Echoes of Maria Clara: Memory, (Im)materiality, and Poetics in Filipino Dress

Abstract

This thesis explores the politics of materiality and memory in the national dress of the Philippines, the Maria Clara gown, which rose to prominence during the late Spanish colonial period. The dress was inspired by and is eponymous with the fictional character Maria Clara from José Rizal’s novel, Noli Me Tangere (1887). There is a complex relationship between the incorporeal identity of Maria Clara as a cultural figure and a literary heroine, and the materiality of the dress that has been given her name. Through an imagined sense of nationhood that has been impressed upon the bodies of women literally and metaphorically, the cult figure of Maria Clara lingers in the poetry of Filipino women writers, and in the poetry of fabric itself; neither present nor absent, but always in-between, below and troubled by the surface. Weaving together analysis of material culture, literary texts, and critical theory, this interdisciplinary study explores the productive frictions between the pieces of the Maria Clara gown across different time periods and geographies, and the poetry of contemporary Filipina poets whose writings are imbricated by the haunting figure of Maria Clara. It challenges the notion of national dress as a fixed and essentialised object, and looks towards the possibility of generative and vulnerable ways of reading into the archives of the Philippines through a close and intertextual reading of the fragments and distances that disrupt the naturalised language of colonisation.