In 1799, a lawyer of the Real Audiencia of Santa Fe, Francisco González Manrique, filed a suit against don Miguel Galindo, governor of Girón, for ‘abandoning’ his daughter Andrea after their wedding. Don Miguel had attempted to return Andrea to her parents’ house, because after years trying to win the young woman's heart, she continued to make the ‘marriage bed into a drama of tears.’ While Galindo's defense lawyer stressed the absence of Andrea's consent to invalidate the marriage, González Manrique, for whom his daughter's feelings were terra incognita, emphasized the legality of the union.
Rather different was the approach of Blasina Tovar's father, who bluntly replied to José Eusebio Caro's letter asking for his daughter's hand: “Speak with her, that is a question she must resolve, not I.” In 1843, after three years of courtship, Blasina decided to accept in marriage the man who was to found the romantic movement in Colombia and, alongside Mariano Ospina Rodríguez, the Conservative Party's ideological principles.
Using such incidents as a guide, Guiomar Dueñas-Vargas explores the breakdown of parental authority over children's selection of potential spouses among the educated elite of Bogotá over roughly a century, between 1778 and 1870. Looking at diaries and private correspondence, which are the main sources of this book, Dueñas-Vargas traces the emergence of an “intense devotional attachment between spouses,” which prior to the period considered in this study was not conceived of as a social requirement for marriage. Bringing the emotional life of the local bourgeoisie to the forefront of the historical narrative through nine engaging and well-documented chapters, Dueñas-Vargas sheds new light on those usually seen as disembodied actors. Approaching emotions as both expression of individual agency and as byproduct of broader social, cultural, and political processes, the author revisits a hundred years of Colombian history, exploring the rise and consolidation of romantic love, which contrary to passionate love, channeled and controlled love inside marriage, while stressing its sublime aspects.
Free will in the selection of mates, alongside new ideas of masculinity and femininity and an impulse to infringe on gender expectations—without, however, subverting the order of things—were all bound to this cultural expression of love, which took firm root in mid nineteenth-century Colombia among both liberal and conservative families. Nevertheless, the rise of individual choice in the realm of love, exercised by both men and women and somewhat undermining patriarchal authority, was not a linear process.
Indeed, in 1810 Francisco José de Caldas not only negotiated his marriage to Manuela Barahona with the latter's uncle, without even knowing her, but also sent his friend Arboleda to represent him in the ceremony, claiming that due to his many commitments he could not attend. If Caro and Blasina's marriage differed from the cold, distant, and too rational bond that tied Caldas and Barahona together, it also differed from the type of relationship that subsequent couples were to forge after the middle of the nineteenth century. It was during that period that the separation between male and female spheres became less clear-cut, as romanticism came to be more decisively embraced and women began to have access to written media. While Caro complained about Blasina's coldness in their correspondence, later couples were to enjoy a hitherto unknown conjugal intimacy, informed not only by desire but also by psychological, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual empathy.
This was the case of two couples with a prominent role in the cultural and political life of mid nineteenth-century Colombia: José María Samper and Soledad Acosta, and Manuel Ancízar and Agripina Samper. Unlike Blasina, who expressed her love to José Eusebio through her dedication to their children and home, Soledad and Agripina looked for companions, not for superiors—partners to share their lives as they developed their literary and political interests. Concomitantly, their husbands turned to them not only for conjugal comfort, but also for advice and help in their intellectual and political endeavors.
The author herself states, generalizing about the shaping of a new model of conjugal relationship, that it is always risky due to the lack of documentation for tracing “complete trajectories of couples through courtship, marriage, and daily life with their elements of joy and pain,” but in this book she convincingly traces the emergence and development of a modern type of conjugal relationship among the elite of Bogotá between the latter eighteenth century and the second half of the nineteenth.
