Although clearly not averse to rhetoric, Bolívar was sceptical of literary mythification where he and his generals were concerned. He disapproved, for example, of José Joaquín Olmedo's epic poem ‘La Victoria de Junín’ (1825), which depicts him and his officers as the semi-divine heroes of Greek myth. In a letter to Olmedo he objected ‘Vd. nos hace a su modo poético y fantástico; y para continuar en el país de la poesía, la ficción y la fábula, vd. nos eleva con su deidad mentirosa’. Myth detracts from reality and devalues the efforts of real-life men; ‘vd. pues, nos ha sublimado tanto, que nos ha precipitado al abismo de la nada’ (quoted in Vidal 2004: 214–15; Conway 2001). The mythification, or mystification, of woman in literature functions as perniciously (de Beauvoir 1997: 171–292).

This chapter examines the woman-trope in the poetry of Andrés Bello, but first traces the slippage from gender as a grammatical category to gender signifying sexual difference in his Gramática. Bello's Gramática de la lengua castellana destinada al uso de los americanos was published in 1847, but prepared in the 1810s. His two most celebrated silvas, ‘Alocución a la poesía’ and ‘La agricultura de la zona tórrida’, were published respectively in the Biblioteca Americana (1823) and El Repertorio Americano (1826). The poems were to form part of an unfinished ‘Canto’ entitled ‘América’ and were written while Bello lived in London, during and immediately after the Wars of Independence. He was reluctant to publish them at the time and considered them no more than ‘fabulitas’ (Rodríguez Fernández 1981: 41). What do they tell us about Bello's conceptualisation of the nation in terms of gender at this critical moment of social and political transformation? This chapter explores the construction of the myths and tropes of sexual difference underpinning these texts and the resulting ideological and political implications.