Many are the stories that have arisen from the classic Pygmalion myth. From Goethe to Shakespeare; from My Fair Lady to Frankenstein. We could list hundreds of authors and texts and still not cover its full influence.
For those who are unfamiliar, the story of Pygmalion recounts how a young king of Cyprus fell madly in love with the sculpture he himself had carved (fig.1). After being horrified by the shameful behavior of Cypriot women and deciding to remain celibate, he sculpted a beautiful maiden embodying all virtues: a perfect woman who, however, lacked life. In the fervor of his love, he implored Aphrodite to grant him a woman equal to his creation, and she finally answered his prayer by bringing the beautiful statue to life, now called Galatea.
Clearly, it is a fictional story like all those that fill the vast world of Greek mythology. However, despite its implausibility, there was a woman who embodied the Pygmalion myth; who conceived herself, educated and lived under her mother's strict and detailed planning, always considering her to be her own «living sculpture». This is the story of Hildegart Rodríguez Carballeira.
Born on December 9, 1914, this young woman came into the world as a fundamental part of her mother Aurora's utopian plan. She intended to liberate humanity from inequality and injustice and redeem women from the oppression they had endured throughout history. To achieve this, she decided to create an exceptional being. Her plan was for this being to popularize the liberating ideas of socialism and female sexual education and establish a regime in accordance with them.
Although it may seem ridiculous, Aurora firmly believed in her project and dedicated herself entirely to it. She selected the appropriate «physiological collaborator» she needed for pregnancy, registered Hildegart as a natural daughter to avoid her being taken away, and devoted herself fully to her education.
During her early years of life, she did everything possible to foster in her a complete, rapid, and exceptional development. Toys, schedules, meals, and outings were meticulously planned. As a result, at the expense of her entertainment and enjoyment, Hildegart soon became, under her mother's strict care, a prodigy. She knew how to read, write –by hand and on a typewriter– and play the piano by the age of four. By ten, she had mastered English, German, and French, studied rationalist philosophy, and sexology. She obtained her high school diploma at thirteen years old and received the Extraordinary University Revalidation Award at the same age, beginning her studies in Law at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
She combined her university career with further philosophical, political, and linguistic studies, as well as work as a journalist, lecturer, and writer, and political and feminist activism in the Socialist Youth –to which she joined at fifteen years old, in 1929–. She learned Greek, Latin, Portuguese, and Italian; wrote dozens of articles for various magazines of the time –El Socialista, Renovación and La Tierra, primarily–; and read and studied the great socialist philosophers.
At seventeen years old, the young woman graduated in Law, becoming the youngest lawyer in Spain, and the first woman to obtain a degree with an average grade of excellence. By then she was already famous for her labor, social, and feminist activism. She emerged as an intellectual specialist on the female question from the perspective of sexuality and had published more than ten books and over one hundred articles expressing her revolutionary ideas (Pérez Sanz, Bru Ripoll, 1987: 19). We can highlight, for example, The Sexual Rebellion of Youth, in which she encourages her contemporaries to enjoy sex with hygiene and responsibility; The Sexual Problem Treated by a Spanish Woman (1931), in which she denounces the terrible consequences that the lack of sexual education had for women; and her popular monograph The Sexual Revolution (1931), which sold 8,000 copies in Madrid alone during its first week after publication (Alvarado, 2013:14).
Regarding her political life, she was elected party delegate of the Socialist Youth due to the great popularity she enjoyed among young people and how she filled auditoriums, provoking ovations, reviews, and interest in newspapers and magazines of the time.
It seemed that Aurora's plan was going perfectly, except for one small detail: Hildegart herself. As she grew older, the young woman became more aware of the suffocating reality in which she lived. Aurora accompanied Hildegart to all her meetings, prohibited her from attending any event not related to her «life goal», forbade her from writing letters or talking to people outside intellectual circles or political life, imposed a strict schedule on her… she was completely confined by her mother, something that her friends and acquaintances noticed.
Towards the end of her life, Hildegart tried to escape from her mother's rigid and demanding control. Her desire for freedom sparked endless and intense arguments that made cohabitation unbearable. She had been educated to be free, she preached freedom in her labor and feminist activism, and she was born with the goal of liberating humanity, but as she herself states in one of her lectures: «one cannot think about freeing others who has not started by freeing oneself» (Guzmán y Muiña, 2014: 164). The more Hildegart wanted to distance herself, the more violent the situation became due to Aurora's absolute refusal to let her go: «[Hildegart] was entirely mine, without any will or thought other than my own thoughts and will, my living sculpture» (Guzmán y Muiña, 2014: 153).
Hildegart intended to escape to London. Before she could do so, her mother Aurora, with the self-attributed legitimacy that came from considering Hildegart a creation of her own property, killed her. Hildegart died at dawn on June 9, 1933 while sleeping in her home. She was only nineteen years old. Three shots very close together, two to the head and one to the chest –directly to the heart– ended her life. In court, her mother declared: «The sculptor, upon discovering even the slightest imperfection in his work, destroys it. And that is what I did» (Rámila, 2012: 14).
Unlike Galatea of the myth, Hildegart did not accept her «creator's» fate for her. She rebelled and had ideas and creations of her own. She was much more than Aurora's living sculpture: a politician, writer, journalist, revolutionary, feminist activist, sexual reformer, and child prodigy. Throughout her life, Hildegart accumulated numerous achievements that, however, were not enough to save her from the oblivion into which most female personalities in history are relegated.
Bibliography
Alvarado, E. (2013). The Red Virgin and the Mother of Death: The Abjection and Horror in Hildegart Rodríguez's Life. Contextos. 29. pp. 11-23
Álvarez Junco, J., Shubert, A., (eds.). (2018) New History of Contemporary Spain (1808-2018). Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg. pp. 128-158
Ferrer Pérez, V. A., Bosch Fiol, E. (2011). Women in Complex Scenarios: The Case of Hildegart Rodríguez. Revista Venezolana de Estudios de la Mujer. 16 (37). pp. 207-220
Giesecke, A. (2022) Mythology from A to Z: An Encyclopedia of Gods and Goddesses, Heroes and Heroines, Nymphs, Spirits, Monsters, and Places (transl. Pilar Ramírez Tello). Barcelona: Folioscopio. pp 242
Guzmán, E., Muiña, A. (ed. lit.) (2014) Aurora of Blood: Life and Death of Hildegart. Madrid: La linterna sorda.
Interesting Lecture by Miss Hildegart Rodríguez (May 5, 1931). El Cantábrico: morning newspaper, Year XXXVII, No. 13103. p. 11. [Accessed on 04/30/20]. Retrieved from: https://prensahistorica.mcu.es/publicaciones/verNumero.do?idNumero=1000450287
Montero, R. (2018) We: Women's Stories and More. Madrid: Alfaguara. pp 115-118
Pérez Sanz, P., Bru Ripoll, C. (1987) Sexology in Spain of the 30s. Volume II: Hildegart or the story of Aurora Rodríguez, her mother. Revista Española de Sexología, no. 32.
Rámila, J. (2012) Hildegart Rodríguez: The Story That Shocked the Second Spanish Republic. Quadernos de criminología: journal of criminology and forensic sciences (18). pp. 8-19
Vigneron, D. (2015). Hildegart Rodríguez Carballeira: The Feminist Education of an Amazon Who Could Not Be. Cuadernos del Hipogrifo. Revista de Literatura Hispanoamericana y Comparada. 4(2). pp. 154-16Wittenzellner, J. (2015). How to Stage Erudition: Hildegart Rodríguez and Sexology. Iberoromania: Journal dedicated to the languages and literatures of Ibero-Romance Europe and America81. pp.46-62.
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