The Romanticism by Dolores Veintimilla

Abstract

María Dolores Veintimilla de Galindo (1829-1857) was an Ecuadorian poet who challenged the class-ist, racist and patriarchal values inherited from colonial times. Her romantic and intense poems created a subjective poetic space where she could express her own desires, resist female stereotypes, and construct her own identity. The few poems and pamphlets that survived Veintimilla’s short and tempestuous life express her love, disenchantmen,t and betrayal. Living in a racist society, she dared to defend Tiburcio Lucero, an indigenous person accused of patricide. This stand caused her to be targeted for denigration and slander by the Church and other pillars of official society. As an ultimate act of protest she committed suicide. Dolores Veintimilla was a controversial woman, a strong defender of social equality, and an opponent of the death penalty. Veintimilla’s romanticism was a response and challenge to the religious, racial, and patriarchal ideology of Nineteenth-Century Ecuador.