Clorinda Matto de Turner

Peruvian writer

• Born: November 11, 1852
• Birthplace: Cuzco, Peru
• Died: October 25, 1909
• Place of death: Buenos Aires, Argentina

In a long career of publishing and writing, Matto de Turner crusaded for the modernization of Latin America, particularly her native Peru, by opening society to the indigenous populations and women. She helped found the literary genre known as indigenismo, or Indianism, and worked tirelessly for the education of women and their participation in all areas of public life.

Early Life

Clorinda Matto de Turner was born Grimanesa Martina Mato, the daughter of Ramón Mato Torres and Grimanesa Concepción Usandivaras, in the former capital of Peru’s precolonial Inca Empire. She grew up on her father’s hacienda in the village of Paullo north of Cuzco. She was a tomboy as a child and was nicknamed “Clorinda,” after the Italian poet Torquato Tasso’s name for a woman disguised as a Persian warrior in his 1575 epic poem Gerusalemme liberta (Jerusalem delivered). She grew up with Quechua-speaking Indians on the family hacienda and in nearby villages and learned the language, beliefs, and customs of the descendants of the Incas. In 1862, she entered a boarding school in Cuzco, where she completed her studies in 1868. On July 27, 1872, at the age of seventeen, she married Joseph Turner, an English physician and businessperson, with whom she lived in Tinta, southeast of Cuzco.

With the encouragement of her husband, Clorinda began writing short stories, poems, essays, legends, and historical vignettes. Many of her early writings highlighted the virtual enslavement of the Indians and the need for an opening of society to women, beginning with their education. Using several pseudonyms, she submitted her work to local newspapers. Eventually she returned to her childhood nickname, Clorinda, and added a t to her Galician surname, Mato, making it “Matto”—a Quechua word for coca leaf harvest.

In 1876, Matto began publishing a weekly in Cuzco with the support of her husband and her father. This weekly included many of her own tradiciones, short historical fictions similar to those written by Ricardo Palma. These pieces attracted the attention of literary salons in Lima, and during the following year, the novelist Juana Manuela Gorriti awarded Clorinda a golden pen as Peru’s outstanding young writer.

Life’s Work

Shortly after Matto received her first recognition as a writer, Peru suffered a disastrous defeat at the hands of Chile in the 1879-1884 War of the Pacific . The war plunged the Peruvian economy into chaos, and when Matto’s husband died in 1881, his estate was deeply in debt. Matto and Turner had no children. Matto never remarried and tried for two years to manage her husband’s businesses but could not repay their debts.

In 1883, Matto moved to the southern Peruvian town of Arequipa, where she took up the position of editor of La Bolsa (the exchange). The first woman in the Americas to serve as editor of an important daily newspaper, she championed women’s causes and blossomed as a writer and a publisher. She also published two volumes of her tradiciones in 1880 and the first of two volumes of Perú: Tradiciones cuzceñas (Peru: tales of old Cuzco) and the first of many textbooks for female students in 1884. During that same year her play Hima-Súmac about a young Indian heroine was performed before an appreciative audience. Meanwhile, Matto argued repeatedly in her essays and editorials for society to recognize that women were as intelligent as men but had deeper faith and more tender hearts.

At the end of 1885, after finally paying off all her husband’s debts, Matto moved to Lima. There she continued publishing her biographies and sketches and was welcomed in the literary circles of Peru’s capital city. By the end of 1887, she had formed her own salon. Along with Manuel González Prada and other elite Peruvians who felt humiliated by their nation’s defeat in the war with Chile, Matto was convinced that Peru needed to modernize by reforming its European institutions. However, rather than encourage more European immigration, these reformers sought to reinvigorate Peru by uniting the nation’s existing European and indigenous populations through education and social and cultural improvements. Peruvians, Matto argued, needed to open more schools and factories and build a better future with the labor of all Peruvians, learning and working side by side.

In 1889, Matto became the editor of El Perú Ilustrado, the most prestigious weekly magazine in the nation. The following year, however, the archbishop of Lima declared that an article by a Brazilian that was published in El Perú Ilustrado contained heretical ideas. The ensuing controversy led to Matto’s excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church and her resignation as editor of the magazine.

In 1889, Matto published the first book in a trilogy of novels that broke new literary ground. Aves sin nido (birds without a nest), Índole (character) in 1891, and Herencia (heredity) in 1895 deplored the sufferings of the indigenous population at the hands of indifferent and abusive landowners, greedy government officials, and lecherous priests. Matto’s novels realistically described the wretched living conditions in the Andes, depicted the white elites as villains, and cast the exploited native Peruvians as heroes. Immediate commercial successes in Peru and some other countries, the books provoked powerful reactions from the elites and the institutions they controlled. Speakers in the Peruvian congress condemned Matto. The archbishop of Lima forbade the faithful to purchase, read, or discuss her writings, and mobs burned her literature and effigies.

In 1892, Matto established a feminist print shop, hired a female staff, and published a new weekly magazine, Los Andes, which she dedicated to women’s issues and the success of Peru’s Constitutional Party. In the Revolution of 1895, the Conservative Party leader Nicolás Piérola seized power. During fighting in Lima, mobs looted Matto’s home, destroyed her publishing company, and burned unpublished manuscripts of her articles and novels. Piérola deported Matto, who relocated in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The literary world of Argentina welcomed Matto immediately. In December, 1895, the male-only salon Atheneum broke its custom and invited Matto to address its members. Matto chose the topic women workers in South America. The subject of women’s conditions and the need for improvement remained the focus of her energies through the rest of her life. She supported herself by teaching, lecturing extensively, writing textbooks and articles, and establishing and operating the family magazine El Búcaro Americano. She also translated the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles into Quechua for the American Bible Society.

Women’s education, acceptance in the professions, and equal treatment in the workplace were constant subjects of Matto’s interest during her last years. On October 25, 1909, she died in Buenos Aires, at the age of fifty-five, of pulmonary congestion. Fifteen years later, on November 30, 1924, her long exile ended when her body was reburied in the Cementario General in Lima.

Significance

Clorinda Matto de Turner left a large volume of writing in several genres. She pioneered in the school of realism and virtually founded the school of indigenismo . She wrote hundreds of essays on Peruvian folkways and more than two hundred biographies exalting the lives of influential women. In her articles, speeches, and editorials, she championed the elevation of women’s conditions in the private and public spheres of society. Her textbooks improved the curriculum for school girls.

The few writings of Matto that are still being read during the twenty-first century are read mostly by academics and their captive audiences. The real significance of Matto’s life is the course of her life itself. With the death of her husband, she rose from personal depression and bankruptcy to become a self-made person, transforming herself from Grimanesa Martina Mato de Turner into Clorinda Matto de Turner.

Matto was born and was reared as a dependent among the landed elite but became a self-supporting entrepreneur. She also became a writer, a publisher, a business owner, a teacher, and a public speaker. The streets, schools, and public buildings that now bear Matto’s name throughout Latin American nations testify to the recognition of the importance of her life and the possibilities that life holds for others. Like Torquato Tasso’s warrior Clorinda, Clorinda Matto de Turner struggled against great odds to be herself. Unlike the imaginary Clorinda who died a tragic and untimely death, Matto overcame the barriers placed in her path and lived a full life.

Bibliography

Berg, Mary G. “The Essays of Clorinda Matto deTurner.” In Reinterpreting the Spanish American Essay: Women Writers of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, edited by Doris Meyer. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. Berg points out that while Matto’s novels brought her fame, her essays constituted the bulk of her writings. Berg’s analysis emphasizes the feminist character of Matto’s writings, particularly during her exile in Argentina.

Matto de Turner, Clorinda. Birds Without a Nest: A Story of Indian Life and Priestly Oppression in Peru. Edited and emended by Naomi Lindstrom. Translated by J. G. H[udson]. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. Lindstrom has reprinted the 1904 English translation of Aves sin nido, restored passages excised by the squeamish J. G. H., and placed sections in their original order. She introduces the work with a fine discussion of Matto de Turner and the literary milieu of Peru at the end of the nineteenth century.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Torn from the Nest. Edited by Antonio Cornejo Polar. Translated by John H. R. Polt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. This modern translation of Aves sin nido follows an extensive discussion of Matto de Turner and Peruvian literature.

Meyer, Doris, ed. Rereading the Spanish American Essay: Translations of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Women’s Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. Contains two samples of Matto’s essays. The first is a short biographical essay of Francisca Zubiaga de Gamarra, who was a soldier like Tasso’s Clorinda. The second is a lecture to Argentina’s National Council of Women.