Partial protagonists. Biography, fiction, and the nineteenth-century legacy in Rosa Chacel and Benjamín Jarnés

This chapter discusses two biographical accounts of idealized and rebellious figures of Spanish Romanticism: Doble agonía de Bécquer (1936), a vanguard biography by Benjamín Jarnés, and Rosa Chacel’s Teresa (novela de amor) (1941), a novelized account of the life of Teresa Mancha, lover of Romantic poet José de Espronceda. Jarnés (1888–1949) and Chacel (1898–1994) were closely associated with the vanguard novel of the 1920s and 1930s, while Doble agonía and Teresa both emerged in the context of a European-wide phenomenon, the New Biography, and in relation to the series Vidas españolas e hispanoamericanas del siglo XIX, brainchild of José Ortega y Gasset. This discussion focuses on how Jarnés and Chacel draw attention to the processes of overwriting and rewriting literary legacies, and what this says about how they construed the Spanish experience of the nineteenth century. The chapter concludes by suggesting a link between the essentialist views of gender that underpinned the poetry of Espronceda and Bécquer, and the recurrence of forms of historical fatalism. Finally, it argues that Chacel’s treatment of Teresa Mancha, by foregrounding these essentialist views rather than obfuscating them, in some ways escapes such fatalism.