failed to achieve her own identity as distinct from her mother may be impaired. Nancy Friday's best-seller My Mother/MySelf. The Daughter's Search for Identity contends, if in a rather cursory manner, that for a daughter to have a well-nourished ego and positive self-image, she must have a vision of her life that is her own and not handed down from her mother. Jane Gallop warns that if the distinction between mother and daughter breaks down, the result can be tragic, since the daughter would run «the risk of death - loss of self, loss of identity...» (115). Elaine Showalter writes that mental disorders, including schizophrenia, can be «caused by the patient's unlivable situation in the home, as the parents (but more often the mother) contradicted and fought their daughter's efforts to achieve independence and autonomy» (221). Adding to the potentially stressful relationship between mother and daughter is the possibility of a catastrophic occurrence, in both real life and in fiction: the death of the mother, often violent and unexpected. As Adrienne Rich writes, «the loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter, is the essential female tragedy» (237). In the case of the death of a mother, a daughter may internalize the mother and thus, in a sense, still struggle every day to fix the boundaries between herself and the absent parent.

Returning to La delirante, one finds that the madness («delirio») of Leonor exists between Acts I-III; not coincidentally, this is the period of the play in which the tragic heroine identifies completely with her dead mother. Mary Stuart's well known struggle as Elizabeth's principal rival to the throne has become internalized and Leonor is the new soldier in the battle against the Tudor Queen. In these early scenes, then, Leonor lacks the mental health of a well-adjusted adult because, unconsciously, she rebels against the fact that the life she is leading is one that she has inherited from her mother and not the one she has chosen herself. Leonor feels this unconscious frustration when she complains to Essex that «¡Si supieses /qué extraordinario ardor, qué activo fuego / inflama mis sentidos!» (128)⁹. Even though she may sympathize with her mother's cause, she did not elect this campaign against Elizabeth by her own free will.

Many examples from the initial scenes of La delirante demonstrate the oneness and connectedness of Leonor and Mary Stuart. As Leonor first enters the stage (Act II, scene II), she declares her hate for Elizabeth, lamenting that «[...] venganza, / grita desde la tumba» (122). The word tumba has a double meaning: on the one hand, it refers to the tomb of Leonor's mother and thus signals the continuation of the mother's battle against the Queen. The word also refers to Leonor's own imagined death, since by the nature of her madness the daughter believes that she, like her mother, has died and is returning from death to demand justice from Elizabeth. Thus Leonor has modeled her life on her mother's political cause and her own imagined death on her mother's very real execution.

Likewise, the throne room and its royal chair are a focal point in which Leonor re-enacts the words and actions of her mother. There, in Act II, scene III, she first has a vision of her deceased mother; she tells Essex that «La estoy viendo; / ¿pudiera yo vivir si ella faltase?» (122). A few moments later Leonor glimpses her mother (now without a head) sitting on the throne, a throne that Mary Stuart never achieved: «¿Degollada, / no la ves sobre el trono?» (123). Then, after kneeling and asking mother for forgiveness (Leonor feels guilty that she was unable to save her mother's life), the exhausted Leonor faints on the throne herself, possessing it in place of her mother (the stage directions read: «Queda desmayada sobre la silla del trono» 123). Lady Pembroke summarizes Leonor's sad state in claiming that the young woman has lost «la luz de la razón... / desconoce el placer, y aun a sí misma» (110).

Additional dramatic action of the initial scenes of La delirante reinforce the audience's perception that Leonor's individuality is an illusion. Elizabeth, for example, addresses Leonor with both her name and the name of her mother, «Estuarda» («¿Qué quieres, Estuarda?... / Leonor...» 132). Leonor also lacks the use of her own name, for her protectors, Lord and Lady Pembroke, call her «Margarita» in order to hide her royal identity from the jealous Queen (120).

Moreover, compounding Leonor's search of her own identity are the various episodes of physical imprisonment and escape that the young woman suffers through-out La delirante. These types of restrictions, as Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar contend (The Madwoman in the Attic), place Leonor in the mainstream of nineteenth-century fictional heroines. To begin with, she is held in the house of the Pembrokes for three years during the most serious period of her madness; once in Elizabeth's palace, a servant, Henriqueta, confines the unhappy daughter in Lady Pembroke's own room. When Elizabeth realizes that Leonor is alive, the Queen orders her to a dark cell (which the monarch describes as «una oscura prisión» 138). Leonor's most memorable escape is from Lady Pembroke's private quarters: Elizabeth, believing her dead, spots her sitting on the Queen's own throne, causing even the bold Tudor Queen to flee in terror (Act II, Scene VI).

Nevertheless, as grievous as these physical imprisonments are, the incarceration of Leonor within her mother's self causes the young woman even greater pain. In fact, Mary Stuart's daughter frequently employs vocabulary which suggests this lack of individuality even echoes a preoedipal period in which the daughter is submerged in a selfless oblivion. In Act II, Leonor compares her suffering to «olvido eterno» (123). Likewise, in Act IV she remembers her past state of bliss and asks, «¿Por qué sumergida en el olvido / no me dejan morir...?» (143). Also, Leonor refers to herself several times as the innocent victim of not only Elizabeth but the hostile fate that has caused her present state, again recalling the infant protected by the mother in the preoedipal stage. In Act III, she warns Isabel to listen, because «gime la inocencia» (137). Even other characters refer to Leonor's «inocencia» (Lady Pembroke at the end of Act III asks God to protect «la inocencia» of Leonor (139). In sum, Leonor's mental health has become endangered not only through her various spatial confinements but also through the inescapable hold her mother's self has placed on Leonor, a grasp often expressed in a vocabulary reminiscent of the preoedipal period.

As the play begins, then, Leonor is a young woman whose mind is impaired mentally from the lack of selfhood as well as from the cruel and sudden loss of her mother. Yet an important change occurs in Leonor, especially in Acts II and III: she begins to recover her memory and is able to reason coherently, enough so that Lady Pembroke can maintain in Act IV that «[...] ya su delirio se ha calmado» (141). By the time Elizabeth is challenged for the throne by Arlington (end of Act V), Leonor in a long speech is able skillfully to diffuse the potentially bloody scene by her call for calm and her reasonable advice against the dangers of rebellion. Leonor's critical role in the patriarchal court of Elizabeth is fueled by the new self-confidence of a person enjoying the fruits of her own sense of individuality. No other action so starkly demonstrates that Leonor is her own person, not a copy of her mother, as when she and Elizabeth embrace at the end of the play. In her reconciliation with the Queen, Leonor has radically departed from both the political aspirations and personal feelings of Mary Stuart and has forged a new life of her own based on the virtues of forgiveness, humility, and reason.

Leonor has been able gradually to regain her mental health and her identity because of a powerful new emotion which Mary Stuart's daughter experiences upon entering the palace of Elizabeth: her intense love for Essex. In the field of psychoanalysis, many writers have noticed the role of love as a therapy to strengthen a patient's sense of selfhood. Julia Kristeva, for example, highlights the efficacy of love in the establishment of a strong identity; Toril Moi points out that Kristeva's concept of love «allows the patient tentatively to erect some kind of subjectivity, to become a subject-in-process in the symbolic patriarchal, male order» (15). Supporting Kristeva's view of love is Jacqueline Rose: «[...] Nor do I think that Kristeva should be dismissed for her analysis of love as a strategy which allows for individual subjects to negotiate the troubled psychic waters» (qt. in Toril Moi, 15). Furthermore, in Hirsch's thorough study of Madame de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves, the critic notes that the protagonist only achieves an individuality distinct from her mother's by falling in love with a handsome nobleman: «It is only with the emergence of her illicit feelings for Nemours that the Princess begins to develop what might be called an identity of her own» (77). Thus, the power of Leonor's love for Essex has been the impetus for abandoning the preoedipal oneness with her mother and has allowed her to enter the symbolic/patriarchal world of the court as required by the successful passage through the oedipal complex.

In fact, Leonor is quite aware of the role love is playing in her improving mental health and her growing sense of self-confidence. In Act IV, she fearlessly informs the Queen (who several scenes earlier had proposed marriage to Essex and offered to make him King of England): «y si restauro / mi perdida razón, es porque vuelva / a temblar por mi amante...» (146). With the empowerment of love and a new sense of her own individuality, Leonor begins taking risks, for in favoring Essex she exposes herself to the Queen's legendary jealousy.

If Leonor's love for Essex allows her to find her own identity and confront Elizabeth, her new self confidence also allows her to brave the animosity of her husband, Arlington. In a sense, Arlington is a substitute Mary Stuart: similar to the mother of Leonor, Arlington seeks the throne for himself and is driven by an irrepressible desire for vengeance against the Queen (Elizabeth murdered his father). Likewise, Arlington attempts to deprive the young woman of any identity or goals separate from his own. Nonetheless, Leonor's increasing sense of self, fueled by her love for Essex, empowers her to confront her husband; by Act IV, for example, Leonor refuses to take part in Arlington's conspiracy against the Queen, saying «Huye, malvado, / de mi vista... ¡Reinar al lado tuyo! / Abominable cetro...» (144). Likewise, Leonor's pardon of Arlington at the end of the tragedy, paralleling her embrace of Elizabeth, is also a pardon for her mother. As Leonor internalizes in her unconscious the unspoken struggle for her own selfhood with her Mary Stuart, she consciously externalizes this same contest with Arlington in full view of the Elizabethan court, for all to see.

Gálvez skillfully displays her dramatic talents in order to emphasize the complex relationship between the absent mother and the mad daughter. Leonor first appears on stage (Act II) dressed in black with a veil over her face, symbolizing a lack of identity of her own. As mentioned above, the presence of the throne in the center of the stage allows Leonor to assume it and adopt the role of her mother, who desired to be the legitimate ruler of the country. The action of the play begins in darkness but ends in the light of early morning, metaphorically tracing Leonor's search for selfhood and the successful finding of herself: the young woman gradually moves from the darkness of her preoedipal fixation with her mother to the light of her own newly-found individuality. In effect, time is lineal in La delirante: in twelve brief hours we find that Leonor has progressed through the preoedipal stage, the oedipal complex and finally fulfilled her own identity within the patriarchal world of the palace.

In the submerged mother-daughter plot of La delirante, María Rosa Gálvez addresses one of the most special relationships in the life of all women and at the same time underlines the paradox of this close mother-daughter bond. The parent and the offspring love one another in a unique if ambivalent alliance that will last all their lives, yet the mother must eventually recognize the independent person that her daughter must become, a feat Gálvez's Mary Stuart did not live to witness. Daughters must resolutely face the patriarchal world with their own life, as Leonor eventually does: she has the courage to come down from the attic and fight for justice and for forgiveness in the problematic world of Elizabeth's court. Leonor, in fact, becomes a unique and more fortunate member of a numerous line of madwomen, some of whom die in a complete state of incoherence, such as Charlotte Brontë's Bertha, and some of whom experience lucid, quixotic moments of wisdom, such as the Countess Aurelia, the Madwoman of Chaillot. The daughter of Mary Stuart is an appropriate madwoman of the Age of Reason who in the light of the morning sun connects with the reality around her. Yet, paradoxically, at the same time, a life force that escapes all rational explanation, «el no sé qué» of Feijoo, has redeemed Leonor from the darkness: love.

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