Maria Clara

Vision of a traditional Filipina

                    Rizal nowhere announced that he was going to depict an “ideal woman” or an “ideal Filipino woman”—whatever that may be. Being a true novelist, he set out to create just one particular person, a single definite individual—and he succeeded so well that his heroine has become a folk-figure, the only one of all his characters who has attained this highest form of literary immortality. Between the first and second parts of Don Quixote, the folk took over and recreated its hero; when Cervantes wrote the second part he was already dealing with another, larger hero, a folk-figure, only partly his creation. Similarly, the folk took over and recreated Maria Clara: unfortunately, there had been, in the meantime, a sudden shifting of cultures: Maria Clara was recreated as a Victorian—which she never was, nor any of her contemporaries for that matter.

                    The Philippines never actually experienced the Victorian Age. When Rizal said that the Philippines of his era was a hundred years behind its time, he was absolutely right. For Rizal, that was cause for lamentation; for us, from our happier vantage-point in time, it may be cause for relief—for the Philippines, by being “backward,” escaped some of the more ponderous horrors of Victorianism. We may be said to have leapt straight from the 18th to the 20th century, from the age of romanticism and revolution to the age of politics and anxiety. However, we did not—and it would have been impossible to—completely escape Victorianism. Sometime between the last of the nineteen-hundreds and the first of the nineteen-twenties, a generation that was being nourished on Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Bryant and Mr. Tennyson, that was being taught to appreciate such books as Pollyanna, Silas Marner, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and the Elsie Dinsmore series, suddenly developed Victorian tastes and attitudes. The señoritos became very genteel indeed; and the señoritas became addicted to blushing and fainting at the least provocation. The era of America’s “Manifest Destiny” in the Philippines was a sort of Victorian twilight as the age of Spanish colonization was the last faint twilight of the Middle Ages.

Nick Joaquin
“The Novels of Rizal”
La Naval de Manila and Other Essays