Juana Manso de Noronha

Juana Manso de Noronha

Juana Paula Manso de Noronha (born June 26, 1819 in Buenos Aires , Argentina , † April 24, 1875 ibid) was an Argentine writer , feminist , composer , educator and journalist .

Life

Juana Manso was born on June 26, 1819 (according to other information, 1820) as the daughter of an Andalusian engineer, José María Manso, and an Argentinian. She tells of her childhood that her father took her to the coffeehouse and paid her a chocolate with toast when she was declaiming a poem.

Since the father belonged to the government of the Unitarian Bernardino Rivadavia and as such fell out of favor when the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas came to power , she spent many years in exile with her parents , initially in Montevideo (1840), where José Mármol , Esteban Echeverría also lived and other romantic poets found; with them she had already participated in the literary salon of Marcos Sastre in 1837/38 . To bridge the economic difficulties, she founded a school in 1841, the "Ateneo de Señoritas" under the direction of her mother; it was the first female educational institution in Montevideo, where arithmetic , Literature, Grammar , French, geography and other scientific subjects for women were taught, but even then as "women typically" respected skills such as handicrafts, good behavior, playing the piano, singing and drawing. In 1841 she also published the famous poem La mujer poeta ("The woman as a poet"). José Mármol encouraged her to write, and so she published poems under various pseudonyms in various newspapers in the Uruguayan capital almost every week .

But the dictatorship spread to Uruguay as Manuel Oribe besieged Montevideo, and the Mansos had to move on to Brazil . In Rio de Janeiro she kept her head above water with private Spanish and French lessons and was able to study at the Conservatório de Arte Dramático. She wrote an oratorio entitled “Cristóbal Colón” ( Christopher Columbus ), with music from her father. In 1844 she met the Portuguese violinist Francisco de Saá Noronha, whom she married. In 1846 both traveled to the United States , but were unsuccessful. In the same year their daughter Eulalia was born, the second, Erminia, in 1848 in Cuba , where they were well received. They then returned to Brazil and Juana Manso founded the newspaper O Jornal das Senhoras (The Women's Newspaper) in 1852 . She composed two zarzuelas for her husband : Elvira la Saboyarda in 1849 and Esmeralda in 1851; both were performed in Rio with relatively great success. However, she was later abandoned by her husband. (cf. Lewkowicz 2000: 50f.)

After the Rosas dictatorship came to an end, she returned to Argentina with her daughters in July 1853, where she founded the Álbum de Señoritas (album for young women) in 1854 . She also worked on the Anales de la Educación Común (Annals of Coeducation ) founded by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in 1858 , for which she wrote many articles (from 1865 until her death in 1875 she was even the director, see Lewkowicz 2000: 122 ). She became a member of the “Partido Autonomista”, whose most important personalities were Bartolomé Miter , Mármol and Sarmiento. In 1862 she published a Compendio de las Provincias Unidas del Río de la Plata for history lessons in Argentina , the first compendium in Argentine history (cf. Lewkowicz 2000: 149). In 1864 she founded the short-lived magazine La Flor del Aire, Periódico literario ilustrado dedicado al bello sexo (Flower of the Air, Illustrated Literary Weekly, dedicated to the fair sex). With the pseudonym "Dolores" she drew a column on "Mujeres ilustres de la América del Sud" (Famous Women of South America); in the same year the magazine was renamed La Siempre Viva (The Evergreen) and Juana Manso its editor-in-chief ; In addition to her, the Argentine writer Eduarda Mansilla de García wrote under the pseudonym "Daniel", v. a. Theater criticism (see Lewkowicz 2000: 108).

Juana Paula Manso de Noronha died on April 24, 1875 and was buried in the English cemetery (Cementerio de Disidentes) because she was denied a Catholic burial as a " heretic " (she had converted to the Anglican faith years earlier ), mainly because she refused to go to bedside confession and receive the final rites . Her daughter Eulalia asked the Minister of Education to be allowed to continue the Anales de Educación Común . It was not until 1915 that the remains of Juana Manso were transferred to the Cementerio de la Chacarita (Panteón de Maestras). (cf. Lewkowicz 2000: 291)

Literary work

Novels

La familia del Comendador

La familia del Comendador (Buenos Aires, Imprenta de JA Bernheim, 1854) is the first novel written by a woman in Argentina and one of the first novels ever, depending on how one defines “the first novel”: El matadero by Esteban Echeverría Although it was written in 1838, it was not published until 1871, it is also not a classic representative of the genre, rather a novella . The first volume by Amalia by José Mármol was published in Montevideo in 1851, but the full edition was not published until 1855. What is interesting, however, is not this forerunner, but the fact that the novel has since been completely forgotten (cf. Fletcher 1994 : 109).

The action takes place in Brazil before the abolition of slavery ; it can be seen as an imitation of Uncle Toms Hütte (1850) by Harriet Beecher Stowe , but it can also be read as a “female” Bildungsroman , because at the beginning we find an inexperienced young woman who develops in the course of the plot. Gabriela is only 16 years old and, according to her parents' wishes, she should marry her insane uncle in order to keep the family property together. This uncle, Juan, has a relationship with a black woman who has had two children, Mauricio and Emilia. Gabriela would rather go to a convent than marry her uncle; she is in love with a young man, Ernesto de Souza, who also treats his slaves humanely, while her own father abuses them. In the end, the slaves are even released and Gabriela is brought back from the monastery. Mauricio, the son of his uncle, who has since passed away, becomes a doctor and falls in love with his white cousin Mariquita, stands as a “ mulatto ” as a symbol of a revolutionary racial equality that was brutally persecuted in Argentina shortly after the Rosas dictatorship when black people were brutally persecuted was (see Lewkowicz 2000: 250f.).

In contrast to her compatriot Juana Manuela Gorriti , who is more in favor of rebellion within the framework of the individual, Manso called for a revolution in the socio-political area. Gorriti was also not as radically anti-racist as Manso; Although she accused the indigenous people of bad treatment , she said that despite all of their education, blacks always remained a “wild animal” that white had to “ tame ”.

Los misterios del Plata

Better known is her novel Los misterios del Plata (written in Philadelphia in 1846, ended in Brazil in 1850, published as a serialized novel in Portuguese in O Jornal das Senhoras 1852 in Rio de Janeiro, in Argentina as a serial novel in book form in 1867 and 1899) anti scarlet-Nazi because of his subject. This is also the subtitle: "Guerras civiles del Río de la Plata" (Civil War on the Río de la Plata). Manso originally wanted to write a whole series of historical novels (see Lewkowicz 2000: 217). The main title is a clear allusion to Les mystères de Paris by Eugène Sue , the founder of the feature-length novel . This text is less revolutionary, but merely aims at a change within the system.

Synopsis : the impeccable Dr. Avellaneda, a Unitarian persecuted under the dictator Rosas, tries to escape from exile in Montevideo to Corrientes , but is arrested through perfidious intrigues and handed over to the so-called Mazorca , the cruel secret police. Adelaida, his wife, becomes active herself by visiting him in prison with the help of a trick, by putting on the clothes of her slave Marica. She also uses a female ruse to send her husband messages to prison (hidden in bread - this is how the woman's role as breadwinner is subversively reinterpreted). Finally, Adelaida disguises herself as a man in order to free her husband from prison. She challenges the law and sets herself up as authority, but at the same time proves that much of male power is based on appearances. So she tries to describe the whole Rosist dictatorship as a great carnival . The author turns against corruption , repression , censorship , exploitation of the poor and slavery , also against the death penalty , the woman becomes a romantically inflated heroine. The whole text is located in an intermediate zone between fiction and reality: In footnotes the author repeatedly emphasizes the truthfulness of her descriptions, that “I experienced it myself”. In terms of content, it is a mixture between a family saga and a historical novel.

title

• Los Misterios del Plata . Episodios de la época de Rosas escritos en 1846. Edición prologada y corregida by Ricardo Isidro López Muñiz. Buenos Aires: Librería y Casa Editora de Jesús Menéndez, 1924.
• La familia del Comendador . Novela original. Buenos Aires: Imprenta de JA Bernheim, 1854.

Secondary literature

• Arambel-Guiñazú, María Cristina / Martín, Claire Emilie (2001): Las mujeres toman la palabra. Escritura femenina del siglo XIX en Hispanoamérica . Vol. I. Iberoamericana / Vervuert, Madrid / Frankfurt a. M. 2001.
• Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos No. 639 (September 2003): Dossier: "Escritoras argentinas del siglo XIX", pp. 5-60.
• Lea Fletcher: Mujeres y cultura en la Argentina del siglo XIX . Feminaria Editora, Buenos Aires 1994.
• Lidia F. Lewkowicz: Juana Paula Manso (1819-1875): Una mujer del Siglo XXI . Corregidor, Buenos Aires 2000.
• María Gabriela Mizraje: Argentinas de Rosas a Perón: Mariquita Sánchez, Juana Manso, Juana Manuela Gorriti, Eduarda Mansilla, Emma de la Barra, Alfonsina Storni, Norah Lange, Victoria Ocampo, Beatriz Guido, Alejandra Pizarnik, Griselda Gambaro. Ed. Biblos, Buenos Aires 1999, ISBN 950-786-223-4 (Biblioteca de las mujeres, 9).

Web links

• Literature by and about Juana Manso de Noronha in the catalog of the Ibero-American Institute of Prussian Cultural Heritage, Berlin
• RIMA Red Informativa de Mujeres de Argentina (Spanish)
• Chivilcoy en Línea Article on Manso's role as a pedagogue (Spanish)
• Article by Myriam Southwell in Prospects, vol. XXXV, no.1, March 2005 (Spanish)