Maria Clara

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Maria Clara also influenced, and for the worse, our feminine standards of beauty. She was a mestiza and, therefore, white, “perhaps too white” is Rizal’s own phrase, light of hair, “almost blonde,” with huge eyes which were almost “almost always cast down” and a perfect nose. Rizal himself called her features “semi-European,” and while this circumstances was clearly called for by the novel’s plot, [yet?] it was unfortunate for Filipino beauty. For, in portraying his heroine in this guise, Rizal set up, unwittingly, one likes to think, a standard of feminine beauty that was untypical and unreal.

By trying to look like Maria Clara, Filipino women have lost the warm naturalness of their Asian personality. Because Maria Clara was fair, they have hidden their golden skin under the rice-powder, and, lately, make-up; because Maria Clara’s hair was curly, they twisted their hair with curling irons, ribbons, and chemicals and succeeded only in frizzing it; because Maria Clara’s eyes we round and long–lashed, their own Oriental almond eyes fell into disrepute, and because Rizal called Maria Clara’s European nose “the correct profile,” everything else became incorrect and therefore deplorable. Because Maria Clara’s mouth was small and dimpled, thousands of Filipinas have gone through life compressing their generous Asian lips into prim and ridiculous rosebuds. We have all seen this kind of mimicry in old family albums—our mothers and grandmothers, powdered, frizzed, and overdressed, gazing foolishly at a paper moon and, when we come to think of it, looking painfully out of character.

The cult of Maria Clara has contributed to the development of many disagreeable traits and attitudes in the Filipino woman. One may cite a diehard refinement and gentility, a determined and often ludicrous observance of the comme il faut, such as ostentatious costumes and jewelry, the duenna, the avoidance of industry or anything that might be possibly called work, the cultivation of idleness and leisure.

Another is the exaggerated emphasis on the maidenly proprieties, the coy look, the half-smile, the dislike to appear too eager or too forward, the excessive regard for appearance. Also, its corollary: the prescribed rituals of Victorian courtship, with its elaborate hypocrisy and formality. What tribulations have been heaped on generations of Filipino suitors because Maria Clara never met Ibarra’s eyes directly!

Another and even more deplorable results is the Filipino women’s fondness for sentimentality, for the mawkish and the banal. Conventional Filipinas, more’s the pity, have a propensity for being sticky-sweet, for tears and sighs, as well as saccharine situations and expressions. Maria Clara once more!

But the most unfortunate of all Maria Clara’s legacies was the masochistic attitude. Because of Maria Clara millions of Filipinas learned to enjoy suffering and humiliation. They took up their crosses and followed her to the apotheosis of romantic sanctification. They embraced, with as many pretty tears as Rizal’s heroine, hardships and tragedies which they could have, and should have, avoided; they gave up sweethearts and love marriages; they suffered in silence and renounced all unladylike pleasures. They denied themselves every kind of joy, wallowed in self-pity gorged themselves on their delicious miseries. And in so doing made everyone around them miserable: we all know how hard it is to live with a woman who is bent on immolating herself. Self-sacrifice can be the cruelest form of tyranny.

It is the element of guilt and disaster in the attitude of Filipino women that we must lament the most. It is so well rooted in our mores that the average Filipina—though she may not have read through Rizal’s novels—has a compulsive sense of sin and doom, of sadness and shame. She feels obliged to see terror in the delights of love and sex, and to offset this, as Maria Clara did, by a kind of frantic piety.

I risk the dangers of simplification willingly when I say that all this came about because Maria Clara—a literary creation who has become a “folk-figure” – had a priest for a father, and adulteress for a mother, and a radical for a sweetheart, and because, caught in the meshes of a patriot-novelist’s plot, she made a talent for unhappiness her greatest virtue.