Redefining truths: Manuela Rosas as a subject of imaginative reconstruction in the Argentine literary realm

Manuela Rosas, the daughter of Federalist dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, is an important nineteenth century political figure who was a consistent subject of imaginative reconstruction during the Rosas era. Much like her fellow women revolutionaries, namely Eva Perón and her mother, Encarnación Ezcurra de Rosas, Manuela assumed an active role in the Argentine political arena and was instrumental maintaining her father’s unparalleled political supremacy, acting as chief mediator between the government and the marginalised Argentine masses. This article argues how, in a series of nineteenth-century fictional works, namely those of renowned Unitarians José Mármol (Amalia; El retrato de Manuela Rosas, 1851) and Juana Manuela Gorriti (El guante negro; La hiza del mashorquero, 1865), Manuela has been inaccurately depicted as ‘la primera victíma de la tiranía de su padre’ who desperately needed rescuing. Both writers maintain that Rosas curtailed his daughter’s social freedom, and that she would have reached her true potential had she been raised by civilised Unitarians and not in a Federalist environment. However, María Rosa Lojo’s La princesa federal (2010) contests the claim that Manuela suffered, instead postulating that she was a resilient and empowered individual who was passionate about promoting the causa federalista, remaining loyal to her father out of choice. I offer an original critical analysis of the unacknowledged and divergent literary and historical representations of Manuela, examining how writers use the lack of historical evidence to manipulate and imaginatively reconstruct her life story and in doing so, blur the line between fact and fictio