VICE AND VIRTUE

When Colombian novelist and literary critic Soledad Acosta de Samper declared in 1895 that the cause of “moralizing” Spanish American society was a task that female writers shared with the rest of the continent’s women, she was, in effect, placing a gender claim on a very old notion of the purpose of literature. A hundred years before the Peruvian-born Pablo de Olavide had begun his long epistolary novel (El evangelio en triunfo) by lamenting that the publishing industry of his era had not yet managed to harness its resources into a single volume that would make Christian doctrine and morality palatable to enlightened readers. What both writers shared was a sense of the imperceptible ability of narrative to transmit moral sensibility. This power—U.S. educational reformer Charles Brooks would call it “moral electricity”—served at once as a justification and a social charge for writers and publishers. Believers in the book as the media force capable of shifting social consciousness, the writers and critics of nineteenth-century Latin America peppered their works with equal parts optimism and dread, as the same art that renders virtue desirable could be turned over to the service of vice. Their new or at least newly distributed art conjured a notion of the American hemisphere on the one hand as a new moral Paradise and on the other as a place where the battle against moral chaos could still go disastrously wrong.