Maria Clara

Maria Clara

The greatest misfortune that has befallen Filipino women in the last one hundred years is Maria Clara. I mean this in a very real sense for, in trying to live up to the pattern set by Rizal’s beautiful heroine, millions of Filipinas have become something other than their real selves. They forced their persona into the narrow mold of Maria Clara’s maidenly charms and became effete and exceedingly genteel caricatures. They affected modesty to an absurd degree and became martyrs to duty and familial love. They tried to disguise their native industry and energy with put-on airs of languidity. And because Maria Clara was ill so often, and so elaborately sad and tragic, it became vulgar to be healthy and almost un-Filipina to be happy. It is this melancholy transformation of Maria Clara from paragon to parody that I want to trace briefly here.

To begin with, let me say that I believed there are two popular interpretations of Maria Clara. One, which found favour during the first three decades after the Noli, conceived of her as a compendium of all possible feminine virtues, beautiful, demure, tender, docile, pure, everything a woman should be. The other, of more recent origin, was a reaction to the first. As a result of a “revolution of taste” it views Maria Clara with a jaundiced eye indeed. It calls her obsolete, melodramatic, meaching, and fatuous and finds her fragility mousy, her nobility irritating, her virtue priggish. I must confess that I am by temperament inclined to the second view. But an objective analysis of Maria Clara as Rizal wrote her and not as clubwomen and their guest speakers on one hand, nor as the aggressive iconoclasts of the thirties, or the other, would have her, seems to indicate that a middle way would be more correct.

Maria Clara, as all successful literary creations should be, was not all of a piece. She was certainly a good and beautiful woman, innocent, unselfish, and admirable in many respects. But she was also – and quite undubitably – a silly girl, coy, sentimental, and often rather foolish. She was, as most people are, neither all good nor all bad. She was so sweet that everyone adored her, so utterly feminine that everyone wished to protect her. She was also strong in adversity. When the shameful story of her parentage was revealed to her, she took it upon herself to shield her real father, her foster father, and her mother’s honor. “She staggers, but she isn’t crushed,” writes Nick Joaquin, “she stands up under the blow. She agrees to marry in cold blood a man she does not love, even at the risk of inviting the contempt of the lover she’s trying to save. When she learns that her lover is dead, she defies even her real father; she will marry no one, she will enter a nunnery.” We may disagree with her decisions, as indeed many of us do, but we cannot rightly say that she made them out of weakness. After all, it does take courage to give up a lover, to decide upon a loveless marriage, and afterwards to take the veil.

Nevertheless, and at the same time, Maria Clara is insufferably soggy and affected. When her sweetheart, just home from Europe, comes to call on her, she rushes to the family oratory and she has to be dragged out, head hanging to greet him. Whenever she hears any piece of bad news, she develops faintness and totters off to her bedroom. She archly pretends to be unworthy of Ibarra’s attentions. She appears to be inarticulate and humorless: a priceless comic character like Doña Victorina does not draw the faintest smile or palest remark from her. One has only to compare with Sinang, her closest friend, who is direct, outspoken, and alive to the significance and the humor of every situation, to realize how dull and colorless Maria Clara’s company must have been. But worst of all, she fails to respond to the patriotic needs of the hour; she does not choose the side of the filibuster, the reformer, the patriot, but the side of the friar and the peninsular. She gives her all to have two completely unworthy men: Fray Damaso, the seducer, and Captain Tiago, the cringing, servile colonial.

How did this commonplace heroine, whose virtues are singularly stereotyped and whose tragedies are ascribable only to fate, ever become apotheosized into the ideal Filipino womanhood? We owe it to the historical circumstances of Rizal’s martyrdom and to the subsequent devotion, more passionate than discerning, to his literary creations. Had Rizal not become the national hero, his heroine would have remained merely one character in our little-read Spanish literature, to be encountered by chance in the romantic labyrinths of an old-fashioned novel, to be dissected perhaps by a few esoteric critics, but surely dismissed by a new generation of readers.

We cannot really blame Rizal. There is little evidence that he tried to enshrine Maria Clara as the ideal or, even, the typical Filipina. It is more probable that he merely created a single individual character out of a woman in his own life. Perhaps Rizal tried to write his own frustration and purge his own heartbreak from the unfortunate affair with Leonor Rivera, the woman whom he called “my only illusion.” We have reason to suppose that Leonor was the prototype for Maria Clara; she, too, sacrificed her sweetheart, although her motives were less pure and pressing than those the novelist attributes to his creation. Rizal never did attempt to make Maria Clara into the Filipino woman. She was simply a woman he had loved. She was not even his own ideal--many men, after all, give their hearts to women whom their minds find inadequate. We must go to the “Letter to the Young Women of Malolos” to know the measure of the women Rizal really admired. In that letter he urged his young countrywomen to be bold, aggressive, industrious, to get rid of the inhibiting ties with religion and convention. The Epistolario Rizalino, too, contains evidence of the type of woman he believed his country needed. While in Germany, for example he wrote his sister Maria to tell her of the ingenuity and the industry of the frauleins; he urged his sisters towards self-improvement, and he was surely their inspiration when they joined the Katipunan and the Masonic Order. Rizal’s own mother was as dissimilar as possible from Maria Clara, and we know that he adored her. Doña Teodora was a down-to-earth, enterprising, incredibly brave woman with a respect for the intellect and intellectual accomplishment. She recognized, although it brought her pain, the value of hatred and rebellion. We can only imagine how different Rizal and our country would have been if Rizal had a Maria Clara for a mother.

Then, too, Rizal was perhaps merely following the literary conventions of the period: the literature of his time was full of haunted, gentle, ill-starred heroines. Dickens, Dumas, Tolstoy, whom Rizal admired, respected the fashion that ordained that heroines must be true, good, and beautiful—and also a little limp and vapid. Rizal’s Maria Clara, perhaps, merely succumbed to the dictates of literary vogue.

But we can blame the generation of Filipinos who came after Rizal. Had they been less sentimental and more clearheaded about Maria Clara, things would have been different. Instead of seeing Maria Clara whole, instead of admiring the woman entire, they made the mistake of idealizing her external traits. Instead of giving their attention to her strength, her nobility, her inherent stubbornness, they made a cult out of her capacity for blind obedience, for fainting and blushing. Thus their women moved quickly from a studied to a habitual demureness, and the nation soon had many millions of mincing, smirking, doltish parodies of Maria Clara.