Carmen Arriagada García was born in Chillán, Chile in 1807 into a prominent and powerful family. Most critics associate her writing career with the letters she wrote to the German painter Juan Mauricio Rugendas (1802-1858), between November 1835 and June 1851.
Arriagada attended school in Santiago until 1825, when she married Eduardo Gutike, a soldier of German origin. In 1831, her father, Pedro R. de la Arriagada died; he had been a congressman and a close figure to Bernardo O’Higgins, José de San Martín, and the Carrera brothers during the independence period. Later, he was also closely tied to Presidents Ramón Freire and Joaquín Prieto. After the death of Arriagada’s father, the couple decided to move to Linares, where she had been left properties as inheritance. They also spent some time in the port of Valparaíso; however, in 1836 they moved permanently to Talca, a city with 14,000 inhabitants. At the time, Talca was one of the most influential cities in the country, along with Valparaíso and the capital, Santiago.
Arriagada met Rugendas in 1835, after her husband invited the artist to visit them. From then on, an epistolary exchange began that was initially marked by a tone of friendship but quickly flowed into topics of amorous discourse. After his return to Europe, Rugendas wrote his last letter to Arriagada in 1849. Nevertheless, she continued writing to him until 1851.
Only one letter from Rugendas to Arriagada remains, dated November 27, 1844. Arriagada feared being questioned by her husband and therefore decided to burn the letters. Meanwhile, the painter kept her letters until his death in 1858, the same year Arriagada’s husband died. The letters were later inherited by Arriagada’s nephew. The letters were published in 1990 by Oscar Pinochet with the title “Cartas de una mujer apasionada” (Letters from a Passionate Woman). The collection allows us a peek into the author’s life and writing trajectory, recounting not only Arriagada’s intimate and private world, but also her literary preferences, political ideas, and critiques of mid-century Chilean society, especially in regard to women.
Although books were a luxury item with limited circulation in Chile at the time, Arriagada’s tastes were diverse, with many reading recommendations provided by Rugendas himself. Arriagada read authors from the classical period (Plutarch), Renaissance (Thomas More), Baroque period (Calderon, Quevedo), the Enlightenment (Voltaire and Goethe), and Romanticism and Realism period (Scott, Schiller, Chateaubriand, Balzac, Dumas). She particularly enjoyed the Chilean poet Mercedes Marín del Solar (1804–1866), often expressing a desire to learn more about the author.
Arriagada took a critical stance toward hegemonic models of femininity and motherhood, unlike most Chilean women writers of the mid-19th century (including Mercedes Marín, Rosario Orrego, Quiteria Varas, Hortensia Bustamante, Victoria Cueto, and Delfina Hidalgo), with views more akin to the dissident voices that emerged later in the century (Lucrecia Undurraga and Martina Barros). In this regard, a significant fact to note is that Arriagada had no children, something she often boasted about: “I gave a thousand thanks to God for my barrenness; thank God that at the end of the day I can be at peace in my bed, that the crying of a child doesn’t wake me to more sorrows, to more desires; thank God!” (198).
Her liberal political views were very similar to Rugendas’ and the intellectual circle that frequented the social gatherings at her home. It was also through meetings with this group of friends that she would become acquainted with the scientific novelties of the time, such as phrenology, which would have a great impact on her. Besides that, Arriagada was a regular newspaper reader, so she constantly referred to national events and to the value of print media for the country’s political and literary culture. Moreover, in Talca she supported the creation of the newspaper El Alfa, in which she herself served as a regular translator and published an article on female education and the need to establish a girls’ school in that city. Likewise, she was well-informed and highly critical of the war against the Peru–Bolivian Confederation waged by Chile (1836–1839), as well as of the management of Minister Diego Portales and Presidents José Joaquín Prieto and Manuel Bulnes. With the same fervor with which she questioned the blind zeal of Chilean patriotism, she defended the ideas of the era’s most unconventional and radical thinker, Francisco Bilbao, in his “Sociabilidad chilena”, an essay published in the liberal newspaper El Crepúsculo in 1844. This led to Bilbao being charged with blasphemy, and the copies of the publication were seized and burned.
Another important aspect to consider, especially in her final letters, is that Arriagada consistently wrote of her body as being afflicted by nervous disorders. Her writing revealed an unhealthy self that was docile in the face of a life that caused her profound distress: her home, her lack of money due to her husband’s economic instability, her disenchantment with married life, the anticipation of seeing her lover again or receiving a letter from him, and the cultural blackout in Talca. Among the other ailments she described, it is hysteria that is most closely linked to the repression of her amorous desires; a sequence of impotent rebellions that reminds us not only of the entire body of literature on the 19th-century paradigm of the hysterical woman, but also of Flaubert’s Emma Bovary and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.
As has been noted, Arriagada only published a few translations and an essay in the Talca newspaper El Alfa, as well as another reflective piece signed under a pseudonym in the 1843 issue of El Mercurio de Valparaíso. She was, however, one of the foundational female writers in Chilean literary culture, as well as one of the most disobedient.
Carol Arcos Herrera
Doctor in Latin American Studies
Académica Centro de Estudios Culturales Latinoamericanos
Universidad de Chile
arcosce@gmail.com