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With speaker Nicholas Wolters (Associate Professor of Spanish)

The centrality of the horse to modernizing Western societies during the nineteenth century can be summed up concisely by one historian’s witty labeling of the Victorian era as both “the railway age and the heyday of the horse” (Hewitt 1). The Spanish empire during this time was no exception. Horses were requisitioned for the fields of battle by cavalrymen from Madrid to Mendoza. Bullfighters and their squads depended on sturdy mounts in the arenas of Ronda and Seville, and racehorses were manhandled by jockeys while being cheered on by gamblers in steeplechases from Jeréz to Barcelona. The horsepower of mules was called upon to support the various enterprises of the industrial revolution: from Catalonia’s textile mills to the Basque Country’s iron mines. Coachmen were responsible for taxiing those who could afford horsedrawn carriages from their homes to the opera. For their part, tailoring boutiques and department stores advertised equestrian apparel and paraphernalia designed for use by male and female riders—sometimes fancifully imagined as centaurs and amazons—according to ever-evolving fashions.

Against this panorama, this paper will argue that equestrian culture became a virtual breeding ground for critical and sometimes whimsical social commentaries on the imagination and social change related especially to class and gender in nineteenth-century Spain. By situating visual culture (e.g. ephemera, genre painting, portraits) alongside literary fiction by Valera, Galdós, Clarín, Pardo Bazán, and Oller, this paper will also show how equine imagery and motifs helped cultural producers to figure or ironize concerns about unbridled imaginations, which were undoubtedly tied to women’s increasing agency and presence within the public sphere."

Sponsored by the Division of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures and the Race and Gender in the Global Hispanophone research group.