The Latest Style: The Fashion Writing of Blanca Valmont and Economies of Domesticity 9783954870264

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THE LATEST STYLE: THE FASHION WRITING OF BLANCA VALMONT AND ECONOMIES OF DOMESTICITY KATHLEEN E. DAVIS

LA CASA DE LA RIQUEZA ESTUDIOS DE CULTURA DE ESPAÑA, 3

LA CASA DE LA RIQUEZA ESTUDIOS DE CULTURA DE ESPAÑA 3

CONSEJO EDITORIAL: Dieter Ingenschay (Humboldt Universität, Berlin) Jo Labanyi (Southampton University) José-Carlos Mainer (Universidad de Zaragoza) Susan Martin-Márquez (Rutgers University, New Brunswick) Chris Perriam (Newcastle-upon-Tyne University) Norbert von Prellwitz (Università di Roma La Sapienza) Joan Ramon Resina (Cornell University, Ithaca, NY) Lia Schwartz (City University of New York, NY) Ulrich Winter (Philipps-Universität, Marburg)

THE LATEST STYLE: THE FASHION WRITING OF BLANCA VALMONT AND ECONOMIES OF DOMESTICITY

Kathleen E. Davis

VERVUERT

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IBEROAMERICANA

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2004

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de

© Vervuert, 2004 Wielandstr. 40 – D - 60318 Frankfurt am Main Tel.: +49 69 597 46 17 Fax: +49 69 597 87 43 [email protected] www.ibero-americana.net © Iberoamericana, 2004 Amor de Dios, 1 – E - 28014 Madrid Tel.: +34 91 429 35 22 Fax: +34 91 429 53 97 [email protected] www.ibero-americana.net ISBN: 3-86527-139-1 (Vervuert) ISBN: 84-8489-157-7 (Iberoamericana) ISBN: 1-55876-364-3 (Markus Wiener Publishers) Depósito legal: Ilustración de la cubierta: Condesa de Vilches, Federico de Madrazo, 1853, Casón del Buen Retiro. Madrid Cubierta: Michael Ackermann The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ISO 9706

Impreso en España

To David, for the many times he sat down with me over this book.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book was made possible by the assistance of the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States’ Universities and the excellent services of the Hemeroteca Municipal de Madrid. A portion of Chapter 4 of this book was previously published in Catalan Review, IX, 1995. I would like to thank my past and present colleagues at Tulane University, especially Dan Balderston and Susan Martin-Márquez, also the members of my writer’s group and David Lanoue for their helpful commentary. Thanks should also go to my hosts in Spain: Amelia Tito, Conchita Calvo, Al Muth, Ed Gurski, and the late Mónica Nedelcu. Finally, this book would not have been possible without the care and support of the entire pulmonary staff of Tulane, my parents, Jimmy, Jay, Mark, Judy, Cynthia, and Marion, the transplant team at Ochsner, and my donor family.

TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION

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CHAPTER ONE Anatomy of the Fashion Industry

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CHAPTER TWO The Tenets of Pro-Fashion Discourse CHAPTER THREE Women’s Lifestyles

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51

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CHAPTER FOUR Pro-Consumerist Discourse in Literature

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121

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157

WORKS CITED ....................................................................................................................

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ILLUSTRATIONS ..................................................................................................................

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CONCLUSION

INTRODUCTION In the third month of La Última Moda’s publication (1888), feature writer Blanca Valmont devotes her column to a review of spring fashions and merchandise at Printemps, a Paris department store familiar to Spanish women through catalogue shopping. Asombra ver la variedad de trajes que aparecen en maniquís, las infinitas telas que en los estantes muestran toda la escala cromática de los colores [...] las mil ideas convertidas en graciosos y distinguidos adornos [...] las infinitas chucherías que revelan un asíduo e inmenso trabajo, un gusto refinado y sobre todo unas manos de hada. Un observador inteligente pasaría momentos deliciosos con sólo examinar el movimiento contínuo, la animación creciente que se nota en el vasto edificio durante todo el día. Amables y solícitos lacayos con lujosas libreas abren las puertas del palacio encantado; empleados de distinguido aspecto y de correcto traje acuden a conocer los deseos de las señoras que penetran en el oasis [...]1. It’s mind-boggling to see the variety of outfits on the mannequins, the infinite number of fabrics, the entire range of colors, displayed on the shelves [...] a thousand ideas transformed into charming and distinguished adornments [...] the infinite trinkets that evidence assiduous and immense labor, refined taste, and, above all, the touch of a fairy. 1 La Última Moda, 19 de marzo de 1888, Año I, N.o 11, Madrid. I have reproduced Valmont’s texts exactly as they appear. I have not corrected variant spelling and accent usage, as these were acceptable at the time.

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The scene Valmont describes is an unprecedented spectacle, offering consumers luxuries and services previously available only to the very wealthy. Now, however, the enchanted castle is open to the «mujer casera» [housewife]. Yet even Valmont, an ardent promoter of new retail practices, concedes that such a wealth of choices, such a magical presentation of goods might prove to be a temptation equal to that offered by «la serpiente del paraíso» [the serpent of paradise]. As goods that were once regarded as luxuries began to be produced and distributed on a mass scale, authors working in a variety of print media increasingly turned their attention to discussion of consumer values and behaviors. In El Angel del Hogar: Galdós and the Ideology of Domesticity in Spain, Bridget Aldaraca notes that there were two different levels at which eighteenth and nineteenth century authors evaluated consumerism (98-99). At the level of national economy, increased consumption brought about increased production, to the benefit of all. However, at the level of the individual household, the domain of women, writers were quick to point out that the temptations of consumerism were potentially dangerous to domestic economy2. Economists, novelists, columnists in family magazines-writers of all kinds perceived a special relationship between consumer values and the ideal of the domestic woman. In their studies of Benito Pérez Galdos’s novels, Alicia Andreu, Bridget Aldaraca, and Catherine Jagoe have meticulously documented the arguments and rhetorical strategies of anti-materialist authors who posed consumerism against the modesty and frugality of the domestic angel. All three of these scholars point out ways in which domestic, anti-consumerist ideology limited the representation of women in the nineteenth century. Yet concentration on the works of the anticonsumerists has tended to obscure the fact that there was social debate

2 See Andreu, Galdós y la literatura popular, 17-91, Aldaraca, El ángel popular, 35, and Jagoe, Ambiguous Angels, 88 on domestic ideology and consumerism.

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about the ethics of consumerism, both in journalism and in fiction. Fashion writers, as well as popular and literary authors, answered the charges of anti-consumerists by attempting to reconcile consumer values with domesticity. Blanca Valmont was one journalist who attempted to link personal consumption and national interests in her essays on the importance of fashion in modern life. In agreement with Baudelaire, Balzac, and Octave Uzanne, she believed that fashion expressed social aspirations and individual psychology. Like Walter Benjamin after her, she viewed the entire complex of the fashion industry as a primary document of historical and social reality. Los publicistas y los gobernantes deberían considerar la Moda como el más activo y útil auxiliar de sus cotidianas tareas. Basta fijar un poco la atención en el cuadro que ofrecen las novedades, al parecer frívolas, de la deidad a quien todos rendimos culto, para abarcar, estudiar y comprender en un momento, no sólo los progresos de las fuerzas sociales, sino el estado moral de las conciencias [...]. Y si la misión de los que piensan, de los que escriben, de los que gobiernan, es conocer las necesidades que aquejan a sus contemporáneos para satisfacerlas en lo posible, no hay nada como la Moda, eso que constituye la brillante superficie de la humanidad civilizada, para penetrar en el fondo y conocer cumplidamente las aspiraciones que en él palpitan [...]. (12 de noviembre de 1888, Año I, N.o 45) Journalists and politicians should consider Fashion as the most active and useful aid to their daily work. It’s sufficient to look at the picture of the latest styles, ostensibly frivolous, of the deity to whom we all render homage, in order to take in, study and understand all in a moment, not only the progress of social forces, but also the moral state of consciences [...]. And if the mission of those who think, those who write, and those who govern is to know the needs of their public in order to satisfy them wherever possible, then there is nothing like Fashion, which constitutes the brilliant surface of civilized humanity, for penetrating to the heart and fully understanding the aspirations that beat in it [...].

According to Valmont, once mass production has made fashion a system in which everyone can participate, then trends in fashion become the mirror of the collective aspirations of a society. Consumption does not necessarily have to be a dangerous temptation, ruining those who spend beyond their means in an attempt to imitate an aristocratic mode. Now, such an array of goods is available at such a range of prices that

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«ingenio» [inventiveness] is just as valuable as money in constructing a fashionable presentation of one’s self. [...] vivimos, a Dios gracias, en unos tiempos en los que la igualdad se impone. Lo que se consigue con dinero, o con habilidad, o con buen gusto, está al alcance de todas las clases sociales que poseen uno siquiera de estos tres elementos. (6 de agosto de 1888, Año I, N.o 31) [...] we live, thanks be to God, in times during which equality asserts itself. That which can be had through money, or through ability, or through good taste is within the reach of all the social classes that possess even one of these three elements.

«Ingenio», «habilidad», «buen gusto» [inventiveness, ability, good taste]: all the qualities that are valued in the domestic angel are qualities that make a good consumer. Blanca Valmont frequently asserts that a woman’s judicious selection and purchase of merchandise demonstrate her sensibility as a good woman: Dime cómo te vistes, y te diré quién eres. Esta variación del conocido axioma, no puede aplicarse con mayor propiedad que al traje y al adorno femeninos. No hay, en efecto, medio más rápido y seguro de descubrir la inteligencia y penetrar en el corazón de una mujer, que la impresión que nos produce al presentarse a nuestra vista más o menos engalanada [...]. (17 de diciembre de 1888, Año I, N.o 50) Tell me how you dress, and I’ll tell you who you are. This variation on the well-known axiom, has no more appropriate application than to the subject of feminine dress and adornment. In effect, there is no more rapid and certain way to discover the intelligence and penetrate to the heart of a woman, than that of the impression that she produces when presenting herself, more or less dressed up, to our eyes [...].

If fashion can be an outward indication that a woman possesses the spiritual qualities that personify a good wife and homemaker, the skillful housewife and consumer can, in turn, demonstrate the family’s worthiness of respectable standing in bourgeois society. It was the new domestic angel’s job to orchestrate the public presentation of herself and her home in such a way as to further the interests and prestige of her family over others.

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This public, competitive dimension of the domestic woman’s responsibility to her family represents a step beyond Nancy Armstrong’s description of the home as a haven from the economic world (9). Armstrong argues that the domestic realm was once formulated in conduct books and fiction as a sphere apart from economics or politics in order to provide an ideology that «appealed to people from radically different backgrounds, with substantially different incomes, and with positions in different chains of social relations. Any number of people in the middle ranks could thus believe that the same ideal of domestic life was available to them» (69). In pro-consumerist formulations of domestic ideology, the unifying function that Armstrong describes gives way to a vision of the domestic woman executing a role in the marketplace. In the most concrete sense, the homemaker, as the primary consumer of fashion and household goods, has the power to determine the success of new retail ventures. In another sense, more important for the ideology of domesticity, woman has the power to use what the market makes available in order to improve her family’s position in the competitive «market» of power and status relations as these are visible in the city. This new conjunction of consumerism and domesticity makes the family function as an economic unit in the service of public life. In a modern economy involving speculation and competition, home and family must sometimes be put on public display as an advertisement of skill and success in business. In such an economy, the question of whether consumerism conflicts with the prescribed moral values of the domestic angel is no longer as important as the question of how consumer values mediate social hierarchies, economic systems, family structure and gender roles.

VITAL STATISTICS La Última Moda was published weekly from 1888 to 1899. Its slogan was «Todo para la mujer y por la mujer», claiming inclusion of all subject matter of interest to women on behalf of women. The folio-sized magazine was amply illustrated with black and white prints, with the cover page carrying a large fashion plate as well as Valmont’s column. The fashion plates were designed to sell a lifestyle as well as clothes; they usually depict women engaging in public leisure activities. These women attend balls, races, and weddings; they visit beaches and historical sites;

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they go shopping or walk in the park. At times, the plates show a social domestic scene, such as the ritual of receiving calls in a well-appointed drawing room. However, the highly private, intimate domesticity lauded in conservative ideology of the time is almost never represented, since to do so would restrict the number of models in the plate and limit the opportunity to display home furnishings and accessories3. In the later years of publication, women are represented reading (accessorized with eyeglasses), bicycling, and even hiking in the mountains. There are few men in the illustrations; the plates are filled with female figures in order to display as many fashions as possible. Children, however, do have a place in the plates, not only to promote an ideology of women’s principal role, but also to sell children’s’ clothes and toys. Inside the magazine, during the early years there was often a double page spread of a seaside or ballroom scene. Smaller illustrations represented lingerie, table and bed linens, decorative knickknacks, and home furnishings. Because the accessibility of fashion to all was important in the magazine’s ideology, issues also included patterns and instructions for home dressmaking, embroidery, lace making, and crochet. As Margaret Beetham has pointed out, the inclusion of these materials provide important evidence of the editorial inclusion of different levels of the bourgeoisie as readers. The magazine was aimed not only at the woman passing her leisure in the drawing room, but also at the woman «working to clothe herself and her family» (67). Different editions of the magazine, selling at variable prices, came with different inserts. These inserts included color plates, more detailed patterns, and pamphlets on special topics such as thumbnail biographies of international feminist figures. The mastheads of the magazine deserve special attention (see pages 164-166). The masthead for the first year is the most elaborate. It is a representation of Fashion as a queen, gazing into a mirror4. To her right is a cherub, scissors in hand, intently working on a piece of fabric. To

3 See Charnon-Deutsch, Fictions of the Feminine in the Nineteenth Century Spanish Press, 159-162 on household luxuries for sale in magazine art. See also Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion on the technology of the fashion plates, as well as representation of clothing, fashionable locales, and social rituals. 4 Charnon-Deutsch offers a provocative analysis of the gaze into the mirror as a woman’s self-assessment of her attractiveness and her worth to men. This, in turn, reflects the woman’s purchasing power. Moreover, the mirror sometimes provides multiple reflections of the luxury goods surrounding the woman. Fictions of the Feminine, 159.

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her left is another cherub, offering riches from a large treasure chest. In the background are a neoclassical pavilion, representing taste, a large ship, representing trade, and an angel trumpeting the benefits of civilization and fashion to the world. In the second year, the masthead is simplified somewhat, although the iconographic significance of the elements is no less important. The title of the magazine occupies a more prominent position, and the Queen of Fashion is moved to the left corner. Her dress has been somewhat modernized, and she strikes a slightly more provocative pose, gazing at a dressing mirror as she tries her crown at a jaunty angle. Now at the privileged center of the masthead are the symbols of domestic industry: spools of thread, a pin cushion and scissors, an inkwell and quill pen, and a small account book. In the fourth year, the masthead was revised again, this time with a more whimsical theme. A group of small cherubs rests on the letters of the title, watching a trio of fairies, the Fairies of Fashion, try on garlands in front of a mirror5. Perhaps by this time the magazine was secure enough in its position to dispense with the insistent symbolism of prosperity, industry, and virtue. Unfortunately, towards the end of the magazine’s run, the masthead was starkly simplified and the fashion plates became much smaller, perhaps in response to financial pressures. The contents of La Última Moda did not differ greatly from the standard of other women’s magazines of the nineteenth century6. In addition to Valmont’s column, the magazine included a second column of more traditional fashion copy —descriptions of styles and fabrics. There were articles on home furnishing, domestic science, hygiene, and etiquette. Special series on history, regional customs, or biographies of public figures, as well as serialized fiction filled out the magazine. La Última Moda is unusual in the length of its publication and the breadth of circulation it apparently enjoyed. Although precise subscription figures are

5 In Fictions of the Feminine, Charnon-Deutsch cites Simone de Beauvoir’s remarks about fairies as creatures belonging to nature but also reflecting what is desired but not quite attainable by men (14). In the context of the Fairies of Fashion, I would agree that the fairies and flowers help tie fashion to nature, thus making consumption of fashion «natural». I would also assert that in this case, the fairies stand for the desires and strivings of women in relation to fashion. 6 For descriptions of the contents of a large sampling of magazines, see Simón Palmer, «Revistas femeninas madrileñas», 9-19 and Segura y Selva, Revistes de dones, 21.

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not available, the magazine was distributed throughout the Iberian Peninsula, Latin America, and the Caribbean as well as in Asian colonies such as the Phillipines and Macao. During the veraneo, the summer retreat to seaside resorts, readers could even request that their subscriptions be sent directly to their hotels. Advertisements, usually for personal health and hygiene products, were few in number and small in size, placed on the back page of the magazine. Advertising was not, apparently, an important source of income for the magazine. A certain amount of money must have come in from the subscriber base, but historians of women’s magazines suggest that many periodicals were supported by the directors in the interest of promoting their ideology on the question of gender roles (Simón Palmer 5, Segura y Selva 16). Blanca Valmont wrote the lead column weekly for the eleven years of the magazine’s publication. She was born in Spain, from whence she derives her sentimental links to that country and her professed sisterhood with Spanish women. Living and writing in France, her adoptive country, she was at the center of the fashion capital, and could offer her readers first-hand reports from the source of fashion artistry and inventiveness. Details of her life are scarce7. This lack of biographical information leaves open the important question of why she wrote. Was she a woman of comfortable income who wrote only to forward her beliefs? Or did she have to write to support herself? In either case, she is in the contradictory position of many Spanish women writers in privileging a domestic lifestyle over any other, even though she herself works as a journalist. Her uniqueness lies in attempting to extend the borders of domestic ideology to include consumerism. Valmont’s column, in the convention of fashion columns at the time, is at first strictly descriptive of new styles —the fabrics, designs, and trimmings that women are wearing in the streets of Paris. However, Valmont soon tires of mere description and begins discussing the social and ethical functions of fashion. She attaches consumption not only to a discourse of domesticity, but also to a generalized political discourse of civilized society. Her use of the term «Civilization» is meant to have economic, democratic, and artistic resonance. 7 Valmont is listed in Simón Palmer’s bibliographic manual Escritoras españolas del siglo XIX, 703 as a columnist for La Última Moda. I have been unable to uncover any other writing she may have done or any biographical details other than those which she herself reveals in her columns.

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In addition to her writing on fashion, Valmont also covers a broad spectrum of topics in what might be called «lifestyle» essays. She is particularly interested in reporting developments in European feminism and their impact on the public and private lives of Spanish women. Valmont’s gender politics may be problematic for modern feminist scholars. She denies being a feminist, and is strongly opposed to any reformulation of traditional gender roles. However, she considers herself to be firmly committed to women’s issues, and, given her longevity as a columnist, her readers must have believed in that commitment. She does consider gender relations and the problems that concern feminists the most important issues of modern social debate, and a number of Spanish women must have formed their opinions based on reading columns like hers rather than the more radical works of Pardo Bazán or Concepción Arenal. Such an assertion is not meant to detract from the importance of these cultural icons but simply to recognize the relative impact of different discourses in the lives of middle class Spanish women of the time. Who was Valmont’s audience? For the most part, her readers were probably conservative, upper to middle class, urban women. However, Valmont is very careful about class discourse in her columns. She wants to promote consumer values and new retail practices as inclusive, and she tries to address class differences by referring to standards of consumption, taste, and restraint for different levels of income. Her intended readers belong to all classes. It would not be in accord with her doctrine of consumerism to dwell on the possibly ruinous impact of shopping on household budgets. She insists that, in moderation, fashion is a system in which everyone, even the poorest members of society, can participate. Besides creating an editorial position meant to include all classes, she also addresses herself to women of the provinces. She asserts that catalogue shopping enables women not living in the capital to free themselves of the stigma of being labelled «provincial» – i.e. not «up to the minute» in terms of fashion. This inclusive position makes sense if we take into account the low literacy rate among Spanish women in the nineteenth century8. Probably not everyone who looked at the magazine bought her own copy. In fact,

8 Illiteracy rates for women were about 81 percent, although the number of reading women in urban areas was probably higher. Charnon-Deutsch, 277; Andreu, 36.

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perhaps a good many people only looked at the magazine, not being able to read it. Several scholars theorize that this was one reason women’s magazines were so lavishly illustrated and contained so many patterns (Simón Palmer 6, Segura y Selva 79). Valmont was not only providing a mirror in which her readers could see their own lives or get information for how best to spend their income, she was also creating images meant to serve as an ideal «seductive enough to produce emulation» (Charnon-Deutsch, Fictions 7). In her theory of the trickle-down economic benefits of the fashion system, she appears to embrace a duty to educate even the poorest women who have access to the magazine in proper consumer values and behavior. Nevertheless, one may question whether the urban and rural poor were even aware that Valmont was championing their right to fashion. For the most part, Valmont’s presumed audience is probably married women. In Usos amorosos del siglo XVIII, Carmen Martín Gaite argues that marriage was a desirable state because it gave women access to money and to public intercourse (25-67). This was still true in the nineteenth century, and marriage was a good vehicle for consumer values. By employing the same domestic discourse in defense of consumer values that anti-consumerists use in their attacks, Valmont hits on a brilliant rhetorical strategy. The anti-consumerists charge that domestic women bring about their own ruin by trying to consume according to the model of aristocratic women. These housewives are not only violating the rules of economy, but also transgressing hierarchies of class and taste. However, Valmont’s model consumer is the middle class domestic woman who accumulates modern products in the interest of her family. In practical considerations as well, domesticity was the best arena in which to promote the values of mass consumption. The care of a comfortable home, the grooming of children, the maintenance of personal appearance in order to keep a husband’s erotic interest all afforded justification for consumption. Valmont sometimes uses her columns to espouse concern for the rights of unmarried women; she promotes their right to work, and their right to salaries and professional recognition consummate with that enjoyed by men. However, unmarried women were probably not consumers on a large scale, given the small salaries they earned and the long hours they worked. For Valmont’s purposes, there was probably more similarity between the needs and/or aspirations of married women of different socioeconomic classes (home, husband, and children) than between single and married women.

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Another question about Valmont’s audience is whether it was largely an intended audience. In other words, how many subscribers could actually consume at the level Valmont suggests? Her inclusive class discourse suggests that she is forming aspirations as much as she is addressing a real audience, and she frequently remarks that Spain is less industrialized and its consumer economy less developed than that of France. However, recent research in post-mortem inventories of individual possessions shows that the Spanish middle class was enjoying tremendous improvement in its material circumstances. Inventories from the mid-nineteenth century show listings of as many as 85 different (specialized) items of clothing in a more varied array of fabrics and colors than ever before9. The same variety of goods and specialization of function appear in household goods: sofas, divans, night-tables, gaming-tables, armoires, cornucopias, porcelain, crystal, chocolate pots, salad bowls, and an array of table, bed, and personal linens (Cruz 342). While some of Valmont’s readers may have been merely looking at the pictures, dreaming of higher living standards in the future, there was a significant sector of the Spanish population who could actually buy fashion and other goods according to Valmont’s models for domestic consumption.

SELECTION OF MATERIALS Blanca Valmont is the sole focus of the first part of this study because of the ways in which her fashion writing differs from much nineteenth century fashion copy. The fact that she attempts to theorize the role of fashion in society, and the eclectic way in which she weaves fashion, feminist, and domestic discourse together, I believe, give us a good view of what Spanish women were reading and what their ideals of consumption and lifestyle were. I later argue that these popular views of fashion, consumption and domesticity found their way into general culture and into literary texts. Valmont wrote a weekly column for eleven years. In the face of such a large body of material, I, of course, had to select a portion of columns on which to focus. I chose to look closely at columns dedicated to fashion

9 Villanueva, 164. Contrary to anti-consumerist propaganda, male spending for clothes was a good deal more than female spending. See Cruz, 343.

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promotion and theory, or columns that engaged in reportage or debate of 19th century feminist agendas or women’s lifestyles. I have left out columns that are purely reportage of styles or social events, unless Valmont treats these as social statements. (Such is the case in the development of sports clothes and the debate over black or colored tuxedos). The columns also include many details of the social calendar of Paris: the visit of Russian czar Nicholas II and Alexandra, and the balls of various princesses. These I have also excluded when presented in the form of mere reportage. However, I include events such as the political scandal involving the Duchess of Uzés and the fire at the Charity Bazaar when Valmont sees such events as symptomatic of changes in gender, class, or political relations. Valmont clearly takes for granted that French fashion did and should inform styles throughout Europe. Consequently, she writes mostly about fashion and events in Paris. We can learn a great deal about French social history from Valmont, but it is beyond the scope of this book to situate the columns fully within their French context10. Rather, I am studying the columns as examples of what material appealed to a subscription base of Spanish women readers. From the perspective of Spanish subscribers, Valmont had expert status by virtue of her proximity to the capital of fashion and retailing. She celebrates France’s exemplarity in the areas of style and industry, but she also examines the price she feels that French women pay for living in an industrialized society and gives Spanish women plenty of opportunity to feel fortunate about their own circumstances. Valmont invites Spanish women to reflect how their society is different, in both positive and negative ways from other nations. If she celebrates French «superiority» in some respects, she also takes many opportunities to flatter the values, traditions, and tastes of her Spanish readers. In the last section of the book I examine selected literary works that I believe are representative of the influence of Valmont’s fashion/lifestyle discourse in fiction. I have chosen two novels, Benito Pérez Galdós’s Lo prohibido and the Catalan author Narcís Oller’s La febre d’or. The contrast between a Castilian novel that takes place in Madrid and a Catalan

10 Michelle Perrot’s volume of A History of Private Life (IV) is a good starting point for the French contexts of the issues about which Valmont writes because of the discussion of how historical events influenced social and domestic life.

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novel situated in Barcelona is important because each setting represents different attitudes toward the social role of consumerism. While consumer spending in order to imitate one’s betters is often represented in negative terms in the fictional milieu of Madrid, the situation in Barcelona is altogether different. Because of migration into the city and industrialization, consumption was an important tool of assimilation into urban life. This kind of aspirant consumer was the ideal audience for Valmont’s model of consumption to facilitate exemplary participation in domestic and public life.

CHAPTER ONE ANATOMY OF THE FASHION INDUSTRY MERCHANDISING In order to find examples of the preeminent shopping experience for Spanish women, we have only to look at the novels of Benito Pérez Galdós. His characters frequently take advantage of their veraneo at the northern beaches in order to cross the border and go shopping in Paris. On the return trip women generally bribe or otherwise persuade the customs officials to let the French garments pass without duty. As reported by Pez in La de Bringas, some women even try to trick the inspectors by donning layer upon layer of clothing so as to empty their trunks. The Boucicault brothers had opened the Bon Marché in Paris in 1869, and Samaritaine and Printemps soon followed11. These stores became well known throughout Europe through promotional materials such as mail order catalogues, but the public outside of Paris wanted to experience the new phenomenon first hand, and the stores became tourist attractions in their own right.

11 Actually, the Bon Marché existed as a magasin de nouveautés as early as 1852. Samaritaine and Printemps also started as «general stores» in the early 1860’s. Philippe Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie, 58. However, Michael Miller marks the construction of a new building to house the Bon Marché in 1869 as the beginning of the large, modern department store. Other stores followed a similar path of expansion and development later on.

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In Madrid, where La Última Moda was published, there was nothing to compare with the Parisian shopping experience. The city boasted a few shopping arcades, but these were never as popular as their French counterparts, perhaps because they were inconveniently located (Nielfa Cristóbal 128). Still, madrileños did enjoy some French retailing innovations. There were stores, such as El Gran Bazar de la Unión, which sold a variety of goods under one roof, with free entry and fixed prices. Large plate glass windows encouraged the development of window shopping and the accompanying pastime of people watching in order to appreciate and compare appearances12. It was not until 1923, however, that a large department store on the scale of the Bon Marché was established in Madrid: the MadridParis (Nielfa Cristóbal 129, 138). Until then, if Spaniards wanted to experience the wonder of the iron and glass shopping palaces they had to travel. Social commentators debated strenuously about whether department stores were exploitative or beneficial to consumers13. The fact that the stores could sell a greater number of goods at lower prices than specialized shops benefited the consumer economically. The lavish displays and amenities of department stores made shopping a pleasurable experience, a new way to spend leisure time. But the big stores did cause social upheaval as the small, artesanal shops were put out of business14. Moreover, critics of the department store joined a general chorus of antimaterialist critics in charging that the stores provided especially dangerous temptations. In Spain, at least since the government’s disentailment of Church property in 1836 and 1854, the Catholic press charged that materialism and consumer values were corrupting elements of society in general and of women in particular. According to essayist J. Jimeno Agius, women were drawn away from their proper domestic sphere by their desire for luxury15. Since these women have no property or money 12 See Labanyi, Gender and Modernization in the Spanish Realist Novel: on Galdós’s novels, Chapters 3,4,5. 13 Williams, Dream Worlds; Bowlby, Just Looking; Miller, The Bon Marché; and Nord, Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment all cover objections to the department store in their works on French consumer culture. Emile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames [Ladies’ Paradise] novelized the debate, presenting a heroine with conflicting loyalties to the Paradise, her place of employment, and to her family, shopkeepers being ruined by the larger store. 14 See Williams, Bowlby, Miller, and Nord for details of the struggle. 15 Agius, «La moralidad en España», El Museo Universal, X, N.o 31 (5 de agosto de 1866), 242-243. Cited in Andreu, 21-22.

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of their own, they must use their bodies in exchange for the luxuries they crave. Eventually, all of society must bear the burden of female misbehavior, in terms of bad debts, illegitimate children, and breakdown of domestic order16. The proliferation of goods in the big stores was perceived to greatly exacerbate the problem. Critics feared that the goods, arranged in tempting displays, would prove overwhelming to women, making them become disoriented and lose control —thus leading to shopping addiction, abuse of the credit system, and even kleptomania. During the first months of La Última Moda’s publication, one of Blanca Valmont’s tasks is to promote the image of the Parisian stores. She begins her defense of the department store by utilizing the familiar observation that it sells a greater variety of goods to a greater number of people at cheaper prices than has ever before been possible. But she goes on to open a new line of reasoning: Los grandes almacenes, con la baratura de sus productos, han llevado el gusto en el vestir hasta a las más apartadas aldeas, han abierto nuevos y vastos horizontes a las aspiraciones femeniles, han puesto al alcance de las imaginaciones que se esterilizaban en el aislamiento, los medios de entrar a tomar parte en el concierto universal de la belleza, y han hecho más, han producido esa encantadora anarquía que hoy aparece en el imperio de la Moda. (17 de diciembre de 1888, Año I, N.o 50) The department stores, with the cheapness of their products, have brought tasteful dressing to the most remote hamlets, have opened vast new horizons for feminine aspirations, have placed within the reach of those imaginations sterilized by isolation, the means to take part in the universal symphony of beauty, and even more, they have produced that charming anarchy that is now present in the Empire of fashion.

Valmont asserts that department stores have added to the communal quality of life by providing women with creative stimulation. She concedes the very thing that is a source of anxiety for many anti-consumerist critics: a woman can enter a shop dressed as a menial worker and come

16 See Andreu, 19-22; Aldaraca, 91-101; Jagoe, 88 on the beliefs about how women’s impulses might disrupt society and how domesticity was meant to contain and control those impulses.

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out looking like a lady. For many persons, the possibility of such transformations was deeply disturbing, creating an uncertainty of how to read the identity and social place of persons in the city (T. J. Clark 47). But for Valmont, the possibility of masquerade is not the issue, nor can it be since she is trying to present fashion as accessible to every class. According to her, the earliest shops to sell ready-made clothing offered such a narrow selection that they might as well have been in the business of selling uniforms. The important issue for Valmont is that the prefabricated quality of the «make-over» suppressed the shoppers’ creativity. From the huge selection of patterns, fabrics, and ready-made models available in the bigger stores, women learn to choose and adapt the styles that suit them best. Each woman develops her own vocabulary of fashion by becoming proficient in assembling the raw materials provided by the store. In her columns promoting department store shopping, Valmont writes about creativity in natural, artistic, and technological terms. She often compares the department store to another institution for display that became popular in nineteenth-century Europe: expositions of art and industry. She refers to a sale at the Paris store Printemps as an «exposición» [both exposition and display] in a «Palacio de comercio moderno» [palace of modern commerce] (19 de marzo de 1888, Año I, N.o 11). This sale, described as a «solemnidad» [ceremony] is taking place in «[un] inmenso y artístico edificio, uno de los más vastos del mundo civilizado». Valmont invests this spring sale with all the formality of a religious ceremony (solemnidad). She ascribes further prestige to the event by describing the building in terms appropriate to a national monument, one of the most impressive in the civilized world. But exhibitions and museums are not solely devoted to industry. Valmont likens designers, weavers, dressmakers, and vendors to painters or other artists preparing for a gallery opening. Before a new fashion collection is displayed, the preparations must be shrouded in mystery. In Valmont’s «museo moderno de traje y del adorno» [modern museum of dress and adornment], the management is described as waiting expectantly not as much in hope of profit as in the hope of creative validation. She compares this anticipation to the suspense of a painter awaiting the reviews of the Exposición de Bellas Artes. The cultural place that Valmont wants to claim for fashion and the department store is emphasized once again in her coverage of the 1892 Exposition of Women’s Arts being held in the Palace of Industry. This

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event exhibited household furnishings and appliances, fabrics, trimmings, and ready-made clothes, jewels, cosmetics, and perfumes. In addition, there was a gallery displaying the writing, painting, and sculpture of contemporary women artists. According to Georges Berger, the organizer of the event: Sin la mujer [...] no existiría la Moda, y sin la Moda sería efímera y miserable la vida del arte, de la industria, y lo que es más, hasta carecería la misma religión de esa belleza que reviste, gracias al sentimiento. (21 de agosto de 1892, Año V, N.o 242) Without Woman, [...] Fashion would not exist, and without Fashion, the life of art and industry would be ephemeral and miserable, and even more importantly, it [Fashion] would lack the same religion that beauty [Woman] wears, thanks to sentiment.

The association of art, industry, and commerce in official expositions was not always greeted in such positive terms. According to Walter Benjamin, the first exposition, in the year IX (1800), was meant to include painting, but the artists refused to display their works alongside manufacturers (190). Later exhibitions often were products of official cooperation between representatives of industry and the arts, but were nonetheless criticized as being crassly materialistic17. However, Valmont asserts that the department store, displaying the products of fashion, provides a workable combination of art and commerce for which many expositions aimed. Robert Rydell, writing on the history of international expositions, comments that: For the designers of international fairs, progress was a universal force that active human intervention could direct toward national benefit. Progress meant advances in civilization, more research in science, improved technology, and economic growth [...]. They were arenas where manufacturers sought to promote products, [...] where people from all social classes went to be alternately amused, instructed, and diverted from more pressing concerns. (Rydell, 9-10)

17 The Crystal Palace Exhibition, for example, enjoyed the patronage of the Royal Society of the Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. Rydell, 2-3.

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Valmont will make precisely the same claim over and over again for the department store and the institution of fashion. Indeed, by the time La Última Moda was in publication, the International Exposition of Barcelona was underway. Even though they did not yet enjoy the benefits of a large department store, Spaniards were already witnessing the convergence of progress, fashion, and free trade at the Barcelona Exposition18. If the store is a jewel of artistry and civilization, business is conducted according to the rhythms of nature and the season: Como en la bella y fecunda estación del año el aspecto de la naturaleza cambia los tristes cuadros del invierno en risueños paisajes esmaltados de flores e iluminados por un sol refulgente, el gran Bazar se transforma en la primera quincena de Marzo y ofrece al admirado público una completa exposición de cuanto forma el traje, el adorno y los mil acesorios que constituyen el lujo, la elegancia y las necesidades femeniles. (19 de marzo de 1888, Año I, N.o 11) Just as during the beautiful and fertile season of the year the sad scenes of winter change to pleasant landscapes painted with flowers and illuminated by a brightly shining sun, the great bazaar transforms itself during the first half of March and offers to the admiring public a complete exposition of everything that goes into the dress, adornment and thousands of accessories that constitute luxury, elegance and feminine necessities.

The sale is not only an exigency of business or promotion; it is a manifestation of the gifts of Nature, renewed each spring. The melting snows and blue skies, the blooming trees and flowers, the social round of the Bois de Boulogne (or, in the case of Madrid readers, the Retiro and Paseo del Prado), the races, and the salons for which women must have new clothes, are all a natural part of the changing of seasons. [...] se despiertan en nosotras deseos de armonizar con la Naturaleza, de vestirnos con más esmero, de adornarnos con más coquetería; que no es cosa de que las flores cumplan su misión en el campo y las mujeres falten a su deber en las ciudades. (31 de marzo de 1888, Año I, N.o 13) 18 Labanyi, citing Benjamin’s Arcades Project, frequently underlines the connection between consumerism and Expositions. See also Vergés and Sarrias, Barbes i bigotis for specifics on the Barcelona Exposition.

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[...] there awake in us desires to harmonize with Nature, to dress with more care, to adorn ourselves with more coquetry; it can’t be that the flowers fulfill their mission in the fields and women neglect their duties in the cities.

Critics often describe the fashion system as enacting an artificial manipulation of the consumer, causing her to purchase things that she does not truly want or need. Valmont, however, «naturalizes» the impulse to buy new clothes by associating it with the biological renewal of spring and with women’s biological functions of attraction, fertility, and reproduction. For those living outside France, as indeed, most of Valmont’s readers did, the store catalogue afforded access to all the store’s offerings. In one column, Valmont refers to the Printemps catalogue as «[...] el Católogo que con tanta prodigalidad regala su opulento dueño [...]» [the Catalogue so generously bestowed by the prosperous owner [...] (N.o 11). In Valmont’s rhetoric, the catalogue is not a marketing tool, something that would be free as a matter of course, on account of the returns the store will gain from it. Instead, the catalogue is a gift from a munificent owner, whose generosity is compared with the bounty of Spring and her natural gifts. In Valmont’s promotions of the department store, the discourses of the gifts of nature, art, and progress all combine to overshadow the fact that she is talking about ready-to-wear clothing for sale in a store. This rhetoric is different from many descriptions of the department store, even promotional ones. In Zola’s Au bonheur des dames, Octave Mouret, owner of the Paradise, arranges the store so as to evoke an atmosphere of beautiful, if overwhelming exoticism. The Oriental Salon, with its rare carpets and curtains, evokes the world of the harem, of feminine sensuality, luxury, and idleness so often represented in Orientalist paintings19. Valmont’s rhetoric is calculated to negate all these associations. In contrast, her descriptions emphasize qualities compatible with the ideology of domesticity. Her evocation of natural rhythms and productive creativity are directed at improving the comfort and attractiveness of social and domestic life.

19 See Zola, 88 for the primary quotation. Also Charnon-Deutsch, 175-221, and Thornton, The Orientalists for further commentary on the role of Orientalist art and its representation of feminine sexuality as these were harnessed for marketing and consumerism.

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In order to further emphasize the sense of expectation the new collections generate, Valmont layers the discourse of an «opening» with that of gift-giving, and it is no accident that she creates the scenario of the gift as a domestic one, between young girls and a mother rather than, for instance, a woman and a man. En una palabra, reina, aunque misteriosa, febril actividad, como cuando en el hogar tranquilo y feliz las hijas conspiran y elaboran a hurtadillas el regalo con que sorprenderán a la mamá, que hace que ignora lo que está pasando. (31 de marzo de 1888, Año I, N.o 13) In a word, a febrile but mysterious activity reigns, as when in a tranquil and happy home the daughters secretly plan and make a gift with which to surprise their mother, who acts as if she doesn’t know what is happening.

Display and sale of goods in the stores were often characterized by critics according to a paradigm of temptation and seduction. In Zola’s novel, this is made explicit, as Mouret believes: It was Woman the shops were competing for so fiercely, it was Woman they were continually snaring with their bargains, after dazing her with their displays. They had awoken new desires in her weak flesh; they were an immense temptation to which she inevitably yielded [...] seduced by coquetry, finally consumed by desire. (Zola, 76)

In the climate of such criticism, Valmont legitimizes and promotes the sales by associating them with domesticity, in this particular case, with a birthday celebration. Valmont is careful to avoid any reference to indulgence or seduction. The anticipation of salesmen to sell and customers to buy is motivated by domestic affections, a wish to serve and delight. Valmont does have to concede some of the criticism of department stores. For example, she devotes an entire column to the problem of kleptomania, which she admits did not exist on a large scale before the appearance of the big stores. From 1879, with the publication of Charles Lasègue’s «Le vol aux étalages» psychiatrists became increasingly concerned with the numbers of women who stole only in department stores (Miller 200-201). According to Michael Miller, historian of the Bon Marché, the prevalent belief was that «If kleptomaniacs committed so many thefts in department stores, then it was not only because they were

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predisposed to steal but because the department stores created conditions that incited them to do so» (202). Valmont, however, shifts blame for the syndrome of kleptomania from the stores themselves to the women committing the act. Damas acostumbradas a tomar parte en las distracciones del gran mundo, bailes, soireés, fiestas de todas clases, carreras de caballos, etc., cuando cesan estos placeres que las preocupan y las ocupan, y mientras disponen los viajes veraniegos, emplean la ociosidad en visitar los almacenes. No son mujeres caseras, la casa se les cae encima, como se dice vulgarmente, no tienen afición a leer ni a hacer labores [...]. En una palabra, no teniendo mejor cosa que hacer, se encaminan a los bazares y allí lo examinan todo, manosean las telas, recorren las galerías, suben a todos los pisos, y poseídas del fatal instinto, de la sugestión, atacadas de la enfermedad kleptománica, aunque son muy vigiladas, aprovechan la ocasión y se guardan una pieza de cinta, unas cuantas varas de puntilla, un pañuelo o cualesquiera otro de los múltiples artículos que se hallan al alcance de sus manos. (19 de julio, 1896, Año IX, N.o 446) Women accustomed to taking part in worldly distractions: balls, soirees, parties of all types, horse races, etc., when all these pleasures which concern and occupy them cease, and while they plan for their summer journeys, employ their leisure in visiting department stores. They aren’t housewives; in fact, the house falls in on them, as the saying goes —they don’t enjoy reading or needlework. In a word, not having anything better to do, they walk through the bazaars, inspect everything, feel the fabrics, review all the galleries, visit every floor, possessed of the fatal instinct of suggestion, attacked by the sickness of kleptomania, although they are watched, take advantage of any chance and hide away a piece of ribbon, some lengths of lace, a handkerchief, or any other of the many articles they find at hand.

So, the kleptomaniac is aberrant in the first place because she is not a domestic woman. Her tastes and habits are formed by public activity, not household tasks. Home for her is mere idleness, and this domestic idleness provokes the first impulse to steal. Throughout the years, Valmont flatters her readers by declaring that Spanish women are more domestic than French women. She is certain that in Spain kleptomania does not exist. Her reasoning, however, is based not on the detail that department stores do not yet exist in Spain but on Spain’s superior moral climate.

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In addition to the question of whether the impulse to steal originated with the individual or the store, psychiatrists were also divided on whether kleptomania was a crime or an illness (Miller 196). Was the kleptomaniac legally responsible for her acts? Interestingly, Valmont resists the medicalization of kleptomania and sharply criticizes the class distinctions connoted by such a diagnosis. La ciencia se obstina en demostrar que los crímenes no son crímenes, sino estados pasionales [...]. En el lenguaje general de todos los países a ese acto de apoderarse de lo ajeno se llama hurtar, y en efecto, cuando la que cede a la tentación es una pobre mujer del pueblo se la califica de ladrona, pero cuando la que comete el punible acto, es por el traje al menos una señora, se la denomina kleptómana. (N.o 446)20 Science persists in demonstrating that crimes are not crimes but states of passion [...]. In the common language of every country the act of taking something is called stealing, and, in effect, when the one who gives in to temptation is a poor woman of the people she is classified as a thief, but when the woman who commits the act is deemed a lady, at least by her dress, she is called a kleptomaniac.

Kleptomania, according to Valmont, is a syndrome provoked, not by the stores and their merchandise, but by the idleness of the perpetrators. She must avoid any stance that associates the stores or fashion with passion or the loss of control. Moreover, for Valmont fashion is a socially unifying force in which women of all classes can participate and find common ground. She must reject any double standard of making a distinction between kleptomaniacs and thieves both on the basis of treating members of different classes differently and on the basis of choice whether or not to commit an act. Although Valmont has no sympathy for the thieves, she does call for due process and consumer rights in exposing an underhanded pact among stores to deal with kleptomania. According to her column, a list of known kleptomaniacs circulated through all the stores of Paris. If any inventory ever went missing in a shop, the owner would send a letter to

20 In some instances, the complete citation (date and number) for an issue of La Ultima Moda is not available because this information was obscured in the microfilming process.

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the husband of each woman on the list, demanding payment for the missing articles. Valmont claims that about a quarter of the husbands were so intimidated by the fear of scandal that they paid without further questions or protests. Of course, the stores engaging in this practice were guilty of exploiting persons who were possibly innocent. Even worse, the stores were actually making a profit off the very issue that was often turned against them in anti-consumerist writing.

MANUFACTURE Valmont does not only concern herself with fashion and merchandising. She tries to familiarize her readers with every aspect of the fashion industry and demonstrate how fashion is linked to every sector of the economy: agriculture, industry, and domestic labor. Para obtener las ricas plumas o las magníficas pieles con que aderezan sus trajes y sus abrigos, hay numerosos y desconocidos cazadores que en remotos países se exponen a riesgos que no siempre consiguen evitar. Para conseguir las relucientes sedas, las blandas lanas, los tules, los encajes que tan importante papel desempeñan en la ornamentación del traje femenino, hay infinitos seres que, en el campo unos, en las fábricas otros, en el hogar, consagrando a un asiduo trabajo horas y horas, realizan esos prodigios, como los oscuros e ignorados soldados que ganan las batallas para gloria de un general o una nación [...]. ¿No es justo siquiera alguna vez recordar a esos trabajadores silenciosos y modestos que al cumplir la ley de Dios, la hermosa y santa ley del trabajo, contribuyen a los esplendores de la civilización moderna, que tanto nos admiran? (26 de octubre, 1890, Año III, N.o 147) In order to obtain the rich feathers and magnificent furs with which [modistas-designers] embellish their suits and overcoats, there are legions of unknown hunters in remote countries who expose themselves to dangers that they are not always successful in avoiding. In order to obtain the shimmering silks, soft wools, tulles, and laces that play such an important role in the ornamentation of feminine dress, there are an infinite number of persons who, some in the fields, some in the factories or in the home, devoting hours and hours to assiduous work, create these miracles, like the obscure and unknown soldiers who win battles for the glory of some general or some nation [...]. Isn’t it just that we sometimes recall those silent and modest workers who, to comply with the law of God, the beautiful and holy law of labor, contribute to the splendors of modern civilization which we admire so much?

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Valmont represents labor as ennobling in both a practical and a moral sense. The workers are making a patriotic contribution to the national economy and to civilization. They may make sacrifices and experience hardships, but, in Valmont’s romanticized vision, they reap spiritual benefits. The garment industry was notoriously exploitative, and many reformers had harsh criticism for the «hideous contrast between the luxury of fashion and the suffering of those who helped make it possible» (Wilson 67). In Spain, as in other nations in Europe, intellectuals were investigating the sociology of working women. In 1883 Alejandro San Martín addressed a Commission for Social Reform with a detailed description of the different kinds of work open to women, along with the hazards and hardships of each job21. The situation of Spanish seamstresses was no better than those in France. They worked from dawn until dusk for a few pesetas. (Seamstresses stopped work at dusk because what they could earn sewing did not offset the cost of lamp oil). A part of their earnings, not even a living wage, sometimes had to be invested as a deposit on materials with each new order they were given. Valmont cannot ignore this criticism. Instead, she tries to address it in practical terms by making her readers aware of some of the problems in the industry, and suggesting activist steps that they might take as consumers. Women readers could particularly relate to the plight of seamstresses, and, like several other fashion journalists at the time, such as Dolors Monserdà in Barcelona, Valmont gives special attention to their problems22. During the first year of her column, Valmont promotes a fund that will help talented seamstresses set up their own shop. Such a fund will provide a possibility for career advancement rather than an endless grind of menial labor ending in exhaustion and starvation (N.o 44). Later on, Valmont relates the establishment of an aid society, La Aguja, which will provide assistance and find jobs for out-of-work seamstresses. It will also advocate with fashion houses to employ only seamstresses subscribing 21 Alejandro San Martín, «Trabajo de las mujeres», in Comisión de reformas sociales: Información oral y escrita, practicada en virtud de la Real Orden del 5 de diciembre de 1883 en Madrid. Mary Nash, Mujer, familia, y trabajo en España 1875-1936. 315-342. 22 Dolors Monserdà, a Catalan fashion journalist, wrote a novel, Maria Gloria, depicting the hardships of seamstress’ lives: the long hours, low wages, poor living conditions, illness and abuse.

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to the society. Lastly, it will organize exhibits of the seamstresses’ work, so that superior talent can be recognized and rewarded. Some fifteen years later Dolors Monserdà will help found a similar society in Barcelona, the Patronat per a les obreres de l’agulla, perhaps following examples reported by Valmont. The description of the society and its aims is curiously framed by the opening and closing lines of the column: Si en la esfera masculina el capital y el trabajo viven en continua y desdichada pugna, en la femenina sucede lo contrario. Las diferencias [entre modista y parroquiana] son nubes de verano; las riñas, riñas de enamorados. Se necesitan, se completan, y gozan, la modista al ver lucir su obra por la parroquiana, la parroquiana al otorgar a la modista la gloria y el bienestar que merece. ¿No significa esto la más completa reconciliación del capital y el trabajo en la esfera donde se agita el eterno y siempre bienhechor femenino? ¿No es este un buen ejemplo que deben imitar obreros y burgueses? (19 de junio de 1892, Año V, N.o 233) If in the masculine sphere capital and labor live in continuous and unhappy struggle, in the feminine sphere quite the contrary occurs. The differences between a dressmaker and her client are summer clouds; the quarrels are lovers’ quarrels. They need each other, they complete each other, and take pleasure in each other, the dressmaker, on seeing her work displayed by the client, the client in granting the dressmaker the glory and well-being she deserves. Doesn’t this signify the most complete reconciliation between capital and labor in the sphere in which moves the eternal and always generous feminine element? Is not this a good example which workers and bourgeois ought to imitate?

At the beginning of the article, Valmont personalizes and feminizes the struggle between capital and labor that takes place in the masculine capitalist sphere. Labor relations between women —a woman and her dressmaker, or the dressmaker and her seamstresses— are better described in the vocabulary of nature or family relations than in terms of economic struggle. In the closing lines, however, she re-politicizes her terms, claiming that the picture of feminine cooperation should be applied to the sphere of capital relations in order to reconcile worker and bourgeois.

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In the public perception, female garment workers had a reputation for dancing, drinking, and prostitution; several charitable societies were established for their material and moral rescue23. Valmont takes an interest in emphasizing other qualities in the workers. In a description of an aid society for feather workers she states: La preparación de las plumas del lofóforo, para servir de adorno a los trajes de recepción y de baile, exige que multitud de mujeres de verdadero gusto, y en posesión de no menos verdaderas manos de hada, dotadas además de una inmensa paciencia, vayan escogiendo y casando tonos y matices para producir los mágicos efectos que tanto admiran y fascinan. (7 de diciembre de 1890, Año III, N.o 153) The preparation of feathers of the Asian pheasant, so that they can be used to adorn ball gowns, demands a multitude of women of genuine taste, and possessed of no less genuine hands of fairies, besides being gifted with immense patience, who choose and combine tones and hues in order to produce the magical effects that are so enchanting.

These workers have extraordinary, even magical virtues to be able to accomplish the work that they do. It is no accident that these virtues are the same as those of the domestic angel: dexterity, patience, and taste. Valmont makes special mention of the organization’s sponsorship, which included Princess Elizabeth of Austria and the exiled Spanish queen Isabel II. Besides royalty, «las reinas y princesas de la banca y la industria» [queens and princesses of banks and industry] also contributed. The workers benefit from the strength of an organization that has prestigious and influential sponsors, and, as Valmont remarks, groups originally antagonistic towards each other, the traditional and modern aristocracies, are able to destroy «la muralla de hielo» [a wall of ice] in order to work together and learn mutual respect. Valmont is quite conscious of the fact that political and capitalist alliances between men are often dependent on the women being willing to socialize with each other. So, a network of mutual benefits between classes and social circles is made possible thanks to the fashion system.

23 On the public perceptions of working women and the attempts made to aid (or reform) them see Adela Núñez Orgaz, 439, and Mary Nash, Mujer, familia, y trabajo en España.

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Valmont establishes a tradition of using each May First column to recognize the garment workers and talk about class relations. She blames proletariat unrest on Baron Haussmann’s redesign of Parisian neighborhoods and its adoption in other cities. Spanish readers were themselves witnessing the re-making of Madrid and Barcelona with the construction of bourgeois neighborhoods such as Salamanca and the Eixample. The spatial separation between rich and poor leads to their spiritual separation (Clark 23-78). In one column, Valmont describes a golden age in which rich and poor families lived in proximity and were aware of the details of each other’s daily lives. Rich families helped the poor, and the poor were bound to the rich by gratitude and goodwill. In a city where the poor are relegated to the suburbs, the rich only see them as street beggars, and no mutual sympathy exists (N.o 123). The insistence on a breakdown of the paternalistic bond between rich and poor because of neighborhood reorganization is important to Valmont’s explanation of class alienation. She cannot blame the factory system and its exploitation of workers lest this reflect badly on the fashion industry. While Valmont asks her readers to remember the plight of garment workers and promotes various plans for practical aid, it is not in her interests to evoke a complete indictment of the fashion industry. Valmont uses rhetoric to represent the garment workers in a new light, not as downtrodden victims but as specialized artists. In one column, she creates an analogy between doctors and garment workers in terms of their increasing specialization and professional status (N.o 50). The housewife making her own dresses is like the country doctor, a general practitioner. In the city, there are many medical specialists; likewise there are specializations in dressmaking. In another column, Valmont represents all the branches of the economy that are linked to fashion and remarks on the elements of both science and art inherent in every type of work: Ya hemos rendido este tributo a las modistas; rindámosle ahora a los artistas, a los industriales y a los obreros que producen esas telas maravillosas, esos colores y esos matices que interpretan en la vida real los ensueños de la fantasía; esos adornos que parecen ideados y ejecutados por hadas. No sólo su trabajo, su ingenio, su inspiración crean esos tejidos admirables, que proporcionan a las señoras opulentas los medios de brillar, sino que, utilizando los modernos adelantos, la maquinaria sobre todo, y en particular los descubrimientos de la química, producen imitaciones relativamente baratas, que permiten a las de modesta fortuna realizar el ideal de la igualdad ante la elegancia y el buen gusto.

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THE LATEST STYLE Sin esas legiones de trabajadores que en los campos sufriendo las inclemencias, en las minas arrancando a las entrañas de la tierra sus tesoros, proporcionan las primeras materias; sin esos sabios mecánicos que han reemplazado con las fuerzas brutas de la naturaleza las fuerzas corporales, convirtiendo los brazos en cabezas y ensanchando la esfera de la inteligencia humana; sin esos operarios que pasan la vida enlas fábricas elaborando los tejidos y reproduciendo las inspiraciones de los artistas que hacen de las telas, por el dibujo y el color, verdaderas obras de arte; sin esas infinitas unidades que aportan cada cual su labor al conjunto, ni las modistas, por hábiles que fuesen, hallarían los medios de confeccionar los ricos trajes y los bellos adornos, ni las señoras, por millonarias que fueran, podrían aparecer en los salones ejerciendo esa soberana influencia que constituye su triunfo, su satisfacción, y su felicidad. (28 noviembre de 1888, Año I, N.o 47) We have paid homage to dressmakers, let us now acknowledge to the artists, industrialists, and workers who produce those marvelous fabrics, those colors and shades that interpret in real life the dreams of fantasy, those adornments that appear to be designed and executed by fairies. Not only their labor, their inventiveness, and their inspiration create those admirable textiles that provide opulent women with the means to shine, but, using modern advances, above all in machinery and chemistry, produce relatively inexpensive imitations, that permit women of modest means to realize the ideal of equality in terms of elegance and good taste. Without those legions of workers who, suffering inclement weather in the fields, extracting treasure from the bowels of the earth in the mines, provide the raw materials; without the learned mechanics who have replaced bodily strength with the brute forces of nature, converting arms into brains and widening the sphere of human intelligence; without those machinists who spend their lives in factories manufacturing textiles and reproducing the inspirations of the artists who create from fabric, through pattern and color, true works of art; without these infinite units, each of which brings its labor to the whole, the dressmakers, no matter how skilled, would not be able to create the rich dresses and beautiful adornments, nor would women, no matter how rich, be able to appear in the salons exercising that sovereign influence that constitutes their triumph, satisfaction and happiness.

The column above is one of several in which Valmont reminds her readers of all the components of the fashion industry. This column is special, however, because of the emphasis on the conversion of brute labor into cognitive and creative efforts. Science, engineering, human intelligence all combine for the satisfaction of the fashionable woman.

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La Moda es la primera que reconoce la importancia del trabajo intelectual, y la que más favorece la actividad y la inteligencia, haciendo sus inmediatos tributarios al buen gusto, al lujo, a la elegancia [...]. La imaginación que crea el sentimiento que embellece, el arte que maravilla, el primoroso trabajo que contribuye a esa admirable producción, que forma el más brillante cuadro social, hallan, gracias a la Moda, consideraciones y premio en las altas clases sociales. (11 de mayo de 1890, Año III, N.o 123) Fashion is the first to recognize the importance of intellectual work, and that which most favors activity and intelligence, making her first tributaries good taste, luxury and elegance [...]. The imagination which creates the feelings that beautify, the artistry that creates marvels, the skillful work that contributes to this admirable production, that creates the most brilliant social scene, find, thanks to Fashion, respect and reward from the highest social classes.

Valmont needs to strike a balance between consumer awareness of the conditions of production and consumer comfort with buying manufactured goods. Although she is a supporter of worker’s rights and consumer activism, she is always critical of large-scale proletariat agitation, such as the textile workers’ strikes in Barcelona. Moreover, it was not in the magazine’s interest to provoke a consumer boycott, not to mention a drop in subscriptions if the political sensibilities of the readers were offended. In her essay on post-1970’s fashion magazines, Leslie Rabine refers to the representation of «two female bodies». The body represented by the fashion photographs is «confident and free», but there is another, oppressed body of woman represented by the many feature articles on rape, women’s rights, salary inequities, etcetera (66). The contradiction that Rabine describes is also inherent in nineteenth century magazines that celebrated the liberating possibilities of fashion for all women side by side with reportage on the oppression of the garment workers. Valmont seeks to reconcile this contradiction by upgrading the representation of the garment worker. They are artists whose creations produce beauty and comfort in social and private life and, consequently, in the soul of each consumer. Moreover, reflection on the workers’ efforts must not produce feelings of aversion for or alienation from, the fashion system. In the aforementioned column describing the varied tasks of the garment workers (N.o 47), Valmont addresses herself to a woman of fashion gazing into her mirror and asks her to take a moment to thank

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the persons who make it all possible. This generous sentiment, an expression of moral beauty, will illuminate the face: Quedamos, pues, en que el complemento de los encantos que las galas de la Moda pueden ofrecer a una mujer, es la expresión de su rostro, y que la luz que el alma exhala por los ojos, irradia en la fisonomía y completa la belleza. (N.o 47) We can agree that the complement of the charms that the trappings of Fashion offer a woman, is the expression on her face, and that the light which emanates from the soul through her eyes, illuminates her features and completes her beauty.

In Valmont’s system, the products of Fashion bestow good taste and physical beauty, social success and a comfortable home life, all of which lead to moral beauty. The relationship between worker and consumer is not one of exploitation, but of symbiotic creativity and sympathy which enhance the well-being and sensibilities of both sides.

MAGAZINES Besides the manufacture and merchandising of fashion, Valmont also promotes the publicity apparatus, namely fashion magazines. In an early issue, Valmont discusses the evolution of the fashion magazine into a lifestyle publication. Early magazines, she claims, were very narrowly focused on reportage of styles. La Última Moda has a much broader mission, and Valmont enumerates eight principal areas in which the magazine hopes to excel: En mi concepto, y coincidiendo con las ideas del Director de esta Revista, el verdadero y útil periódico para las señoras debe aspirar a realizar los siguientes fines: 1) Ofrecer, por medio de variados dibujos y detalladas descripciones, el mayor número posible de modelos en trajes, en adornos, en labores, en mobiliario, etc. 2) Consignar todas las variaciones que se introduzcan en los usos, costumbres y ceremonias de la vida social. 3) Estudiar de una manera clara y práctica todas las cuestiones que se relacionan con los deberes y los derechos de la mujer en la familia y en la sociedad.

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4) Educar el sentimiento e ilustrar la inteligencia de la mujer, con el objeto de que pueda desempeñar digna y cumplidamente la misión afectiva y social que le están encomendadas. 5) Informar de todo cuanto pase en la esfera social, del movimiento artístico y literario en todos los países, para proporcionar esos conocimientos generales que facilitan y amenizan la conversación del trato social. 6) Divulgar las nociones de la higiene, de la que la mujer debe ser fiel y constante guardadora. 7) Acumular todos los conocimientos útiles, para formar con ellos una completa enciclopédia de lo más necesario a la vida práctica, en el hogar y en la sociedad. 8) Distraer el ánimo con lecturas agradables de la mayor moralidad, desarrollar los nobles sentimientos con las creaciones de la poesía y de la música, con los más bellos pensamientos de los grandes escritores, y divertir los ocios con juegos de imaginación o de cálculo. (30 de mayo de 1890, Año III, N.o 117) In my view, and in accord with the ideas of the director of this magazine, a really useful women’s magazine should aspire to the following goals: 1) To offer, by means of a variety of drawings and detailed descriptions, the greatest possible number of models of outfits, accessories, needlework, furnishings, etc. 2) To record all the new variations in the manners, customs, and rituals of social life. 3) To study in a clear and practical manner all questions related to the duties and rights of women, in both the family and society. 4) To educate the sentiment and instruct the intelligence of women, with the object that she may discharge with dignity the affective and social mission commended to her. 5) To report on everything that happens on the social scene, artistic and literary trends around the world, in order to supply the general knowledge that eases and enlivens conversation. 6) To spread the rudiments of hygiene, to which women must strictly and faithfully adhere. 7) To gather together all useful knowledge with which to compile a complete encyclopedia of the essentials of practical life, in the home and in society. 8) To distract the spirit with enjoyable reading of the highest moral tone, to develop the noble sentiments with the creations of poetry and music, with the most beautiful thoughts of the great writers, and to fill leisure moments with pastimes and brainteasers.

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It may be noted that only the first point is directly related to fashion. The other points, relating to sentimental and intellectual formation, public and domestic interests, all derive from the practice of fashion. The magazine facilitates women’s participation in a social system. The content of the magazine is meant not only to be informative, but also to act as an equalizing force. Ensanchar la esfera del buen gusto; llevar el conocimiento y el culto de la belleza a todas las clases sociales; demostrar que el arte puede valer tanto (y a veces más) como la riqueza; extender las nociones de la cultura, de la educación, patrimonio de reducidos y privilegiados círculos a la masa general: éste fue el móvil que dió origen a esta Revista, que en el corto espacio de dos años ha llegado a contar muchos miles de asiduas suscritoras, reuniendo en el campo neutral de la elegancia y el buen gusto a todas las clases sociales, desde las más distinguidas hasta las más humildes [...]. (29 de diciembre de 1889, Año II, N.o 104) To broaden the sphere of good taste, to carry the knowledge and worship of beauty to all social classes, to demonstrate that artfulness can be worth as much (and sometimes more) than wealth, to extend the ideas of culture and education, the patrimony of limited and privileged circles to the general public: this was the founding motive of the magazine, that in the short space of two years has reached many thousands of eager subscribers, bringing together all the social classes on the neutral ground of elegance and good taste, from the most distinguished to the most humble [...].

In Desire and Domestic Fiction, Nancy Armstrong asserts that domestic ideology functions as unifying force in a society that might otherwise be divided along lines of class or political affiliation (4-5, 9, 48). This is precisely the claim that Valmont makes for fashion. Fashion magazines have a special role in disseminating information to a great number of people over a large geographic area. Thanks to magazines, there is no longer a striking difference between modes of cosmopolitan and provincial dress. The magazines also make fashion accessible to women of all socioeconomic classes. Each issue includes dozens of detailed drawings, patterns, and instructions so that women unable to shop in Paris or hire dressmakers can reproduce the clothes themselves in their own home. Since the prices of these magazines have steadily dropped, in spite of the increasing number of illustrations, there is greater circulation among the middle classes than ever before. Besides the fashion

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content of the magazines, which helps to establish norms in middleclass dress, the sections devoted to manners and lifestyle are also meant to inform as many persons as possible of the «social norms of polite modernity» (Mackie 18). In another column, Valmont addresses the role of the magazine in readers’ private lives. It is not just an informant on fashion, or simply a publicity apparatus for designers; it is also a friend. [...] es del agrado de numerosas lectoras, y particularmente de las que no solo consideran el periódico como mentor y consejero de cuanto con la Moda se relaciona, sino también como amigo agradable y leal, que las visita todas las semanas deseoso de entretener sus ocios, de distraer su ánimo, de aumentar su ilustración y ante todo y sobre todo de estimularlas a examinar y conocer a fondo las cualidades de su espíritu, que son las que producen la belleza moral. (26 de diciembre de 1897, Año X, N.o 521) [...] it pleases many readers, particularly those who not only consider the paper a mentor and advisor in terms of everything related to fashion, but also an agreeable and loyal friend, who visits them each week, desirous of brightening their leisure, distracting their spirit, adding to their learning, and, first and foremost, stimulating them to examine thoroughly and know the qualities of their spirit, which are those which produce moral beauty.

Valmont often criticizes early fashion magazines for their authoritarian stance, for dictating what women must wear or should think. The supposed shift in the voice of the magazine from advisor to friend is consistent with Valmont’s insistence that commitment to fashion trains the intelligence and the spirit. [La lectora] Goza, y así debe ser, de la más amplia libertad; tiene a su disposición todos los elementos necesarios para formar su carácter, para adquirir la indispensable ilustración, para componer su adorno, para arreglar su casa. Por eso es responsable de sus actos [...] (10 de agosto de 1890, Año III, N.o 136) [The reader] enjoys, as she should, the broadest liberty: she has at her disposition all the elements necessary to form her character, to acquire an indispensable education, to fit herself out, and arrange her home. Consequently, she is responsible for her actions [...]

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Through fashion, women cultivate the qualities that lead to reflection, informed choice and action. The fashion editor helps her as a friend, but is not a Pied Piper leading women to mindless, frivolous consumption. Valmont often comments with pride on the fact that the political dailies, usually aimed at a masculine readership, now include fashion commentary in their columns. This inclusion of fashion into political papers is evidence of its legitimacy and growing social importance24. But on one occasion, that of the tariff war between France and Spain in 1892, the role of fashion in political life caused no small problem for Valmont. Cadalso referred to the problem of trade imbalance in the latter part of the eighteenth century when he commented that persons valued and bought foreign goods more than local ones (181). In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Galdós is still referring to trade imbalance in his novels, in which women cross the border to buy clothes and then invent various ways to get their purchases past the customs officials. Notwithstanding the occasional critics, during the Restoration era both liberals and conservatives generally favored free trade. However, by 1891 Premier Antonio Cánovas del Castillo gradually introduced protectionist tariffs (Labanyi 49). In practical terms, the 1892 tariff wars will limit exports and sales from France to Spain, thus being problematic for Valmont in her role as a promoter of French goods. But she also has to worry about reader goodwill. After all, she is promoting «enemy goods» to a readership that may perceive themselves as victims of French politicians. In a column addressing the issue, she opens on an intimate, domestic note as the best possible diplomatic gesture. France and Spain are really like affectionate friends: Figúrense mis lectoras, dos amigas que se profesan acendrado cariño, que a fuerza de estimarse y de comprender que mútuamente se necesitan, han llegado a identificarse de tal modo que sus ideas, sus sentimientos, sus esperanzas, sus deseos, su vida entera son una misma cosa; y figúrense también que de pronto sus padres o sus esposos, por causas a las que son completamente agenas, se malquistan, riñen y las obligan a cesar en el trato que tanta dicha les ofrece. (14 de febrero de 1892, Año V, N.o 215)

24 Of course, this assertion recognizes a paradox in her claim that fashion fosters independent thinking in its adherents, because such adherents are gaining membership into a growing system that is regulated by norms and standards. They are being assimilated into a social group that influences public life. Mackie, 19.

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Let my readers imagine two friends that profess pure devotion, that in view of mutual esteem and a recognition of mutual need, have reached such a degree of identification that their ideas, feelings, hopes, and desires —their whole lives are one and the same; then imagine that all of a sudden, their parents or their husbands, for reasons that have nothing to do with the friends themselves, have a falling out, argue and force the friends to suspend their happy relations [...]

Such is the situation between France and Spain. The two countries, represented as young women, would get along happily were it not for the interference of patriarchal authority. Valmont states that «Nosotras, que por instinto poseemos el arte de la economía doméstica, desconocemos en absoluto lo que llaman los políticos ciencia económica [...]». [We women, who possess the art of domestic economy by instinct, are completely ignorant of what politicians call economic science [...]]. Although she professes academic ignorance of economics on the part of women, she goes on to imply that their instinctual knowledge is actually superior to that of men. Men are only trying to help and must be forgiven any error they make in the course of defending national interests. It is up to women to «dulcificar las amarguras, de suavizar las asperezas, de calmar los furores...» [sweeten the bitterness, smooth the roughness, calm the rages...] (N.o 215). The overall effect of the embargo, Valmont believes, will be nil. Some economic sectors in both countries will benefit, and some will suffer. In any event, fashion can survive the conflict and even rise above it. Desde el punto de vista de la Moda, la paz no se ha alterado ni se alterará nunca. La Moda, que como he dicho tantas veces, es la manifestación social del arte, no halla jamás fronteras que se opongan a su paso, ni las aduanas pueden influir e n su vida de espíritu, y por tanto, se escapa de todas las fórmulas y preceptos oficinescos... La Moda, pues, no tiene nada que ver con la industria y el comercio; en vez de favorecer el privilegio desea destruirlo y ensanchar la esfera de su acción cosmopólita. Crea una forma artística y deja a todos los países en libertad de interpretarla. Impone una tela, pero no exige que se fabrique en una sóla nación. Por el contrario, desea que en todas se acate su buen gusto, desea también que todos se enriquezcan, porque así es mayor el número de sus adeptos. (N.o 215)

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THE LATEST STYLE From the point of view of fashion, the peace can never be broken. Fashion, as I have said many times, is the social manifestation of art. There are no frontiers that can oppose its entry, and so, it is beyond all bureaucratic precepts and formulas.... Fashion has nothing to do with industry and commerce; instead of upholding privilege, it desires to destroy it and broaden the sphere of its cosmopolitan influence. It gives birth to an art form and leaves all countries free to interpret it. It stipulates a fabric, but doesn’t demand that it be produced in a particular country. On the contrary, it desires that all observe good taste, that all enjoy prosperity because in this way it gains devotees.

Valmont contradicts her usual position in stating that fashion has nothing to do with industry and economy. Previously, she has promoted fashion on the grounds of its importance to growth and progress. What she wants to emphasize here is that fashion has a borderless economy, above specific local or national interests, and that it transcends political differences. While insisting that fashion is a universal value and does not need to be manufactured in any particular country, Valmont assures her readers that fashion magazines become even more important in the face of the embargo. Goods cannot cross the border, but periodicals and drawings can. All well and good that now Spanish textile factories will be weaving the cloth, and Spanish dressmakers will be making the clothes. Valmont appeals to her readers by insisting that Spanish manufacturing and interpretation of fashion is not inferior in any way. But her position at the source of French fashion is still important, because she can circulate ideas and patterns where actual goods cannot pass. ...yo con el auxilio de los que colaboran en nuestra querida revista, procuraré ser solícita mensajera entre las dos amigas separadas materialmente, pero unidas siempre por el más acendrado y desinteresado afecto, que desean su respectiva prosperidad, y que además saben de sobra que su separación no puede durar mucho. (N.o 215) ...I will aid our collaborators as a helpful messenger between the two friends, physically separated, but united by the most pure and disinterested affection, who desire prosperity for each other and who know that their separation cannot last.

What Valmont implies is that fashion is French, and it is lucky that French designs can still circulate as patterns on which to base local

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manufacture. The underlying logic of the claim for the importance of La Última Moda in keeping lines of communication open is that Spain has to have a way of learning about French fashion. Referring once again to the two friends, the continued circulation of ideas is presented as a feminine strategy that will circumvent the constraints of the authorities and provide the basis for an eventual reconciliation. In her promotion of the different elements of the fashion industry, Valmont attempts to silence the criticism that fashion is exploitative and frivolous. She constructs associations between fashion, technology, political economy, and moral cultivation. The testimony of her success is that politicians and intellectuals are now willing to concede the importance of fashion. Although Valmont accepts male interest as a legitimizing credential for fashion, she asserts that fashion is actually above male policy making. Any imbalances or injustices are best left to feminine modes of problem solving (N.o 215).

CHAPTER TWO THE TENETS OF PRO-FASHION DISCOURSE FASHION AND THE CIVILIZING PROCESS While department store displays tried to imitate the decor of the Orient in order to imbue the goods with a sense of romance, adventure, and sensuality, Valmont has a different rhetorical purpose in her references to Asia and the Middle East25. Si el traje y el adorno femeniles fueran pura y simplemente una satisfacción de la vanidad, tendrían razón los que pretenden que estos inmensos bazares son la tentación de los tiempos actuales, pero como son una necesidad social, se equivocan de medio a medio. Que se fijen los que no opinan como yo en los países, o mejor dicho, en la parte de los países en los que la Moda no refleja ninguno de sus fecundos rayos. No encontrarán más que el atraso con todas sus consecuencias; la vida intelectual sometida a la vida animal. Países enteros hay también en los que la Moda no ejerece su benéfica influencia: Turquía, por ejemplo, y basta recordar cómo se vive en esa populosa, pero incivil nación, para volver los ojos con horror y con asco. En cambio en Europa y América la inteligencia, el sentimiento, aparece en su más amplio desarrollo; la civilización sonríe, deslumbra y encanta. (19 de marzo de 1888, Año I, N.o 11)

25

On exoticism in department stores, see Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds, 66-78.

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THE LATEST STYLE If clothing and accessories were purely and simply a satisfaction of vanity, those who believe that the large stores are the temptation of modern times would be right, but as [fashion] is a social necessity, they are completely wrong. Let those who don’t believe me look in those countries, or in the areas of those countries, in which Fashion doesn’t shine her fruitful light. They will find only backwardness with all its consequences; intellectual life subsumed by animal impulses. There are also entire countries in which Fashion does not exercise its beneficial influence: Turkey, for example, and it’s enough to ponder how people live in this populous but uncivilized nation to turn away in horror and revulsion. On the other hand, in Europe and America intelligence and sentiment are present in their most developed state; civilization smiles, dazzles and enchants.

Valmont cites Turkey as a nation without fashion and consequently, without civilization, presumably because of the institution of the veil26. According to her information, women all look the same, fully and uniformly covered, at least when they venture out. But if the Orient lacks fashion and civilization, how does Valmont account for the exotic imported goods that are filling the stores? How can she explain the European taste for Asian and Middle Eastern goods, which can be seen as an attempt to «buy into» the imagined attractions of the East? Valmont must concede that beautiful, luxurious clothing is bought and sold in the Orient, and that the women are celebrated for their beauty, enhanced by clothing. The crucial difference between East and West, as Valmont sees it, is female agency. In Europe and America, fashion is a vehicle for women’s public life, the public display of taste and exchange of ideas, which both responds to and provides a catalyst for art, commerce, and industry —therefore, civilization. The difference in the East is that a woman’s life is not public in the same ways. Bazaars are bursting with rich clothing, but the streets are deserted. Women purchase their clothing from behind the wall of the harem rather than in the public forum of the department store. Their clothing is worn in privacy, for their 26 In the National Textile Museum in Istanbul, a display on the nineteenth century shows Turkish women in a parlor in Victorian dress reading fashion magazines. Although the veil might have been required in public, in the upper classes there was apparently an enthusiasm for Western fashion. Ten years later, Valmont has apparently changed her mind about Turkey. She prints the reflections of a representative of the Young Turks, Amed Riza-bey, in favor of feminism (N.o 492).

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husbands only. This is no comparison to the active public role that Western women exercise through their participation in the fashion system (N.o 242). For Valmont, there is a difference between adornment and fashion. Adornment may be simply private, self-indulgent luxury. Fashion, however, is something practiced within a matrix of public relationships; it gives women a place in public life. For example, Valmont rejects the visiting King of Siam’s pretensions to fashion on the basis of the oppressed status of women in that country (N.o 509), since he has not renounced the harem, he cannot make a true claim to be fashionable27. Valmont writes from the point of view of the industrial bourgeoisie, believing in the unidirectional movement of industrialized and democratic nations towards progress28. She presumes a linear development of fashion and civilization (both moral and material) culminating in Western Europe29. Valmont would agree with Norbert Elias that «Consumption fosters civilization —an overarching ideal that simultaneously includes the nurture of art, science, and learning in society at large and the development of courteous, restrained behavior in the individual»30. Valmont often reports on fashion developments and life-style trends in other countries, often judging these countries in terms of the degree to which Western fashion has penetrated the culture. For example, in the case of Meiji Japan she observes31: No hay más que observar lo que hoy sucede en el Japón, ese pueblo que aspira a ser una potencia importante [...]. Lo primero que ha hecho para realizar estos progresos, es renunciar al traje tradicional y adoptar no sólo los usos y costumbres de la Europa culta, sino las modas, hasta el punto de haber impuesto la emperatriz a todas las japonesas el uso del corsé, desconocido en aquel característico país.

27 This is the Chulalonhkorn educated by Anna Harriette Leonowens of Anna and the King of Siam fame. 28 On this conception of history see Elias, The History of Manners, 235-236. 29 This historicizing discourse was in fact not new. Diane Owen Hughes shows that Cesare Vecellio used the same scheme of historical progress towards civilized fashion in his costume book, Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo, in the sixteenth century. «Fashioning a World: Costume and Identity in Renaissance Venice». Work in progress. 30 Quoted in Williams, 23. 31 According to Liza Dalby’s Kimono, during the Meiji era there was a fascination for the S-shape of the body given by the corset, but women never set aside the kimono.

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THE LATEST STYLE En este orden de ideas, podría ofrecer a la consideración de mis lectoras gran número de datos para demostrar que la Moda es el gran agente de la cultura y, por tanto, de la civilización de los pueblos. (10 de octubre de 1897, Año X, N.o 510) We have only to look at what is happening today in Japan, this nation that aspires to be an important power [...]. The first thing it has done to attain progress is to renounce traditional garb and adopt not only the manners and customs of civilized Europe, but also its fashions, to which end the Empress has declared that Japanese women should adopt the corset, unknown until now in this traditional country. In the same order of ideas, I could offer my readers a great many examples that demonstrate that Fashion is the great agent of culture and, consequently, of the civilization of nations.

In addition to acting as an agent of culture, fashion also promotes democratic values. To this day, critics accuse that fashion «dictates», that women are forced to buy what designers produce, no matter how ridiculous or impractical. Valmont insists that this was only true for former generations. In times past, before the advent of department stores or fashion magazines, women were confined to a few styles. In her own time, however, Valmont claims that the proliferation of products and images encourages reflection and choice. She sometimes grafts political rhetoric onto her writing in order to establish a relationship between the evolution of a democratic society and the evolution of the fashion system. Nunca ha sido tirana, y mucho menos en estos tiempos en los que ya no están de moda los tiranos. Deja en completa libertad al buen gusto y a la discreción para que con los múltiples elementos que generosa pone al alcance de todas sus adeptas creen la elegancia, un tanto constitucional, aunque podría ser absoluta y despótica reina, pero no gobierna [...]. (16 de julio de 1888, Año I, N.o 28) She has never been a tyrant, and much less in these times when tyrants are no longer the fashion. She leaves good taste and discretion in complete liberty so that with the many elements she generously puts within the reach of her followers, they may create elegance. She is a constitutional [mo narch], although she could be an absolute and despotic queen, but she doesn’t control [...].

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Valmont often asserts that Fashion has «democratized» society. By this she means not only that fashion is accessible to greater numbers of people, but that the balance of power has shifted. The public now «elects» the styles rather than being subject to the directives of the industry32. Modern fashion and politics mirror each other. In fact, they may have influenced and formed each other since they both depend on populations having been gradually trained to evaluate and choose.

FASHION AND CLASS A great deal of the criticism leveled against fashion, shopping, and consumer values in general rested on ideas about socioeconomic class. Many persons viewed class as «a barrier [...] by which the fashionable world seeks to segregate itself from the middle region of society» (Benjamin 74). The nineteenth century was marked by a struggle as to who had the right to claim bourgeois status, and some persons made this claim through fashion. Certain clothing marked their status, and anyone who could only sport cheap imitations was merely vulgar33. As readymade clothes improved in quality and became more widely available, anxiety about the possibility of disguise and class impersonation increased (Clark 49). Critics also worried about the issue of overspending and its destabilizing effect on the family. This destabilization showed its effect not only on the family budget, but, as some contested, on family morality as well34. The loss of money or of respectability could mean the terrible loss of social position. As a popular fashion journalist, Valmont has to answer these concerns and develop a viable discourse of class and accessibility to fashion. In order to appeal to a broad base of subscribers, she must avoid writing about fashion in terms of exclusivity. It must be defined as a system in which everyone can participate.

32 That is to say, she would not be in agreement with theorists from Rousseau to Baudrillard who believe that consumption is driven by the tyrannical and manipulative force of production. 33 I am paraphrasing T.J. Clark, substituting the category of fashion for his category of access to nature as a distinguishing mark between upper and lower bourgeois, 155-156. 34 For more on feminine morality and spending see Andreu, 17-28; Aldaraca, 88-117; Jagoe, 85-95.

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THE LATEST STYLE [...] en Francia y en otros muchos países, los adelantos modernos han permitido que lo que antes era exclusivo privilegio de una sola clase, lo sea de todas. ¿Por qué no ha de tener derecho a engalanarse, a agradar, la que carece de fortuna, si tiene inspiración y habilidad para convertir la humilde tela, la pobre cinta, en artístico traje o en adorno de delicado gusto? En el Imperio de la Moda sucede lo que en todos los Imperios modernos. ¡Ya no hay castas! Así como cada soldado puede llegar a General, y el oscuro hijo del labrador conquistar el puesto de Ministro, la mujer de más humilde cuna puede aspirar a llegar a las mayores alturas en la escala social, si tiene en su alma los elementos necesarios [...]. (28 de mayo de 1888, Año I, N.o 21) [...] in France, and many other countries, modern advances have allowed that whatever was once the exclusive privilege of one class now belongs to many. Why shouldn’t a woman lacking a fortune have the right to adorn herself, to be pleasing, if she has the inspiration and ability to convert humble cloth or second-rate ribbon into an artful ensemble or a fine trimming? In the Empire of Fashion things are the same as in all other modern empires. There are no more castes! Just as every soldier can reach the rank of General, and the obscure son of a laborer can win the seat of a Minister, the woman of most humble birth can hope to attain the highest social status, if she has within her soul all the necessary elements [...].

For Valmont, social mobility is something to be applauded, and she equates the social advancement that women can attain through fashion with the gains in power that men might attain in the political sphere. But it is to be noted that if proper dress allows a woman a certain place in society, the dress is in fact secondary. In the same way that military commissions and parliamentary seats can now be earned through work and merit rather than merely purchased, items of rich clothing by themselves are not enough to gain entry into a select circle. «Elements of the soul», namely, powers of observation and creativity are what really allow women to improve their social status. In column after column Valmont insists that fashion is an activity open to everyone. Indeed, it is the duty of every woman, but, she ceaselessly stresses, always within the means of each individual (N.o 11). Yet if each person consumes only within his or her financial limits, then how can he or she become upwardly mobile, assuming that mobility entails possession of the goods and standards of the circle to which one wants to rise?

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Respondiendo a esta transformación que lentamente ha venido operándose en nuestra indumentaria, las telas se han abaratado considerablemente, y hasta para mayor desahogo, las imitaciones se hacen tan bien que se confunden con sus originales y se venden a precios realmente inverosímiles. Además, la pedrería, las plumas, los encajes y cuanto constituye el adorno de una dama, se falsifican de tal manera que sólo despues de una larga y minuciosa comprobación, puede distinguirse lo que es legítimo de lo que no lo es. Esta clase de industrias, que merecen por lo ingeniosas el aplauso de la clase media, a quien vienen a colocar, siquiera sea en la apariencia nada más, al nivel de las clases altas, permite que, no ya en cuestiones meramente de buen gusto, sino en cuestiones de ostentación, puedan los que disfrutan de una situación nada más que desahogada figurar, sin desdoro y a veces con ventaja, entre los poderosos. (26 de septiembre de 1897, Año X, N.o 508) In response to the transformation that has been slowly occurring in our dress, fabrics have become considerably cheaper, and, for greater [financial] ease, imitations are so well-made that they can be taken for originals, and they are sold at unbelievably [cheap] prices. Moreover, gemstones, feathers, laces, and every other element of feminine attire can be manufactured so convincingly that only on long, minute examination can one tell which is genuine and which isn’t. This type of industry merits, for its inventiveness, the applause of the middle class, which it places, at least in terms of appearance, on the level of the upper classes, permitting that, not only in terms of good taste but also in terms of display, those who are merely comfortable can take their place among the powerful without dishonor and, sometimes, to advantage.

Synthetic imitations have made fashion cheap and accessible. If the difference between the genuine and the artificial is no longer discernible, this can only work to the advantage of persons who want to advance beyond their origins. Thanks to the development of technologies and markets that make «knock-offs» available, persons of limited income do not necessarily have to spend beyond their means to acquire the visible credentials for membership in public, bourgeois society. What Valmont does not mention is that upper class women did claim to recognize these cheap imitations, and that a vocabulary had developed to describe women who attempted to «pass»: the vocabulary of cursilería or pretentiousness35.

35 For a more thorough and nuanced definition of cursilería, see Noël Valis, The Culture of Cursilería.

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Valmont writes her columns within the context of a debate on consumption taking place in French political and economic journals at the end of the century. In August of 1888, a few months before the first issue of La Última Moda, the first debates on luxury took place at the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. Valmont may have read the opinions of Georges D’Avenel, Henri Baudrillart, and Paul Leroy-Beaulieu and popularized them for a feminine Spanish audience. These three economists and historians of consumption applauded modern technology for making available to a vast number of people luxuries that were once the prerogative of aristocrats.36 Paul Leroy-Beaulieu in particular, not only distinguishes between healthy and unhealthy luxury, but also historicizes patterns of consumption. Primitive and decadent luxury, typical of medieval and pre-modern court societies, is defined by ostentatious consumption beyond any «normal physical or intellectual needs» (Williams 228). In contrast, contemporary luxury is healthy because it is domestic in nature and «productive economically because it stimulates manufacture instead of wasting human and natural resources» (Williams 228-229). Like Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, Valmont also divides consumerism into healthy and unhealthy behaviors, and she needs to define the limits of these terms for each class. Claro es que todo en el mundo debe encerrarse en justos y prudentes límites, y el lujo no debe degenerar en extravagante derroche ni en desordenado derramamiento de riqueza. La que no pueda llevar lujo debe abstenerse de aparentar lo que sus facultades no le permiten sostener; pero, en cambio, la que afortunadamente esté en situación de vivir, no ya con desahogo sino con opulencia, es conveniente que revele, en todos los detalles de su vida, que es merecedora de la riqueza que posee, y, en vez de estancarla y de ir atesorando sin fruto para nadie, repartir una buena porción de ella entre los millares de obreros consagrados a las artes y a las industrias suntuarias, cuyo rápido progreso y cuya extraordinaria multiplicidad causa de día en día mayor asombro. (13 de noviembre de 1898, Año XI, N.o 567) It’s clear that everything in the world must be confined within just and prudent limits, and that luxury shouldn’t degenerate into extravagant waste or an uncontrolled hemorrhage of money.

36 See Williams on D’Avenel, 94-99, on French economic thought and the debate on luxury, 217-233.

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She who is not able to wear finery should abstain from affecting that which her [financial] powers cannot sustain. On the other hand, she who is able to live in a style not just of comfort but of opulence should reveal, in all the details of her life, that she deserves the wealth that she has and rather than stopping up its flow or hoarding it so that it benefits no one, must distribute a good portion among the millions of workers devoted to the sumptuary arts and industries, whose rapid development and extraordinary multiplicity are more amazing every day.

For the wealthy woman, one mode of bad consumption is unbridled waste. In her warnings against this mode, Valmont sometimes sounds like the anti-consumerist propagandists whose position she is trying to refute: Hay en París y en otras capitales de Europa, aunque en más reducido número, señoras que todo lo sacrifican al fausto, a la ostentación, a una especie de delirio, que haciendo del capricho, de la fantasía y con más frecuencia de la vanidad una necesidad absorbente, despótica, insaciable, se condenan al mas doloroso de los martirios que puede sufrir una mujer [...]. Dominadas por una verdadera locura, el deseo de brillar, de eclipsar a las demás, de figurar en primera línea, mata en su corazón los hermosos sentimientos que contribuyen a la felicidad propia y a la ajena [...]. (N.o 567) There are in Paris and in other capitals of Europe, although in fewer numbers, women who sacrifice everything to splendor, to ostentation, to a kind of delirium that makes out of caprice, fantasy, and, more and more often, out of vanity an all absorbing, despotic, insatiable necessity. [Such women] are condemned to the most painful martyrdoms that a woman can suffer [...]. Dominated by genuine insanity, the desire to shine, to eclipse everyone else, to be of the first order, kills within their hearts the gentle feelings which make their own happiness and those of others [...].

In this excerpt, Valmont represents spending much as do consumer critics of the time, in the language of madness, a kind of addiction or hysteria. The motivation is self-absorbed vanity. The wealthy woman must reject the traditional aristocratic model of wasteful consumption in pursuit of arbitrary, nonsensical fashions37. On the other hand, she must not stop up the

37 See Armstrong’s analysis of the shift in attitude towards the female aristocrat, 20, 66, and Mackie’s remarks on frivolous fashion, 62-63.

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flow of money38. In fact, the wealthy have a responsibility to consume; they must do their duty by industry for the good of national prosperity. Valmont rejects the notion of hoarding and encourages consumption as a stimulus to the economy. Fashion, home decoration, and entertainments are the duty of the rich, especially when the economy is in recession (Aldaraca 95). Their consumption is conceived not as a line of demarcation between classes, but rather as an act of brotherly feeling, so that workers may keep their employment and their wages. In «La mujer española» (1890) Emilia Pardo Bazán is also writing a defense of the aristocratic lifestyle, but Valmont goes further in tying the spending of this class to the fashion industry and national economy39. For example, in an early column Valmont chastises the Economic League of German Women for their fashion boycott of 1890. This group of rich women, under the sponsorship of their Empress, had decided to eschew fashion in favor of modest dress in order to express solidarity with impoverished workers during a recession. Valmont sees this as a disastrous policy, a result of misguided sentiment. The slowdown in consumption and production that the adoption of plain dress will cause will only exacerbate the problem (N.o 113). Instead of a general renunciation of fashion, Valmont encourages the German women to pledge to consume only national products to stimulate domestic industry and to restore the balance of trade. She asserts that consumption is a much better way to help the poor than charity. The palaces, adornments and amusements of the rich are not merely vain and self-serving. Vanity and desire have their place in the service of others; as the rich fulfill their impulse for aggrandizement, they are also fulfilling a duty because their consumption provides employment for the poor. Gastar más de lo que se tiene, es un error de dolorosas consecuencias. No gastar lo que se puede, y, por tanto, debe gastarse en facilitar el trabajo, en desarrollar la industria, en fomentar las ciencias y las artes, y en proporcionar elementos de vida al comercio, es otro error más funesto aún

38 Saccard L’argent, Donoso in Torquemada en la cruz, Bernat in Febre d’or, Milagros in La de Bringas, in fiction all refer to the hoarding of money as damaging to the economy. Money must circulate through consumption or speculation. Even though there may be individual tragedies, such as a huge loss on the stock market, the fact that money has changed hands and in so doing has stimulated industry, is to be seen as a positive value. 39 See Pardo Bazán, «La mujer española» II, 7.

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que el que anteriormente he señalado; porque el primero afecta a un individuo o a una familia, y el segundo a la sociedad en general. No hay que olvidarlo, alucinados por el sentimentalismo, la alegría y el lujo de los ricos es el pan y la tranquilidad de espíritu de los pobres. (2 de marzo de 1890, Año III, N.o 113) To spend more than what one has is an error of the most painful consequences. To not spend what one can, and therefore should be spent in order to provide work, to develop industry, to foment the sciences and arts and to furnish the elements of life to commerce, is another error more fatal than the first, because the first affects an individual or a family, but the second affects society in general. We must not forget, [our judgment] clouded by sentiment, that the happiness and luxury of the rich is the bread and peace of mind of the poor.

According to Valmont’s logic, it is a slowdown in consumption rather than conspicuous or ostentatious consumption that leads to class resentment and revolutions. She is a firm believer in «trickle down theory» the model by which money put into the economy by the wealthy provides industrial development, jobs, and more discretionary income for the lower classes40. She distinguishes between envy and a healthy desire on the part of the less fortunate to emulate consumption patterns of the more prosperous. In her reconstruction of a «good» upper-class model for consumption, Valmont creates an ethic of social responsibility, consumption that feeds production rather than being merely wasteful. Can this «reformed» group of elite consumers ever fall into excess, and, if so, how might that excess be defined? One danger is that of believing that wealth is a reliable, boundless resource. In a column on the Panama Canal fiasco and the ruin of Lesseps, Valmont comments on the transient nature of money gained by speculation. It is the wife’s responsibility to encourage a speculator to be cautious with his wealth because it is undependable (4 de Diciembre de 1892, Año V, N.o 257). And, of course, women themselves must not lose track of what they are spending by overuse of the credit system. In one instance, Valmont publishes interviews with designers who defend themselves against accusations that they urge women to overspend:

40 See McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society for more on consumption and the trickle-down theory.

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THE LATEST STYLE No falta quien nos calumnie, atribuyéndonos el papel de serpientes tentadores. Pero sucede todo lo contrario. Más bien está en nuestro interés contenerlas que excitarlas a la prodigalidad. (7 de mayo de 1893, Año VI, N.o 279) There’s never a loss of people who slander us, putting us in the role of tempting serpents. But it’s just the opposite. It’s more in our interest to restrain [women clients] than to excite them to spend freely.

The unnamed designer laments that every day he must refuse credit to a client, and she responds first with disbelief, then with attempts to charm him, then with anger at being forced to recognize the limits of her funds41. Another aspect of excess might be characterized as a kind of competitive consumption: Pero hay muchas personas que necesitan ir siempre más allá. ¿Los relojes se abaratan y pueden usarlos todas las clases sociales? Pues fuera los relojes hasta que, por ejemplo, se invente uno que cueste un dineral y no pueda poseerlo más que una millonaria. Todo se andará. Vivimos en una época en la que pueden realizarse los más fantásticos caprichos y el más, más nos domina. La monotonía es el enemigo más temible [...]. Hay quien envidia a los que viven entregados a esta continua orgía de novedad, de lujo, de diversiones. Créanme mis lectoras: más que de envidia, son dignos de compasión. Tienen cuanto desean, y ya no saben qué desear. (6 de agosto de 1888, Año I, N.o 31) But there are many people who always need to go too far. Have watches become cheaper, and can all the social classes now use them? Then out with watches until, for example, one is invented that costs a mint and that only a millionairess can have. All this will pass. We live in a time in which the most fantastic caprices can be realized and the call of «more, more» enthralls us. Monotony is the enemy most to be feared [...]. There are those who envy the people who live in the power of this continuous orgy of novelty, of luxury, of diversions. Believe me, readers: rather than being the object of envy, these persons are to be pitied. They have everything they want, and they don’t know what more to desire.

41

debt.

See Rappaport, «A Husband and His Wife’s Dresses» for more on women and

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Clearly, Valmont advocates a certain standard of moderation. This standard might be judged best by the motivation of the consumption rather than the measure of the things consumed. Over and over again, Valmont encourages her wealthy readers to consume goods and services, to give banquets and parties, to travel to resorts, all in the service of the economy. But she disapproves of exclusivist consumption, that motivated by the desire to have something no one else can possess. The aforementioned column also puts forth the problematic of desire. The rich may well be able to buy everything they see, but Valmont worries that this may lead to the malady of not knowing what more to desire. This leads either to the wasteful, elitist consumption that she describes or, perhaps worse, to a kind of consumer overload or fatigue. The end of desire would mean the end of prosperity. In the light of this reasoning, Valmont insists that the domestic woman of limited means is better off. Anti-consumerist writers insist on this point also, but they expect that such a woman will have a limited impulse to consume. In contrast, Valmont reasons that this woman is more fortunate because she can still feel the prick of desire, and those unsatisfied desires continue to be stimulating, both to her own spirit and to the economy. [...] y aunque no se conforme con su suerte, aunque sufra el aguijón del deseo, aunque la envidia intente apoderarse de su corazón, todavía ve delante muchos goces que no ha realizado, goces que pueden ser esperanzas, ilusiones algo, en fin, que estimula, que abre horizontes [...]. Pero en cambio, ¡qué triste situación la de la mujer que ha realizado todos sus deseos, que no sabe ya qué desear! (N.o 31) [...] and although they won’t settle for their lot, although they suffer the pricks of desire, although envy tries to take hold of their hearts, they can still see before them many pleasures not yet attained, pleasures that can be hopes, illusions, something that stimulates, that opens horizons [...]. But, in contrast, how sad is the situation of the woman who has attained all her desires, who doesn’t know what else for which to wish.

Valmont even answers moralist critics of consumer values, such as Severo Catalina and Ubaldo Quiñones, who declare that consumer values displace religion and spiritual development42. Religious conservatives, and

42 Severo Catalina, La mujer en las diversas relaciones de la familia y la sociedad. Ubaldo R. Quiñones, La educación moral de la mujer.

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even economists, worried about the conflict between an economy based on multiplying needs and the Christian tradition «which counseled selfdiscipline and restraint of desire» (Williams 224). In Spain, the position of the Church was even more stringently anti-consumerist than in France, since the Spanish clergy blamed materialistic values for the disentailment of Church property43. Valmont attempts to connect consumer desires to a discourse of sacrifice44. While unbridled desire and instant gratification might eventually exhaust consumer impulses, desire modified by delayed gratification can build character. Again, consumer practices can be suited to every socioeconomic class. The rich have an obligation to consume; the poor get even more pleasure than the rich from consumption because of the labor, sacrifice, and discipline behind their purchases. Que consiga a fuerza de solicitud, de trabajo, de abnegación, hacer agradable el medio ambiente en que vive su familia; que rodee a su esposo de atenciones; que procure con su carácter ganar en absoluto su corazón; que por su aspecto, su inteligencia, su buen gusto reuna en el hogar la mayor suma de atractivos [...]. (14 de febrero de 1897, Año X, N.o 476) Let her manage, by diligence, work, and sacrifice, to make comfortable the atmosphere in which her family lives; let her surround her husband with attentions, let her win his heart; that with her appearance, her intelligence, and her good taste she brings together in the home the greatest number of attractions [...].

Following mainstream economists of the 1880’s and 90’s, the fashion system as Valmont describes it must obey two imperatives: it must encourage work, and it must never abolish all need. Full equality of material circumstances is never desirable, for «only inequality inspires everyone to produce more and thus to further the progress of civilization»45. For the rich, Valmont encourages domestic and recreational spending in order to set an example of culture and refinement and to create jobs. For the

43 See Andreu for more on the Church’s response to disentailment and how this response influenced beliefs about the morality of consumption. 44 See Aldaraca, 59 and Charnon-Deutsch, Narratives of Desire, 41-77 on the feminine ideal of self-sacrifice. 45 Williams, 231. Williams points out the contradiction inherent in Paul LeroyBeaulieu’s praise of «democratic luxury» by asking whether an «inequality that brings progress or an equality that brings social harmony» is preferable.

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lower classes, she approves an ethic of striving, work combined with the study of fashionable models in order to approximate bourgeois comforts as far as possible. However, we should remind ourselves that the poor may not even have been aware that Valmont was championing their rights to fashion. Although probably anyone could get hold of used or old issues of the magazines to look at the plates and copy the patterns, only women in higher socio-economic spheres could actually read Valmont’s column. So, the practical effect of her writing must have been to give these readers a modicum of comfort with a lower class whose imitation of fashion was often read as a threatening encroachment. In short, she puts a positive spin on imitation and aspiration.

FASHION AND CREATIVITY Valmont is writing during a period of considerable social and geographic mobility. Persons gravitated to urban centers in search of work and needed to look as if they «belonged». Not only are Madrid and Barcelona growing in population, but the new ensanches [additions, developments] have wider streets, more commercial space, and more space for leisure in which persons can see and be seen. In several columns, Valmont discusses the important role that fashion plays in assimilation46. She first approaches her subject with the negative example of persons who do not keep current with fashion. Even the most attractive or talented persons, if their attire is not up to date, will look strange, like foreigners, perhaps poverty stricken —the clothes of the poor are often a few seasons out of date. Everyone, of every social class, must keep up with fashion, warns Valmont. There will be serious social and economic repercussions for the persons whose dress labels them as backwards, out of touch, uneducated, or unrefined. No hay más remedio: pobres y ricos, ignorantes y sabios, todos absolutamente todos, tienen por fuerza que resignarse a seguir la moda, so pena de aparecer disfrazados en medio de la sociedad universal que obedece a esa soberana que se ocupa en proporcionarnos los medios de agradarnos unos a otros. (13 de julio de 1890, Año III, N.o 132)

46 Assimilation or demonstration of decency, is a key point in Thorstein Veblen’s model of consumption. The Theory of the Leisure Class, 80-87.

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THE LATEST STYLE There’s nothing for it: the poor and the rich, the uneducated and the cultured, everyone, absolutely everyone, must resign themselves to follow fashion, on pain of appearing to be in disguise in the midst of a universal society that obeys the sovereign who concerns herself with giving us the means to be agreeable to each other.

Valmont recognizes that fashion is often used by dominant social groups as an exclusion mechanism, a set of rules that guards against «incursions by would-be imitators»47. For this reason, it is important for those who wish to gain admittance to mainstream, modern civilization to make a study of fashion. Magazines are an important tool for educating the pubic in the possibilities of fashion as well as in money-saving techniques for appearing fashionable. In order to allow her readers to maintain decorum up against those who can afford luxury and opulence, she exerts herself in demonstrating ways in which styles can be adapted to different budgets, detailing how the home dressmaker can alter or retrim a garment, all according to the latest fashion. La gran cuestión es amoldarse a un término medio, en el que la gracia, el gusto, la distinción y la economía nos permitan vivir cerca del lujo y la opulencia, con la consideración que alcanzan las cualidades y las prendas del espíritu, al lado de las que otorgan la riqueza y el lujo. Porque hay muchas señoras a quienes no permite su posición entregarse a los despilfarros que exige el lujo, y, sin embargo, necesitan presentarse ante el público como la Moda ordena. (13 de julio de 1890, Año III, N.o 132) The main issue is to adapt to a happy medium, in which charm, taste, distinction and economy permit us to live close to luxury and opulence, with consideration for the qualities and gifts of the spirit along with those conferred by wealth and luxury. Because there are many women whose position doesn’t permit them to surrender to the extravagance demanded by luxury, but, nevertheless, must appear before the public as Fashion dictates.

Philippe Perrot, 167. Perrot makes a distinction between propriety, the «appropriate handling of possibilities in clothing according to place and circumstance», and fashion, the «unstable, ever-changing science of optimum management of the possible within an interplay of innovation and obsolescence». Valmont essentially conflates Perrot’s two terms. 47

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Besides instructing the public in techniques of economical dressmaking, fashion magazines serve broader educational functions. By the 1880’s, technical developments in printing had facilitated wide circulation at greatly reduced prices. In a column from her first year of publication, Valmont commends women’s magazines for their role in the formation of taste at all socioeconomic levels. Again, she insists that fashion writers do not dictate, do not provide models to be strictly imitated. Rather, the magazines display a variety of «examples», and the subjection of these examples to readers’ selections, combinations, and experimentation educates the readers’ taste. Unlike the traditional, aristocratic claim that taste is inborn, Valmont recognizes taste as a product of education48. Pero vivimos, a Dios gracias, en unos tiempos en los que la igualdad se impone. Lo que se consigue con dinero, o con habilidad, o con buen gusto, está al alcance de todas las clases sociales que poseen uno siquiera de estos tres elementos. (6 de agosto de 1888, Año I, N.o 31) But we live, thanks be to God, during a time when equality asserts itself. That which can be had by means of money, or ability, or good taste, is within the reach of all social classes which possess at least one of these three elements.

Fashion is now open not only to those who have money. Good taste is enough to participate, and good taste is available to everyone. Style is now a function of elegance and imagination, not simply money spent on clothing. Hoy, felizmente para la mayoría de las mujeres, no se exige a éstas que vayan lujosas sino elegantes, y sabido es que la primera condición de la elegancia es la sencillez. Cualquiera que sea la posición social de una mujer, no tiene necesidad de hacer ostentación de riqueza para ocupar dignísimamente su puesto [...]. (Año XI, N.o 567) Today, happily for the majority of women, it is not required that they be opulent but elegant, and everyone knows that the first rule of elegance is simplicity. Whatever the social position of a woman, she doesn’t need to show off her wealth in order to play her role with dignity [...]. 48 See Bourdieu’s discussion of «charismatic», i.e. natural taste and taste as the product of education. Distinction, 11-96.

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Valmont defines the fashionable as the «elegant», not the luxurious, and since elegance equals «simplicity» anyone can achieve it (Aldaraca, 116-117). But Valmont actually seems to believe that taste has a dual nature. It can be learned through study of magazines and observation of store displays and of well-dressed people. However, she also speaks of taste or fashion sense as being synonymous with personality or spirit. La mujer al vestirse y adornarse, al amueblar y ornamentar su casa, revela su carácter, sus inclinaciones, sus gustos. Observando con alguna atención, hasta pueden adivinarse sus sentimientos; y esta circunstancia es muy importante para que sea juzgada y estimada en lo que realmente vale. (4 de agosto de 1895, Año VIII, N.o 396) Woman, on dressing or adorning herself, on furnishing or decorating her home, reveals her character, her inclinations, her taste. If one observes with attention, she can even guess her feelings, and this is important in evaluating what a woman is truly worth.

Writing a few years after Valmont, the German sociologist Georg Simmel states «Adornment [...] allows the mere having of the person to become a visible quality of its being. And this is so, not although adornment is superfluous, but because it is [...]»49. As a result of increased production, more diverse selection in department stores, and a proliferation of examples in fashion magazines, women have the power to select what they will wear and how they will furnish their homes. The choices they make reveal something about themselves. Dime cómo te vistes, y te diré quién eres. Esta variación del conocido axioma, no puede aplicarse con mayor propiedad que al traje y al adorno femeninos. No hay, en efecto, medio más rápido y seguro de descubrir la inteligencia y penetrar en el corazón de una mujer, que la impresión que nos produce al presentarse a nuestra vista más o menos engalanada. Si, dueña de su albedrío, elige el sitio de su domicilio, lo distribuye a su manera, lo adereza a su gusto, datos son éstos que dan ya, si no toda la clave del enigma, una buena parte de ella. Sus trajes, sus adornos personales resuelven el problema por completo. Dime cómo te vistes, que yo vea cuanto te rodea, y te diré quién eres. (17 de diciembre de 1888, Año I, N.o 50) 49

Simmel, «Adornment» quoted in Wilson, i.

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Tell me how you dress, and I’ll tell you who you are. This variation on the well-known axiom has no more appropriate application than to the subject of feminine dress and adornment. In effect, there is no more rapid and certain way to discover the intelligence and penetrate to the heart of a woman, than that of the impression that she produces when presenting herself, more or less dressed up, to our eyes [...]. If, mistress of her own will, she selects her dwelling, arranges it in her own way, decorates it according to her own taste, these are details which give, if not the entire key to the puzzle, a good part of it. Her dress and accessories will tell the rest. Tell me how you dress, let me see the things that surround you, and I’ll tell you who you are.

Because Valmont sees fashion as an important means of women’s self-expression, she is strenuously against the practice of leaving dress or home furnishing in the hands of a hired consultant. This point is one instance in which she comes out against an expansion of consumer services. She cannot promote any service that would contradict her definition of fashion as a means of self-expression and/or self-determination. This would leave women open to the common charge that their spending behavior is easily manipulated. For this reason, she repeatedly declares that the matrix of fashion publicity (patterns, advertisements, magazines) only transmits examples, communicates possibilities, displays and distributes raw materials. The images and goods are a vocabulary which women must deploy to articulate their own statements. Valmont seems at times to struggle to balance the contradictions inherent in her varied justifications of fashion. Proper display of fashion gives standing in a group (the group deciding what is proper), but, at the same time, is somehow expressive of some individual essence. Taste can be learned, but it can also demonstrate the essential qualities of a woman’s personality50. In 1897, a rival fashion writer forces Valmont to address and rationalize some of these contradictions. A Baroness Staffe, writing in Figaro, declares herself opposed to mass-produced fashion, stating that each woman should have her own dressmaker and create her own, customized fashion. It is perhaps no surprise that a Baroness would express this opinion; it would of course be within her means to have a personal dressmaker. Perhaps her plan reveals an intent to recover fashion 50

Balzac also takes this position, Traité de la vie elegante, 66.

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once again as the exclusive preserve of the rich, based on the artisanship of small-scale production rather than the factory and department store driven enterprise that it has become. Interestingly, however, Valmont chooses not to refute the Baroness’s arguments on the grounds of class exclusivity. Rather, she attacks the Baroness’s suggestions on the grounds of economic ramifications. Esta verdadera anarquía, sería la negación de la belleza, la anulación de la cultura de que disfrutamos; y por añadidura de realizarse, que no se realizará, sería desastrosa para la producción y nos haría retroceder a las remotas épocas en que las grandes poblaciones vivían como las míseras y más olvidadas aldeas. (Año X) This genuine anarchy would be the negation of beauty, the annihilation of the culture that we enjoy, and besides, if it came about, which it never will, it would be disastrous for production and would cause us to revert to the distant time in which the great capitals lived in the same way as the miserable and remote hamlets.

Valmont thinks that the Baroness’ vision of fashion is chaotic, anarchic in fact. She recognizes that it would destroy the edifice of production as it has by now developed. Valmont modifies somewhat her assertions on pre-mass production as a time of «uniforms». In rebuttal of Staffe she explains that fashion must strike a balance between unity and diversity. All along she has maintained that fashion is open to infinite variety, that it is accessible to women of all classes and walks of life, that women can put together «looks» using endless combinations of elements. However, in the production sector, capitalists need some measure of predictability; they have to know which goods and how many to produce. Hence she asserts that the fashion system, as an industry and as a means of artistic self-expression, cannot exist without some kind of unity. [...] en los periódicos de modas que se multiplican y reproducen en sus grabados cuantos detalles pueden ser necesarios para que dentro de la UNIDAD-Moda encuentren las señoras la VARIEDAD-Arte [...].(Año X) [...] in fashion magazines the plates multiply and reproduce all the details necessary so that within Unity/Fashion women find Variety/Art [...].

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FASHION AND DOMESTICITY While the Spanish clergy was insistent that consumer values were absolutely opposed to domestic values, some Catholic public figures take a less stringent view. Dolors Monserdà, despite being the author of several domestic novels and a contributor to Acción Católica Femenina, also serves as editor to Modas y Labors. Pilar Sinués de Marco, another author of domestic novels and the conduct book El ángel del hogar also concedes that fashion can have a place within domesticity (Valis 145). Valmont assumes the role of reporting the developments in French intellectuals’ attempts to reconcile domestic and consumer ideologies. In his historical scheme of consumption patterns, Paul Leroy Beaulieu, a contemporary of Valmont’s, characterizes modern consumption as concerned with domestic comfort (Williams 228). The Catholic sociologist Frédéric Le Play and his school articulated domestic consumption as a consumer ethic in accord with the values of the Church. Unlike many theorists of his time, Le Play believed that the family, rather than the individual, was the locus of consumer and social needs (Williams 236239). Valmont echoes the attempts of these social scientists to tie consumer values to domestic values. In the following column, she constructs the syllogism that home is to family as nation is to citizen in order to explain our emotional attachment to the things around us: El hogar es para la familia lo que la patria para el cuidadano. En él nacen esos afectos que arraigan en el alma y van formando la historia de nuestra vida íntima. Todos los objetos que nos rodean, inanimados al parecer, son sin embargo, parte más o menos importante de nuestra existencia; representan algo que nos afecta, algo estrechamente ligado con nosotros [...]. (20 de noviembre de 1892, Año V, N.o 255) Home is to the family what the country is to the citizen. Within it are born the affections that take root in the soul and shape the history of our private life. All the things that surround us, apparently inanimate, are, however, a more or less important part of our existence; they represent something that affects us, something closely tied to us [...].

From here, she launches into a discussion of the importance of social gathering. The home and the objects in it have a greater role than providing intimacy and comfort for nuclear families. The family, with the woman at its head in this respect, has a responsibility to socialize.

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Rituals of hospitality require a comfortable setting, appetizing food, attractive clothing, and interesting conversation. So, Valmont links consumption to social entertainments and, hence, to progress, industry, economy, and intellectual exchange. La civilización, esa obra paciente y gigantesca de los siglos, desaparecería por completo y volveríamos al primitivo estado, si el trato social no fuese objeto primordial de nuestra atención y hasta de nuestro sacrificio. De modo que esa preocupación, ese esmero de las señoras en reformar y mejorar sus casas, en ofrecer a la familia la atmósfera que necesita para vivir dichosa, es a la vez que una satisfacción de su alma el cumplimiento de un deber social. Visitar y recibir visitas, ofrecer amenas reuniones y asistir a las que nos dedican, no son meras distracciones, no son sólo agradable pasatiempo; son deberes sociales que cumplamos coayudando al movimiento intelectual, al movimiento afectivo, al movimiento económico, y por tanto a la civilización, que es el distintivo de la época en que nos hallamos. No es extraño por tanto, que la Moda contribuya poderosamente a su resultado, preste a las señoras, con la magia de sus creaciones en todo lo que es arte en la esfera social, los medios de cumplir esos deberes que he indicado. (20 de noviembre de 1892, Año V, N.o 253) Civilization, that huge and slow accomplishment of centuries, would completely disappear, and we would return to a primitive state, if social interaction were not a prime object of our attention and sacrifice. So, this preoccupation, this trouble that women take to remodel and improve their homes, to offer to the family the atmosphere it needs to live well, is both a pleasure of the spirit and a fulfillment of a social duty. To pay and receive calls, to hold and attend pleasant gatherings, aren’t mere distractions or enjoyable pastimes; they are social duties that we fulfill promoting the vitality of intellect, affection, economy, and consequently civilization, that is the hallmark of our age. Therefore, it is not strange that Fashion makes an important contribution, lending to women through the magic of its creations in all the arts of the social sphere, the means to fulfill those obligations of which I have spoken.

During the years of Valmont’s career, fashionable social behavior favored small, domestic gatherings, especially the «five o’clock», the English custom of paying calls and taking tea. This ritual provides a forum for displaying fashion, and Valmont recommends it as less enervating than large balls. Moreover, in a drawing room, a woman cannot

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depend entirely on physical grace for her attractiveness, as she might at a ball. Instead, she has to be able to display her wit and facility of conversation. Este movimiento social aumenta también la cultura; que si es fácil bailar un rigodón o un vals, no lo es tanto llamar la atención por el ingenio, por la amenidad de la conversación; por la ilustración [...]. (5 de marzo de 1888, Año I, N.o 9) This social trend also fosters culture; if it’s easy to dance a rigadoon or a waltz, it isn’t so simple to command attention with wit, pleasant conversation, knowledge [...].

Although a ball requires more elaborate, expensive dress, Valmont prefers «le five o’clock» because fashion can more fully demonstrate the connection between the selection of the clothes and the intelligence of the woman. Of course, it is part of woman’s domestic role to make the home inviting for her husband and children. Anti-consumerist critics were primarily concerned with the erotic power of clothes in terms of its negative impact on marriage. Clothes initially exercise their seductive power over women themselves, enticing them to spend too much and, in turn, use the beautiful clothes to seduce men who might pay their debts. Fashion was certainly viewed by many critics as immodest and outside the concern of a virtuous woman. Fashion was recognized to be for the purpose of being attractive to others, and what need had a married woman of this?51 So, this is another front along which Valmont must lay down an argument that makes fashion a virtue within the discourse of domesticity. Valmont censures women who give up the practice of coquetry, defined as looking their best, after their marriage. A woman has to make sure she always measures up favorably to any possible comparison. So, Valmont proposes fashion as a guardian of sexual fidelity within marriage; it keeps the husband from straying. She scolds women who become careless in personal grooming and dress after marriage; this will take away a woman’s prestige, «que es su fuerza, la fuerza que, empleada en el bien, sostiene el hermoso edificio de la familia» [which is 51 See Aldaraca, Andreu, and Jagoe for more on the ideological limitations of the married woman’s impulse to consume.

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her strength, a strength which, used for good, sustains the beautiful edifice of the family] (N.o 202). Just as important, the maintenance of a certain level of consumption, a certain formality in appearance is beneficial to children because it teaches them a standard of living and of conduct to imitate. According to Eduard Fuchs «the function of erotic stimulation in fashion, [...] operates most effectively when the erotic attractions of the man or the woman appear in ever new settings [...]» (Benjamin 77). In Valmont’s view, a woman maintains the attention of her husband by constantly appearing to be a new woman, working to always be in style. [...] la que [...] ha sabido elegir en el vasto y hermoso arsenal de las bellezas de la Moda atractivos para agradar a un esposo amado, para hacer resaltar las cualidades de su alma a los ojos del hombre destinado a labrar su felicidad, la que ha recreado su espíritu engalanando a sus queridos hijos, en una palabra, la que ha aplicado todo el arte y toda la experiencia que ha podido adquirir leyendo las descripciones o examinando los modelos que los periódicos de modas le han ofrecido, a embellecer cuanto hay en torno suyo, a disipar las penas y los sinsabores de la vida, a formar una atmósfera de cariño, de bienestar, de elegancia, de buen gusto, debe experimentar una gran satisfacción [...]. (31 de diciembre de 1888, Año I, N.o 52) [...] she who can select from the vast and beautiful arsenal of the charms of Fashion attractions with which to please a beloved spouse, in order to make visible the qualities of her soul to the eyes of the man responsible for her happiness, she who has diverted her spirit dressing up her dear children, in a word, she who has applied all the art and experience she has been able to acquire by reading the descriptions or studying the plates of fashion magazines, to beautify everything in her sphere, to soothe the pains and troubles of life, to create an atmosphere of tenderness, well-being, elegance, and good taste, should feel great satisfaction [...].

A pretty wife in an attractive, comfortable home will make the husband prefer domestic life to public entertainments in casinos, theatres, or cabarets. He will have no need to resort to mistresses or prostitutes for attraction and novelty, thus endangering the patrimony or hygiene of the family. By this logic, Valmont manages to take the domestic argument of anti-consumer critics and turn it around, making fashion the guardian of domesticity.

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FASHION THEORY What makes fashions fashionable? What does fashion express? In very general terms, writers who attempted to theorize fashion, such as Balzac, Baudelaire, and Octave Uzanne, state that fashion expresses both social aspirations and individual psychology52. Economists from D’Avenel to Veblen tried to explain fashion as a struggle for position in capitalist society53. Twentieth-century theorists such as Baudrillard, Barthes, Douglas, and Isherwood treat consumption as a system of signs for which we must figure out the codes54. However, one issue on which most theorists agree, albeit for different reasons, is the importance of novelty. For economists, novelty is an imperative of production. For some social critics, novelty is a function of exclusion: Fashion is the barrier —continually raised anew because continually torn down— by which the fashionable world seeks to segregate itself from the middle region of society [...]. Hence the unceasing variation of fashion. No sooner have the middle classes adopted a newly introduced fashion than it [...] loses its value for the upper classes [...]. Thus, novelty is the indispensable condition for all fashion55.

In contrast, Valmont, with her insistence that fashion be inclusive, believes that novelty is the expression of new social and personal aspirations. During 1888, her first year of publication, Valmont writes a column describing the pleasure of novelty as crucial to all aspects of individual experience and social life. She first comments on the passing of the traditional mode of consumption: that of buying things to last over generations in order to hand down a patrimony in the form of durable goods. The present economy, however, grows from new capital and calls for new things. The economy of conservation and scarcity only perpetuates its own backwardness, while new consumer values foster industry and the progress of democratic civilized societies.

52 See Steele, as well as Balzac, Baudelaire, and Uzanne for an overview of fashion theory contemporary with Valmont. 53 See Wilson, 47-66 as well as Williams’ survey of French consumer theorists. 54 See Baudrillard «The Consumer Society» Barthes The Fashion System, Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption. 55 Rudolph von Jehring quoted in Benjamin Arcades Project, pp. 74-75.

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THE LATEST STYLE La Moda, que parece tan superficial, es más profunda y más intencionada de lo que se cree. Al permitir, como hoy permite, todos los caprichos, todas las fantasías, todas las adaptaciones, al convertir los salones a la vez en una gran mascarada sin caretas y en una exhibición de los progresos de la ciencia, de la industria y del arte moderno, sintetiza de un modo práctico la confusión de ideas, de clases, de estilos, de costumbres y de tendencias que caracterizan a la época actual. (22 de Octubre de 1888, Año I, N.o 42) Fashion, which seems so superficial, is more profound and deliberate than what is believed. On permitting, as it now does, all the caprices, all the fantasies, all the adaptations, on converting the drawing rooms into great masked balls without the masks, and into an exhibition of the advances of science, industry, and modern art, [Fashion] synthesizes in a practical way the confusion of ideas, classes, styles, customs, and trends that characterize contemporary times.

Desire and the imagination are channeled by fashion into growth. But Valmont claims that fashion is not just motivated by novelty, attraction, or even aesthetic pleasure. It is expressive of something. Practice of fashion can be an ethic that demonstrates moral and spiritual values; a good person will choose good and appropriate fashions (Perrot 137). Fashion can also be a very immediate indication of psychology; Valmont asserts that what an individual chooses to wear coincides with her inner mood, be it happy or sad. Observers, then, may use individual dress as an emotional barometer and fashion as a system of signs that expresses a social mood or tenor. Esto se ve todos los días y en todas partes. Es más: se manifiesta hasta en las diferentes situaciones del espíritu. Cuando la desgracia nos abate, cuando la tristeza nos domina, cuando la desesperación se apodera de nosotros, descuidamos el traje [...]. Nos hallamos bajo la influencia de una enfermedad que nos hace retroceder en la escala social [...]. Por el contrario, cuando las esperanzas nos sonríen y las ilusiones nos acompañan; cuando las legítimas ambiciones nos impulsan a llegar hasta el límite de los horizontes que descubrimos; en una palabra, cuando nuestra salud moral y material se hallan en perfecto estado; cuando sentimos la necesidad de vivir y el deseo de vivir bien, sucede todo lo contrario. Nos engalanamos como para asistir a una gran solemnidad, a un magnífico festín [...] (Año X).

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This can be seen everywhere every day. Moreover, it shows itself even in the different attitudes of the spirit. When trouble oppresses us, when we are overcome by sorrow, when despair takes hold of us, we are careless in our dress [...]. We find ourselves under the influence of a sickness that makes us slide down on the social scale. On the other hand, when hope smiles upon us and we are guided by our dreams, when legitimate ambitions push us forward towards the limit of our horizons, in a word, when our moral and material health are in perfect state, when we feel the need to live and the desire to live well, just the opposite occurs. We dress ourselves up as if to attend a grand function, a magnificent feast [...].

Valmont does not seem to notice, or is not able to resolve the problems inherent in thinking of fashion magazines as an instrument for education and assimilation and thinking about fashion as an expression of the self. Throughout the nineteenth century, in satirical articles and literary works such as Galdós La de Bringas, authors were making fun of women ineptly expressing themselves through fashion, particularly those who tried to follow French models. The ultimate insult for the woman trying but not succeeding to express her aspirations through fashion was that she was cursi. Valmont’s adoption of a position as advisor on French fashion presupposes that the outfits Spanish women might put together on their own will not be good enough. She presumes that Spanish women need the guidance of an authority, that Spain needs guidance from France. Although Valmont seems to write her columns in all sincerity, there is an underlying assumption of Spanish inferiority or cursilería. Indeed, lo cursi was a major cultural preoccupation of nineteenth century Spain. According to Noël Valis’s brilliant analysis of the concept of cursilería «[...] the Spanish middle classes [...] had also to contend with the realities of cultural, social, and economic dyssynchronicity, a sharply felt sense of inferiority (in relation to powers like France and England), and insufficiency» (32). Valmont capitalizes on this sense of class and cultural inadequacy in her role as fashion columnist. Fashion may be, in part, an expression of self, but Spanish women are not yet ready to freely express themselves in a manner that will always be tasteful. They still need the fashion columnist as a consultant. Fashion may well demonstrate individual mood and personality, but it is also a group practice. Valmont also tries to investigate what society as a whole is trying to express when dress or manners go in and out of fashion. Valmont rarely writes about specific fashions. After her first few columns, she announces her interest in fashion and lifestyle commentary,

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and one «Clementina» takes over the reportage of seasonal fashions. There are a few occasions, however, when Valmont chooses to examine specific fashions because she sees a significant meaning behind a change in styles. One example is the long-running battle she wages against the colored tuxedo in men’s fashion. She is certain that promotion of the colored tuxedo over the black is a conspiracy on the part of tailors and haberdashers. Como indiqué al terminar mi Crónica anterior, se ha levantado una cruzada contra el frac negro. Esta vez no son los elegantes, enemigos de la monotonía, los que combaten la prenda diplomática por excelencia. A la cabeza del nuevo movimiento se han colocado los sastres, inspirados no por sentimiento estético, sino por interés económico. (28 de septiembre de 1890, Año III, N.o 143) As I pointed out in a previous column, there has sprung up a crusade against the black dress coat. This time it’s not the style-setters, enemies of monotony, that are fighting against this garment which is tact par excellence. At the head of the new movement are the tailors, inspired not by aesthetic sense, but by economic interest.

This is the only instance in which Valmont accuses the needs of production of driving consumption, of factories foisting an article off on the consumer which is not really in his/her best interest. The main reason producers want to lead men away from the black tuxedo is because it does not become obsolete in terms of fashion, and it takes several years to wear out. This is a disadvantage to manufactures, tailors, and retailers. This issue apparently engaged the attention of several writers, and Valmont reproduces, uncredited, a comic dialogue between a pearl gray and a black coat that appeared in one of the daily newspapers for men. El frac gris. —¡Pobre frac negro! ¡Qué pena me da verte! Tienes un aspecto tan lúgubre, que no puedes menos de recordar, en medio de las alegrías de la vida, las tristezas de la muerte. El frac negro. —¡Miren quién habla! ¿Acaso tú representas la novedad o el progreso? ¿Qué eres más que una antigualla? Perteneces al pasado, a aquellos tiempos de absolutismo y tiranía, de oscurantismo y de desigualdad, y aunque pretendes imponerte, no lo conseguirás, porque recuerdas el vicio de los palacios y la miseria de los pobres. El frac gris. —¡Hola, hola! ¿te las echas de demócrata? Pues te llevas chasco, y el día menos pensado verás cóma la blusa te destrona. Pero no nos

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metamos en política: sin necesidad de profundizar, basta verte para comprender lo ridículo de tu aspecto. Tu monótona severidad debe ceder el puesto a lo simpático y agradable de mi color. El frac negro. —¿Hay algo más efímero que tú? Una mancha te deteriora, una arruga te destruye. Sirves para una o dos veces, y gracias. Además, cuestas caro en relación con lo breve de tu vida. Si triunfases con tus compañeros de colorines, el traje de los caballeros sería, como en los siglos anteriores, mucho más costoso que los de las señoras. En el reinado de Luis XV, por cada mil francos de gasto que hacía una señora para sus trajes y prendidos, empleaba tres mil un caballero. Esto basta para que todas las damas se confabulen contra vosotros y me favorezcan. El frac gris. —¡Estás en un error! ¡las damas me prefieren porque yo soy la seducción, el encanto! El frac negro. —¡No lo creas, ven en ti y en los tuyos competidores, émulos, rivales! El frac gris. —Recuerdo el siglo de la galantería. El frac negro. —Y yo el período de la formalidad, del progreso y de la cultura. El frac gris. —Eres de origen inglés, y lo que representas es el spleen, la economía, la codicia. El frac negro. —Y tú de origen italiano, y representas la superficialidad, la coquetería y la indolencia. El frac gris. —Tengo a mi lado a todos los hombres elegantes. El frac negro. —¡Y yo a todas las mujeres! (N.o 143) Pearl: Poor black coat! It pains me to see you! You have such a funereal appearance, that one can’t help but think of the sadness of death, right in the middle of all the joys of life. Black: Look who’s talking! By some chance do you represent novelty or progress? What more are you than an old fossil? You belong to the past, to times of absolutism and tyranny, to [ignorance] and inequality, and although you try to impose yourself, you won’t succeed, because you call to mind all the vices of the palaces and the misery of the poor. Pearl: What? What? You call yourself democratic? Well, you’re in for a letdown, and when you least expect it, you’ll be dethroned by the smock. But let’s not get into politics; without going too deep, it’s enough to look at you to grasp how ridiculous you look. Your monotonous severity should give way to the charm and attractiveness of my color. Black: Is there anything more ephemeral than you? A stain spoils you, a wrinkle ruins you. You’re only good for one or two wearings. Besides, you’re very expensive in relation to your short life. If you were to triumph, along with your colorful friends, then gentlemen’s dress would become, as

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Economic issues are a part of what is at stake in the battle between black and colored coats: the durability of black decreases spending on clothes. But Valmont’s defense of the black coat is on dangerous ground in this respect. She does not like styles being manipulated by manufacturers, but she herself has frequently argued that fashions must change for economic health. So, she turns to an aesthetic argument: colored frock coats will clash with women’s ball gowns. Figurémonos que triunfan los sastres parisienses, y que los hombres aparecen en los salones vestidos con trajes que repiten los colores y la ornamentación de los destinados hasta ahora al bello sexo; ¡qué confusión! ¡Qué mezcla de colores vivos y chillones! ¡Qué falta de armonía, de regularidad¡ Pero, por el contrario, recordemos el cuadro que ofrecen los bailes y los saraos sin la reforma deseada. Entre los trajes espléndidos y ricos de color de las señoras, resalta, como para separarlas y darles más relieve, el traje negro, severo y elegante de los caballeros. (N.o 143) Let’s suppose that Parisian tailors triumph, and that men appear in drawing rooms dressed in frock coats that repeat the same colors and trimmings of the clothes designed for the fair sex; what confusion! What a mix of bright and loud colors! What a lack of harmony and regularity! But, on the other hand, let’s recall the picture offered by the dances and parties without this desired reform. Among the splendid gowns of rich colors worn by the women, the men’s black coats, severe and elegant, stand out and highlight the womens’ gowns.

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Fashion is a social practice that gives women beauty, the power of self-expression, and a means to participate in and influence public life. The aesthetic competition that male fashion threatens might also have parallels in the extra-aesthetic functions of fashion, and women could lose their special avenue to public civilization56. A third point in the battle between the two coats has to do with the historical and political associations connected with each mode of dress. Valmont is very interested in the significance of historical borrowing in fashion. Marcel Prevost, whom Valmont often quotes in her columns, insists that fashions are not governed by chance, but that fashions «last as long as do the political and social circumstances in which they exist»57. Valmont observes the pastiche of historical and cultural styles to be found in clothing and home decoration and interprets it as a cultural confusion that yearns for some resolution. En esa orgía de formas y colores, en esa mezcla de estilos y de géneros que nos permiten ver en una misma casa un gavinete turco, una alcoba Edad Media, un salón Renacimiento y una galería japonesa; en ese panorama de trajes y de adornos de tan diversas épocas como hoy presentan las señoras en cualquier reunión, aparece admirablemente retratado nuestro tiempo. Todos los motivos suenan a la vez, y si los hay que nos recuerdan guerras, dolores, maldades, depravaciones y miserias, los hay también que evocan en nosotros dulces sentimientos, recuerdos de emociones purísimas, esperanzas de felicidades soñadas. (22 de octubre de 1888, Año I, N.o 42) In this orgy of forms and colors, this mix of styles and types that permits us to see in the same house a Turkish cabinet, a Medieval bedroom, a Renaissance salon and a Japanese gallery; in this panorama of clothes and accessories from such diverse epochs that women today wear at any gathering, our time is admirably represented. All motifs are heard at the same time, and there are those that call to mind wars, pains, troubles, depravity and misery, and also those that evoke in us sweet sentiments, memories of the purest emotions, hopes for dreamed-of happiness.

56 The Great Male Renunciation, the argument that men adopted black dress because it was associated with reason and stability, as opposed to the colorful dress of flighty, unstable women, is not useful to Valmont, since she holds that fashion is one of the means by which women can demonstrate their qualities of virtue, reason, and taste. See Kuchta, «The Making of the Self-Made Man». 57 Prevost, quoted in Uzanne, The Modern Parisienne, 32.

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The question for Valmont is why, in the world of the train, the telephone, and the submarine, do consumers often look to the past for fashion? Los que profundicen un poco, se penetrarán de que esta tendencia obedece a la necesidad, inconsciente quizás, pero profunda y apremiante, de restaurar, al mismo tiempo que los objetos y las cosas, los sentimientos y las ideas. (12 de Noviembre de 1888, Año I, N.o 45) Those who ponder a bit, will understand that this tendency obeys a necessity, perhaps unconscious, but deep and pressing, to restore, along with objects and things, the feelings and ideas.

Valmont devotes several columns to the revival of medieval motifs in fashion and home decoration, a trend that she explains as symptomatic of current sociopolitical anxieties. Although there are many benefits to the growth of technology, society is conscious that something has been lost in human relations. She reports the revival of the village dance at many country houses in the harvest season —occasions at which the aristocratic and wealthy mix at table and in dance with servants and villagers. In particular, she reports on a countess who dances a waltz with the son of a tenant «como sucedía en la Edad Media» [as used to occur in the Middle Ages]. Con este movimiento de aproximación de clases, que quizás en el fondo entraña un plan político, coincide una tendencia a resucitar ideas, costumbres, usos, trajes y muebles de la Edad Media, sin renunciar a las conquistas del siglo XIX. Poseer una o dos habitaciones de puro estilo Edad Media, es también un deseo vivísimo de las que pueden permitirse este lujo. (N.o 42) This approximation of classes, which perhaps at bottom contains a political agenda, coincides with a trend of resuscitating ideas, customs, manners, dress, and furnishings from the Middle Ages, without renouncing the conquests of the Nineteenth Century. To have one or two rooms in the medieval style, is the greatest desire of those who can permit themselves such luxury.

Valmont interprets the enthusiasm for medieval-style entertainments and decorative motifs as a nostalgia for a time when different socioeconomic classes lived in greater proximity and enjoyed more interaction. She endorses the prosperity that technology and consumer values bring,

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and she insists that fashion helps as many people as possible enjoy a share of that prosperity. But she is conscious of another social reality, that of displaced persons, exploited workers, and urban poverty. She, and fashionable society with her, erase any facts they may know about feudal conditions in order to imagine the Middle Ages as a time of harmony and fellowship. The fashion for things medieval is a response to cultural anxieties about how progress is changing human relations. En medio de la confusión, se ve un cambio por el que van las corrientes en busca de lo que echan de menos en medio del progreso que nos rodea; la enredada madeja ofrece un hilo por el que se ve a la actual sociedad volver en busca de las eternas verdades del Cristianismo: la familia, la fraternidad, el amor. (N.o 42) In the middle of the confusion, a change can be seen in which the current goes in search of that which we miss in the middle of the progress that surrounds us; the tangled skein offers a thread by which today’s society can go back in search of the eternal Christian values: family, brotherhood, and love.

What speaks in favor of the Middle Ages is her association of the era with Christian values, the supposed lack of which is her continuously sustained critique of modern progress. Another instance in which Valmont discusses specific fashion trends occurs in the context of the growing popularity of the bicycle and women’s interest in sports58. At first, Valmont is ambivalent about the bicycle. She publishes comments by male writers who claim that the musculature women develop from cycling spoils their grace in dancing and makes them generally less attractive (N.o 502). She tries to dampen any idea that the bicycle might become a principal mode of urban transportation for women, recommending that they limit their cycling to the countryside. She seems somewhat uneasy about the change in social ritual and custom that the bicycle might cause, but she eventually becomes convinced of the health benefits of cycling, tennis, and other sports. She then begins to write about the fashion for cycling within her customary discourse of the link between fashion and self-cultivation.

58

See Weber, 193-212.

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THE LATEST STYLE La moda, inspirada por la higiene, aconseja el ejercicio como el mejor remedio para conservar la salud y el más eficaz cosmético para producir ricas encarnaciones, ojos de límpido iris, y todos los demás atractivos que deterioran las anemias y los achaques de las naturalezas enfermizas. (15 de Noviembre de 1891, Año IV, N.o 202) Fashion, inspired by hygiene, advises exercise as the best way to preserve the health and the most efficacious cosmetic to give pink color, bright eyes, and all the other attractions spoiled by anemia, and maladies of those with a sickly constitution.

Valmont approves of the effect that exercise has on women’s health and asserts that this is consonant with the aims of beauty and fashion. However she is a bit disturbed by changes in attire that would be necessitated by widespread use of the bicycle. She worries about a masculinization of fashion, a widespread adoption of sports clothes. En cambio es necesario poner coto a la tendencia del traje femenino a invadir los dominios del masculino. Puede considerarse como una galantería por parte de las damas, adaptar a su traje algo de lo que caracteriza la elegancia y buen gusto en el de los caballeros; pero adaptar y sin imitar, no incurrir en exageraciones. (28 de septiembre de 1890, Año III, N.o 143) On the other hand, we must limit the tendency of feminine dress to invade the dominions of the masculine. It might be considered a compliment on the part of women, to adopt in their dress something of the elegance and good taste of male attire, but adapt and not imitate, not to go too far.

Of all the changes in daily life and social forms that Valmont sees at the end of the century, the one that concerns her most is what she fears is a masculinization in women’s dress and women’s roles. She has theorized and defended fashion as a feminine domain through which women become empowered. By beautifying themselves and their homes, by cultivating their attractions, women influence the course of the economy, politics, class relations, and, hence, the development of Western civilization. What will happen to fashion and to feminine influence on public life if the pressures of industrialization significantly change the concerns and activities of women?

CHAPTER THREE WOMEN’S LIFESTYLES Valmont believes that the mission of any fashion magazine must include attention to the moral and social issues of concern to modern women. Fashion is not just about clothes; it informs every aspect of life. Valmont devotes some column space to writing about fashionable society, but most often, when not writing directly about fashion, she examines issues of family and public life. Although she does not support some of the political agenda of the late nineteenth-century feminist movement, she considers women’s issues the most important topic of the age and keeps her readers informed of any developments that impact the lifestyle of women59. Since Valmont considers Paris the capital of fashion, she almost never makes mention of international variants of fashionable dress. This is not the case in her columns on lifestyle; she often reports on trends in England and North America, as well as in France. She insists that Spanish women enjoy a unique position: Bien sé yo que en España todavía existe en el campo femenil esa serenidad que ofrece el bienestar que experimentamos cuando vivimos de la consideración y el aprecio, [...] y quizás es la hermosa nación española una de las pocas de Europa y América donde la mujer puede reflexionar con calma y por lo tanto con acierto qué es lo que más conviene a su porvenir [...]. (8 de agosto de 1897, Año X, N.o 501) 59 On the problems with the term «feminism» to describe women’s movements in Spain, see Nash, «Two decades of women’s history in Spain», 392.

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Valmont addresses her Spanish readers as women who are still comfortable in their roles and not yet embattled by the social transformations of modern life. She sees her role as an informant, sometimes recommending, sometimes cautioning against new trends. She promises to give Spanish women the knowledge they need to preserve the integrity of their family life, invoking Fray Luís de Leon’s sixteenth century treatise La perfecta casada as the model for her advice columns (N.o 208)60. In the matter of women’s lifestyles, we will see that Valmont is curiously silent on activism in Spain. Indeed, she must be so to maintain her assertion that Spanish women are different. The news she does not report, as well as the news she does, reflects important information about the probable beliefs of her readers.

LEISURE AND ENTERTAINMENT In her fashion writing, Valmont has often said that fashion both forms and reveals the personality and spirit of a woman. As part of her mission to address moral and social life as well as fashion, she often reflects on the inner life of women, on their mental health61. She is especially interested in the connections between the mental and the social, as in a column on boredom, which she feels is a widespread social ill. Most women who suffer from boredom are like «birds in a golden cage»: Como el pajarillo del ejemplo que cito, picotean hoy una fiesta, mañana un baile, al otro día una venta de caridad, después un concierto, luego una función hípica, una conversación, etc., y cuando se cansan de haber picoteado estos cañamones de la existencia social, exclaman: ¡Qué aburrimiento! lo que equivale al gemido de las aves enjauladas. (19 de abril de 1896, Año IX, N.o 433) 60 Aldaraca devotes an entire chapter to discussion of La perfecta casada as a foundational text for 19th century domesticity. 61 In comparison with religious periodicals cited in Andreu, Perinat, Segura and Selva, while Valmont refers vaguely to «religion» or «spiritual values» she almost never talks specifically about doctrine. For her, women’s inner life refers more to psychology than to religion.

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Like the bird in my example, they ‘peck’ one day a party, the next a ball, another day a charity bazaar, afterwards a concert, then the horse races, conversation, etc., and when they’ve tired of pecking at the birdseed of social life, they exclaim ‘How boring!’ just like the sigh of birds in a cage.

A contemporary interpretation of the «bird in the golden cage» metaphor might read the image as an expression of the frustrations inherent in insular domestic life. Valmont, however, uses the image to introduce a discourse on domestic life improperly lived. The description is very much like Valmont’s theory of the motivation behind kleptomania, or the syndrome suffered by women addicted to elitist consumption. When does boredom most often hit? Ironically, when one has just gotten a new dress, received a series of visits, gone to a ball. She ties boredom precisely to agitation, hyperactivity, and having realized all one’s desires. A second component of boredom is a lack of reflection and selfknowledge. Valmont writes often about the interior and exterior selves. Women who do not spend time in reflection live only in their exterior selves, the self-concerned with the objects and entertainments of consumer society. On the face of it, the modern consumer existence that Valmont celebrates in her fashion columns appears to be responsible for boredom. She attempts to right this apparent contradiction in her discussion of a third component: the lack of a realizable goal or a responsible activity, the absence of causes or persons for whom to care. The malady of boredom is the result not of consumerism in itself, but of an improper relation between consumer behavior and social life. The proper role of consumerism and fashion is not merely to embellish the exterior self. It is to train the taste and spirit, to serve the family, to provide a bond with a larger social group, and to develop civilization. Women suffering from boredom will probably seek a remedy in public entertainment, but Valmont has several cautions to offer in this respect. During the run of her column, she is preoccupied by the changes she sees in patterns of entertainment. She does not believe that family and domestic life serve only as a sanctuary from sordid public life, quite the contrary62. She does not in principle disapprove of families seeking amusement in public spaces. In one column on travel and entertainment she states: 62 For discussion of the actual interpenetration of the domestic and public spheres, see Jagoe, 7, 39; Aldaraca, 18, 49; as well as Vickery and Levine.

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THE LATEST STYLE La Moda, que, como tantas veces he indicado, se preocupa no sólo de las bellezas y elegancias del cuerpo, sino de los puros y distinguidos deleites del alma, ha fomentado la afición a los viajes para engrandecer la esfera de acción de la familia humana, para dilatar los horizontes de la inteligencia y del sentimiento, para difundir y generalizar el bienestar que resulta del comercio de ideas y de afectos, cuyo brillante conjunto es la civilización; y al mismo tiempo, aumentando el prestigio del hogar, del paraje en donde nacimos, de la patria a que pertenecemos, ha contribuído a desarrollar en el espíritu facultades que en otras épocas dormitaban en el perezoso, monótono e infecundo regazo de la vulgaridad. Permanecer en un paraje siempre, es vegetar: recorrer el mundo, viajar, es vivir. Pero si las Empresas de los ferrocarriles, más codiciosas de repartir pingües dividendos a sus accionistas que de atender a la seguridad de los viajeros no se enmiendan, para no entorpecer ese hermoso y fecundo movimiento de aproximación, viajar va a ser morir, o lo que es aun peor, quedar lisiado para toda la vida. (20 de septiembre de 1891, Año IV, N.o 194) Fashion, which as I have said many times, does not only concern herself with the beauties and graces of the body, but also with the pure and lofty delights of the soul, has fostered an enthusiasm for travel in order to enlarge the sphere of activities of the human family, to widen the horizons of the mind and emotions, to spread the well-being that results from the commerce of ideas and feelings, whose brilliant whole is civilization; at the same time adding to the prestige of the home, of the place where we were born, of our country, contributing to the development of spiritual powers that, in other times, slumbered in the lazy, monotonous and sterile lap of coarseness. To always stay in one place is to vegetate: to see the world, to travel, is to live. But if the railway companies, more eager to disburse fat dividends to their investors than to take care of the safety of their passengers, don’t change their ways, so as not to slow down this great and fruitful movement of rapprochement, to travel will mean to die, or even worse, to be maimed for life.

Entertainment, circulation of persons, ideas, and money is beneficial to individual, home, and country, and is sanctioned by Fashion63. Valmont uses her travel promotion to segue into a criticism of railway companies. This is the technique that she uses to broach subjects in the masculine, 63 Notice the contrast with many women’s novels at the time. In Pilar Sinués del Marco’s La amiga íntima, Angela Grassi’s El copo de nieve, and Fernán Caballero’s La gaviota, Pardo Bazán’s El tesoro de Gastón, to name a few, women are chastised for their desire to travel and participate in the whirl of public entertainments.

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political sphere. Wars, stock market crashes, railway accidents are public news that she considers important, but she never approaches such material directly. To do so would be to engage directly with politics. Instead, she must first establish the connection that this has to women’s lives in their role as guardians of the home and, by extension, the public sphere. In this way, women’s activism and protest can be justified as protecting family interests within traditional roles. She talks about the current frequency of train accidents, then shifts to the benefits of travel, all of which could be lost if people become afraid of rail travel. She then asks who is ultimately responsible for the accidents. Who is behind the prematurely worn tracks? Corrupt speculators, engineers, politicians. In spite of her avowed disapproval of doing so, this is entering into political, masculine journalism. But the way in which she organizes her points emphasizes the convergence of fashion, politics, and lifestyle. To return to the question of entertainment, Valmont endorses public amusement as a salutary way of bringing people together, extending the model of bourgeois civilization. Consequently, a trend that disturbs her in public interaction is the segregation of the sexes. She devotes several columns to the fashion for Ladies’ Clubs, a development of which she does not really approve. The trend had taken hold in the United States well before it became popular in Europe, and Valmont reviews one Madame Th. Bentzon’s tour of American clubs. About her visit to Chicago’s Fortnightly Women’s Club, Madame Bentzon reports: «¡Con qué facilidad hablaban! ¡Con qué entereza argüían! ¡Con qué habilidad criticaban las opiniones que no estaban de acuerdo con las suyas! Nada ... aquello parecía una reunión de hombres de talento vestidos de mujer. Las oradoras habían estudiado el asunto, habían formado juicio sobre él, y discutían sin pasión, sin bondad, atributos esencialmente femeninos, sin tratar de ser agradables, sin ocultar por nada ni por nadie lo que creían una verdad, aunque esta verdad fuese molesta a su contrincante». (2 de febrero de 1896, Año IX, N.o 422) They spoke with such ease! They argued with such firmness! They criticized so ably the opinions of those who didn’t agree with them! This was like a gathering of talented men dressed as women. The speakers had studied their topics, formed judgments, and argued without passion or kindness, essentially feminine attributes, without trying to be agreeable, without hiding, in deference to anyone, what they believed to be true, even if that truth might be unpleasant to their opponent.

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Madame Bentzon goes on to describe the social and political activism that comes out of these clubs. They are not only active in women’s rights, but also in the reform of hospitals, jails, and rehabilitation facilities. In light of Madame Bentzon’s description, Valmont comments: Fácilmente comprenden las lectoras que estas damas teniendo que preocuparse de los asuntos destinados a la discusión, y que ocuparse en estudiarlos, de poco o ningún tiempo pueden disponer para consagrarlo a los afectos de la familia, de que es piedra angular la mujer, y mucho menos a las atenciones y cuidados domésticos [...] la mujer tenga mucho de hombre en un país en donde por regla general, el hombre sólo se preocupa de hacer dinero [...] ha tenido que suplantar al hombre y desempeñar una gran parte de las funciones morales, sociales, económicas y políticas, encomendadas en los demás países al sexo fuerte. Que la hermosa mitad del género humano cultive su inteligencia, que adquiera ilustración como un encanto más, es justo y conveniente. Pero desde el momento en que prescinda de sus funciones naturales, de su misión providencial, para desempeñar una parte siquiera de cuanto está encomendado al hombre en la vida intelectual, moral y social, su situación será irregular, anti-lógica, y por tanto difícil y triste. (N.o 422) The readers can easily understand that these women, being obligated to concern themselves with the issues under discussion, and busy themselves with their study, have little or no time to dedicate to family, of which she is the cornerstone, and even less [time] to domestic cares [...] women have many attributes of men in a country where, as a general rule, men only care about making money [...] they’ve had to take men’s place and fulfill a good part of the moral, social, economic, and political functions that are commended to the stronger sex in other countries. It’s right and proper that the fair sex cultivate its intelligence and acquire education as one charm among many. But from the moment it dispenses with its natural functions, from its God given mission, to fill even a part of the intellectual, moral, and social functions destined for men, then its situation will become irregular, illogical, and, consequently, difficult and sad.

While Madam Bentzon is impressed by the intellectual level of the club members and commends them on the forthrightness of their discussions, Valmont believes this only signifies a dereliction of the women’s domestic duties. Men in the United States, being overly concerned with making money, neglect their duties to society. They leave the cares of the public good to women, who are themselves thus taken away from their

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own duties in the home. Moreover, the women Madame Bentzon describes are suspect because they are accomplishing things by means of reason rather than by means of charm. Although most of Valmont’s writing demonstrates that she believes in the interpenetration of the public and private spheres, celebrating women’s ability to affect public life through their actions as wives, mothers and consumers, she takes a conservative view of the means by which women should exercise their influence. Women must operate within the confines of their traditional roles, making use of the qualities Valmont conceives as particularly feminine. The fact that women affect the public sphere obliquely, as it were, she sees as their strength, saving them from the appearance of self-interest or calculation. She views any direct attempt to influence public policy as undermining women’s claim to selflessness. When women’s clubs such as La Junta de Damas de la Unión Iberoamericana form at the turn of the century, they take this same conservative view, carefully emphasizing the members’ commitment to domestic ideology (Scanlon 200-201). In another column on women’s clubs, Valmont describes a season at a summer resort during which men have socially abandoned women, each pursuing their own activities. In response, a number of Englishwomen begin a club and, after some initial resistance, are soon joined by Frenchwomen. Porque este fin es acá para entre nosotras, dar una lección a los caballeros que cada día que pasa son más urañoa; es decir desertan de los salones y hasta de los gabinetes para engolfarse en esos Clubs, Círculos o Casinos donde juegan, o comentan los pormenores de la crónica mundana, o se confían sus aventuras, o leen, o hablan de sus negocios, renunciando a la sociedad inteligente, agradable, bien educada, amena e interesante de las señoras [...]. (30 de octubre de 1892, Año V, N.o 352) Because our goal, among ourselves, is to teach those men a lesson, who every day are more elusive; that is to say [they] desert the drawing rooms and even the sitting rooms in order to bury themselves in those Clubs, Circles, or Casinos where they gamble, or chat about the particulars of world events, or confess adventures to each other, or read, or talk about business affairs, renouncing the intelligent, agreeable, cultured, pleasant, and interesting society of women [...].

Rather than debating social policy, in the French women’s clubs the members apparently do in company exactly the same things they would be doing at home in solitude: sewing, arranging flowers, and painting.

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A positive effect the clubs may have had was the mixing of groups who would probably not have come together in private homes: French and English, aristocrats and banker’s wives, single and married women. Such meetings may have actually resulted in a meaningful extension of women’s social circle. Valmont laments the fashion in women’s clubs and men’s casinos, however, as a symptom that the two sexes have lost the ability to make meaningful conversation with each other64. Conversation is one of the requirements of femininity, because it makes social intercourse pleasant, and cultivating social pleasure and ease is a woman’s God-given duty. In order to make good conversation, one must have some kind of instruction, so in this context, Valmont is in favor of a certain amount of education, although not enough for credentials or public recognition. La conversación, que vale tanto como la belleza cuando revela la belleza del alma, ha sido y será en todo tiempo uno de los mayores atractivos que la mujer puede y debe poseer [...]. Saber, no para brillar por la sabiduría sino para agradar, para aumentar los títulos al aprecio de las gentes, debe ser el deseo femenil [...]. En resúmen, mis queridas lectoras, la mujer moderna, sin renunciar a sus ocupaciones habituales, encuentra utilidad y satisfacción al instruirse, y lo repito, éste es un nuevo encanto que puede unir a los que tanta admiración y afecto la alcanzan en la vida cuando sabe cumplir todos sus deberes y utilizar todas sus ventajas en provecho de cuantos la rodean. (11 de diciembre de 1892, Año V, N.o 258) Conversation, as valuable as [physical] beauty when it reveals the beauty of the soul, has been and will always be one of the greatest attractions a woman can and should possess [...]. To know something, not to show off one’s knowledge but to please, to increase one’s claim to people’s esteem, should be women’s desire [...]. In summary, dear readers, the modern woman, without renouncing her habitual tasks, finds usefulness and satisfaction in instruction, and I repeat, this is a new charm that can unite those who gain admiration and affection in life when she knows how to fulfill all her duties and make use of all her advantages to the benefit of those who surround her. 64 Valmont seems to feel some nostalgia for the salons of the eighteenth century, although Carmen Martín Gaite observes in Usos amorosos del siglo XVIII that, in Spain, the substance of women’s conversation was somewhat lacking. See also Habermas 159175 on the deterioration of salon culture.

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In spite of her worries about the increasing social segregation of the sexes, Valmont asserts that there are some measures to which women should not stoop in order to gain men’s company. One is visiting the gaming tables; public faith in women’s ability to manage money is fragile enough without gambling (N.o 295). Another practice to be avoided is going to restaurants. Valmont chastises women for accompanying their husbands to late-night restaurants and cafes. The wives’ justification of the custom is that they are keeping their husbands company in an activity for which they would otherwise seek disreputable companionship. Valmont still objects because demi-mondaines originated the practice of dining in public, and even though she understands and sympathizes with the logic, she is afraid that respectable women will be contaminated by association. Pretenden las señoras que hacen el sacrificio de imitar a las que las han precedido en esta costumbre, para no privar a sus esposos de este ratito de desahogo en mejor y, sobre todo, más legítima compañía que la que suelen tener en esos momentos. Juzgan que de este modo siguen desempeñando el papel de ángeles de la guarda de sus maridos, y no vacilan en arrostrar los peligros a que se exponen; porque en éstos tiempos y en esos sitios de que hablo, sólo se juzga por las apariencias, y no es fácil distinguir si bajo un magnífico traje, confeccionado por el más hábil y artístico modista de París, se oculta un corazón noble y honrado, o un alma pervertida por los vicios sociales. Yo creo, y supongo que mis lectoras estarán de acuerdo conmigo en esto, que aunque se vaya del brazo de un esposo, no conduce a la verdadera felicidad el camino donde se encuentran esas paradas y fondas tan resbaladizas. (22 de noviembre de 1891, Año IV, N.o 203) Those women who make the sacrifice of imitating those who first established this custom are trying to provide their husbands with better and, above all, more legitimate company than that which they’re used to having during these hours of leisure. They think that in this way they are still fulfilling the role of their husbands’ guardian angels, and they don’t hesitate to brave the dangers to which they are exposed, because at these hours and in these places, people judge only by appearances, and it’s not easy to distinguish if under a magnificent outfit, made by the most able and artistic designer of Paris, is hidden a noble and honest heart or a soul perverted by the social vices. I believe, and I assume my readers are in agreement with me, that although one is on a husband’s arm, the road on which one finds these sordid restaurants and taverns does not lead to true happiness.

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Valmont’s objections are somewhat surprising, since she usually champions sites of consumption and display as being healthy for the economy65. She does not believe that domesticity is threatened by public entertainment; she approves of balls, bazaars, exhibitions, and the theatre. These entertainments, however, are socially select. Restaurants and cafes disturb her because of the possibility of confusion between respectable and disreputable women. In her fashion writing, she is not threatened by the possibility that someone may use fashion to confuse or disguise her class status, but there can be no confusion about virtue.

MARRIAGE, AMBITION, AND EDUCATION The danger in the new trends in entertainment, in Valmont’s view, is that as the sexes lose the inclination or ability to socialize with each other, male and female interests will become separate. In this respect, Valmont fears that even the intimate bond of marriage is in crisis. The appearance of marriage agencies and want ads for brides is the catalyst for a series of columns on the changing nature of matrimony. Of course, Valmont strongly censures this development. But she does also represent other women’s objections to her position. What are single women with no prospects to do? Many have to go to work as house-keepers or nurses for men; if one must live in this kind of economic bondage, why not seek the added security of marriage? Even for destitute women, Valmont is against marriage as an economic contract. Accepting the most menial work is better than seeking gain from marriage. For her, union between two persons is defined by romance and self-sacrifice66. Terminaré limitándome a afirmar que el matrimonio no es un contrato de interés [...]. No se trata pues como entre personas del mismo sexo, de servicio por servicio, de producto por producto, de derechos por derechos, lo que es el fundamento del órden económico [...]. (15 de noviembre de 1896, Año IX, N.o 463) 65 From the time restaurants, café-concerts, and other modes of public entertainment came into fashion, there was a strong current of critical resistance based on the concern about taking entertainment out of the home and into the public. See Clark and also Spang. For the Spanish context, see Larra’s «La fonda nueva». 66 See Charnon-Deutsch, Narrative of Desire, for an analysis of sacrifice and social masochism.

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I’ll end, limiting myself to insisting that marriage isn’t a contract for profit [...]. It can’t be treated as if it were between persons of the same sex, one service in exchange for another, one product for another, certain rights in exchange for others, as in the case of the economic order [...].

In her investigation of the crisis in marriage customs, Valmont comments on the demographic situation in England, the «odd women» phenomenon, which leaves many women without prospective marriage partners67. Yet she often ignores the «odd women» issue in favor of other explanations for the decline in marriages. In one column she blames the increasing expense of daily life. Comfort costs more: women are not finding men who can offer it at the level they have enjoyed while growing up; men cannot afford a wife. Her analysis soon shifts from the practical consideration of concrete expenses to a critique of values. Reporting on the male perspective of the issue, she states that men do not marry because they cannot support wives with high material expectations. The salaries that they make as mid-level government bureaucrats or mercantile clerks cannot satisfy the ambitions of young girls educated above their station. According to Valmont, women protest that they would rather remain single than accept the privations of marriage of less than middle-class status and instead opt for independent employment as governesses or secretaries. Many of the «odd women» had to work or starve, but Valmont refuses to acknowledge this inescapable demographic problem. Instead, she treats the marriage question as a lifestyle choice indicative of misguided values. In one example, Valmont devotes a whole column to a letter written by a young girl of marriageable age and the response it elicits from an unnamed marriage expert. This particular girl has received an elite education but only a modest dowry. Her parents have hoped for an advantageous match on the basis of her good looks and schooling, but such a match has failed to materialize. Should this woman give up her marriage aspirations and become a teacher? By this time there was a good deal of competition in the teaching profession from British and German women. Her education has been so excellent that she can even consider attending medical school, but she is worried about the «stigma 67 On the «odd women» phenomenon see George Gissing’s exposé novel The Odd Women, with Marcia Fox’s introduction. In the 1890’s demographic imbalances left more than one million women without prospective marriage partners.

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of masculinization» and doubts that she will ever be allowed to practice anyway. The expert responds that her whole education and expectations are the fault of the miscalculations of the parents. He advises the girl to set her sights lower on the socioeconomic scale and to see the value of a husband devoted to work, perhaps in commerce or industry. By this time, these professions were acknowledged to lead to an improved social standing and material lifestyle, but some girls still judged it preferable to find a husband who did not need to earn a living. «La verdad, aunque triste, es señorita, que usted y las que pertenecen a su clase, es decir a la burguesía medianamente acomodada, han sido educadas, partiendo de una teoría que es falsa, y por lo tanto causa del malestar de que usted se lamenta. No tengo capital —piensan los padres— pero mi posición me permite dar a mi hija una esmera educación. Es guapa, honrada, y además instruída. Malo ha de ser que no encuentre un buen acomodo con estas cualidades». Pues bien; todo eso no basta para hallar un marido. Serán ustedes objeto de admiraciones, de lisonjas, pero las que van a los bailes a buscar consorte, lo primero que preguntan es a cuánto asciende el dote. Y esto no debe extrañar: ustedes buscan un marido de lujo, natural es que los que pueden considerarse como tales, se hagan pagar caros. No lo esperen ustedes todo de los hombres; busquen ustedes el bienestar en sus propios recursos, en sus propios sentimientos. No desdeñen el arte, la industria, el comercio, que son el alma de las sociedades modernas. (19 de febrero de 1893, Año VI, N.o 268) The truth, sad though it is, is that you and the young ladies of your class, that is to say the comfortable bourgeoisie, have been educated on the basis of a theory that is false, and consequently causes the unhappiness of which you complain. «I don’t have any capital», think the parents, «but my position allows me to give my daughter an elite education. She’s pretty, upright, and educated besides. It would be something if she can’t find a good match with those qualities». Well, all this is not enough to find a husband. You will be the object of admiration, of flattery, but as for those who go to balls to look for a spouse, the first thing they ask is «How much is the dowry?» And this should not be surprising: you are looking for a first class husband; it’s only natural that those who can consider themselves such expect a good price for it. Do not expect everything from men: look for happiness from your own resources, your own sentiments. Do not disdain art, industry, and commerce, which are the soul of modern societies.

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The discourse of class in Valmont’s columns on marriage is contradictory to that of her fashion writing. Indeed, she seems to have written herself into a corner when she criticizes young girls for seeking material comfort in a marriage. According to Valmont, fashion and consumer values are empowering on many levels: social, economic, and personal. Desire, the power to imagine better material circumstances, provides the energy for consumerism and prosperity68. But, although she never directly acknowledges the connection, consumer values seem to be invading, even corrupting non-material dimensions of existence, particularly areas that affect the quality of women’s lives, such as marriage. While fantasies of improved standing may be expressed in dress, thanks to mass-marketed fashion, the same expression of desire is not so easily realizable when choosing a spouse, at least not within the idealized version of domestic virtue that Valmont promotes. The only solution lies in careful education. A good education, Valmont has written in her fashion columns, includes the formation of taste and an instinct for elegance. Training in the codes of appearance —grooming and dress— must be kept separate and distinct from moral education. In this respect, Valmont again contradicts herself, since she has elsewhere represented fashion and taste as the mirror of a person’s moral virtue. La solución que se impone, pero que requiere una completa y por consiguiente lenta transformación de las costumbres, es teóricamente muy sencilla. Si enseñamos a apreciar en lo que valen las cualidades morales, y prevenimos los peligros a que arrastra la fiebre de riquezas, aliviaremos una buena parte de las enfermedades sociales que aquejan a la generación presente. (7 de agosto de 1898, Año XI, N.o 553) The solution that’s called for, but that will require a complete and gradual transformation of customs, is theoretically very simple. If we teach [our children] to appreciate the value of moral qualities, and prevent the dangers brought on by the fever for riches, we will cure a good many of the social ills that trouble the present generation.

Despite the lively activity of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza during the years of La Última Moda’s publication, Valmont rarely discusses formal education in her columns. She is against co-education, and she 68 See Campbell’s theory of consumerism, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, 88-95.

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speaks out against the abolition of a course in morals from primary school curriculum69. For the most part, the aspects of education that interest her have to do with the problems of reaching an equilibrium between moral and consumer education. Toys, games, and childhood customs have an important role in teaching proper values in both areas. Two years running, Valmont writes about the adoption of the English custom of putting presents around a Christmas tree. In the first year, Valmont condemns the practice of displaying presents as competitive and ostentatious (N.o 158). Later, she changes her opinion: Los árboles de Navidad, tan generalizados en París, en el Norte de Francia y en el Norte de Europa, siguen siendo el embeleso de los niños y el encanto de los padres. La industria y el arte se ponen de acuerdo para aumentar cada año los atractivos de este juguete que tantas sorpresas y alegrías infantiles representa, y como para contrarrestar las codicias, las ambiciones, los egoísmos de nuestros tiempos, la idea de aprovechar la felicidad de los niños ricos para aumentarla enseñándolos a repartirla con los niños pobres, se acentúa y progresa siendo ésta una esperanza de que las virtudes cristianas acompañarán y sobrevivirán a todos los progresos y a todos los retrocesos de la humanidad. (18 de diciembre de 1892, Año V, N.o 259) Christmas trees, so popular in Paris, northern France, and northern Europe, continue to fascinate children and charm parents. Industry and art cooperate each year to improve the attractions of this plaything that represents so many youthful surprises and joys, and to correct the envy, ambition, and egoism of our times, taking the happiness of wealthy children and increasing it by teaching them to share with poor children, thereby giving hope that Christian virtues will accompany and survive all the progress and all the backsliding of humanity.

In this second column, art and industry, the twin engines of consumerism, are working together to teach children to share with those less fortunate than themselves. The toy industry can influence the consumer habits of children for good or ill. While Valmont writes about fashion manufacturers as artists who interpret the desires of the public to the benefit of all, in the case of the toy industry, she recommends parental activism in monitoring the effects of toys on children’s acquisitive impulses. 69

For background on educational policy see Scanlon, La polémica feminista.

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In a particularly entertaining column, Valmont writes about the important role that dolls have in a girl’s education. They help her form maternal and domestic instincts; they give her a playmate and someone to care for. ¿Qué es una muñeca? No es una cosa ni un objeto, es una persona, es la niña de la niña. Ésta la presta con su imaginación la vida, el movimiento, la acción y hasta la responsabilidad. Con la muñeca hace lo que sus padres con ella; la enseña, la dirige, la gobierna como ella es enseñada, dirigida y gobernada. (6 de enero de 1895, Año VIII, N.o 366) What is a doll? It’s not a thing or an object; it’s a person, the daughter of a little girl. With her imagination, she gives to her doll life, movement, activity, and even responsibility. With her doll, she does what her parents do with her; she teaches, directs, and governs her as she is taught, directed and governed.

But the problem is that dolls and their clothing are becoming every day more luxurious and showy. All the dolls in shop windows look like princesses. Valmont worries that this sets a bad example for the girls. She suggests that in addition to their other functions, dolls should provide fashion training, teaching young girls the difference between elegance and ostentation70. Dolls should be bought with only a shift and simple shoes, and mother and daughter can work together to sew the doll’s wardrobe. Asi desde temprano aprenderán a vestirse, y si son ricas sabrán lo que encargan a las modistas, y si no lo son se vestirán siempre bien, con economía, y gozarán la satisfacción que proporciona el trabajo [...]. En cuanto a las muñecas vestidas, con lujo, es un espectáculo de tristes consecuencias el que se da a las niñas. ¿Cómo han de consentir que sus muñecas vistan mejor que ellas? ¿Qué ideas no bullirán en aquellos inconscientes cerebros al ver a todas horas terciopelo, raso, encajes, joyas, plumas? Una madre inteligente, puede con el auxilio de la muñeca hacer de su hija poco a poco una mujer dotada de todas las virtudes morales, y de todos los atractivos que hacen de la hermosa mitad del género humano, el angel tutelar del hogar. (N.o 366)

70 Aldaraca cites Rousseau’s Emile as a foundational text on the education of little girls in adornment. 109.

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In this way, [girls] will learn early on how to dress, and if they are rich they will learn what is done by seamstresses, and if they are not they will still always dress well and economically, and they’ll enjoy the satisfaction that comes from work [...]. As for dolls [that are sold] luxuriously dressed, they offer young girls a spectacle that will have sad consequences. How can the girls allow their dolls to be dressed better than they themselves? What ideas won’t begin to swirl in the innocent brains on always seeing velvet, satin, lace, jewels, and feathers? An intelligent mother can, with the help of a doll, gradually make of her daughter a woman possessed of all the moral virtues and all the attractions that make of the fair sex the guiding angel of the home.

By dressing dolls, young girls can learn to make clothes and learn strategies for creating outfits at low cost. In addition to criticizing the extravagance of manufactured doll clothing, Valmont points out that doll furniture is becoming increasingly elaborate and expensive. Valmont rarely critiques industry practice, but in this case she does so, commenting not only on the excessive nature of the clothes and furnishings themselves, but also on the grossly inflated prices, well over the cost of actually manufacturing the items. Pero consideren un momento el daño que hacen con estos regalos, y es muy posible que piensen como yo que son más útiles los bebés desnuditos, y las muñecas que vestidas con modestia, no despiertan la idea del lujo y vestidas con arte y elegancia, forman el buen gusto, hacen apreciar el valor de la sencillez y dar la más acabada idea de la belleza pura. (N.o 366) But consider for a moment the damage that can be done by these gifts, and it’s possible that you will come to think as I do that undressed dolls are more useful, and that dolls dressed with modesty won’t awaken ideas of luxury, and [those] dressed with artfulness and elegance will instill good taste, and appreciation for the value of simplicity, and a well-formed idea of pure beauty.

Although Valmont addresses the question of schools for girls or women only occasionally, she does discuss the kind of knowledge women need to have in their roles as household managers. She asks, for example, if women need to study science, usually recognized as a subject for men. The answer is, to some extent, yes. The reasons for acquiring this learning are twofold. On the one hand, scientific knowledge is useful in some aspects of domesticity71. An understanding of the principles of light, 71

See Aldaraca, 70 for more on domesticity and education.

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heat and ventilation contributes to the comfort of the home. Food hygiene, chemistry, and first aid are obviously useful. Mechanical skills can be used to help maintain coffee grinders, scales, and sewing machines. Study of botany can be applied to growing decorative and medicinal plants. Knowledge of family law is recommended, curiously, in order to avoid lawsuits. Moreover, women need to have basic knowledge in order to fulfill their function as educators. While mothers train their children in codes of behavior as a matter of course, scientific knowledge is also useful in making phenomena of the natural world, such as storms or illness, less frightening to children. However, Valmont adds, there is really no need for women to become scientists, doctors or lawyers. These professional accomplishments pale against the rewards of domesticity and are not to be encouraged. [...] todos los triunfos que algunas puedan obtener en las universidades, en los ateneos y en el desempeño de cargos reservados hasta ahora a los varones, podrían, sin duda alguna considerarse efímeros y de una importancia muy secundaria al lado de los que en el hermoso retiro de la vida íntima consigan alcanzar, ayudando a su esposo en la lucha por la existencia, y educando con solícito esmero a sus hijos. (6 de noviembre de 1898, Año XI, N.o 566) [...] all the triumphs that women can attain in universities, learned circles, and the discharge of duties previously reserved for men, can be without a doubt considered ephemeral and of secondary importance next to those they attain in the shelter of private life, assisting their husbands with the struggle for existence and taking pains over the instruction of their children.

Just as mothers themselves have no need of formal credentials, the fashion for educating young girls in advanced classroom subjects rather than domestic sciences is equally to be deplored. Valmont considers the new curriculum in England eccentric and possibly harmful. Las que se han educado en Colegios montados a la moderna, cuando vuelven al seno de su familia se niegan a compartir con sus madres los quehaceres de la casa, el cuidado de sus hermanitos [...]. Su gran pasión en la actualidad es por la economía política, la botánica y la geología. Estas tres ciencias son las que están de moda en Londres entre las señoritas, y cuando se reúnen en un gabinete o en un salón unas cuantas MISS, dan vivísimos deseos de huir de ellas; porque su conversación hace creer que se halla quien la escucha, en un manicomio o poco menos. (18 de noviembre de 1896, Año IX, N.o 462)

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Those who have been educated in modern schools refuse to share household chores or child care with their mothers once they return home [...]. Their great passion now is political economy, botany, and geology. These three sciences are all the rage right now among young ladies in London, and whenever some «misses» gather in a drawing room or salon, one feels a keen desire to flee, because their conversation makes one believe one’s self in a madhouse or something of the sort.

Valmont’s opinion of American education is even worse. She mentions one school of which she has heard in which Irish, Norwegian, and Italian girls are taught how to do household tasks. Valmont is mistakenly taking for official mainstream curriculum what are apparently either assimilation or job training courses for immigrant women who need survival skills. Perhaps the girls are learning middle-class standards of housekeeping so that they can go into service. But Valmont scoffs at these courses, saying that such skills cannot be taught; they must be learned at a mother’s side. America has rejected domestic values, and the housewife is extinct. She accuses American women of routinely placing their children in the care of others so that they themselves will be free for other pursuits, some frivolous —reading or painting, some unseemly— politics or community service. With the mothers so distracted, it is no wonder that the children end up in co-educational schools or that young girls enjoy unusual and dangerous freedoms (N.o 214). Valmont insists that the «so-called equality» of American women is not to be envied; they are far from enjoying the superior happiness of the European mother, wife, or daughter. Fortunately, outlandish American customs have not yet been adopted in France, Spain, or Italy, but Valmont feels the need to caution her readers. «Para huir del peligro, lo mejor es conocerle» [To escape the danger, it’s best to be familiar with it] (Año X).

FEMINISM AND MASCULINIZATION The very term «feminism» is problematic in discussing Valmont’s position on women’s rights. Scholarship on early Spanish women’s movements has concentrated on the movement of political feminism72. Valmont herself applies the term «feminism» to all the kinds of women’s activism 72

Nash, «Two Decades of Women’s History in Spain», 391-92.

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that she rejects. Nevertheless, she is dedicated to the discussion of any social or cultural movements that affect the quality of women’s lives as they are defined by traditional gender roles. Las lectoras asíduas de La Última Moda conocen mi modo de pensar, y saben que no me entusiasman las tendencias que la mujer francesa, y más aún la mujer inglesa, y la mujer norteamericana, tienen a convertirse en hombres, o por lo menos a usurpar al sexo fuerte sus atribuciones, sus tareas y su modo de ser. (17 de septiembre de 1888, Año I, N.o 37) The eager readers of La Última Moda know my thinking and they know I’m not impressed by the tendencies of French, English, and North American women to turn themselves into men, or at least usurp from the stronger sex its attributes, tasks, and way of life.

Valmont is troubled by anything she fears could result in the «masculinization» of women. Most frequently when she uses this term she is referring to reversal of public/private roles, but she may occasionally have in mind instances of disguise such as that of Concepción Arenal, who attended university dressed in men’s clothes73. The main danger against which she warns is professionalization. In her coverage of the Chicago Exposition of 1893, she singles out Evaville for special ridicule74. Evaville was an exhibition building designed by a female architect and constructed by female carpenters and bricklayers. The purpose of the building was to exhibit art work by women. Previously, she had favorably reviewed a French exposition dedicated to women’s art; Valmont is never critical of women’s artistic self-expression. But she considers the fact of the building itself an ideological expression of feminism of which she cannot approve. As she summarizes in her objections, «Las mujeres demostrarán prácticamente que pueden reemplazar a los hombres» [Women will demonstrate that they can practically replace men]. (1893) Valmont finds the increasing numbers of women entering the professions alarming. In 1891 she devotes a column to the results of a British

For an account of how the media attempted to masculinize Arenal for having resorted to this disguise in her youth see Mangini, 39-42. 74 A pamphlet on this exhibit, Art and Handicraft in the Women’s Building of the World’s Columbian Exposition, is listed as part of the Smithsonian collection on World’s Fairs. See Rydell, 147, item N.o 836. 73

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census which demonstrates that between 1871 and 1891 numbers of female clerks, doctors, journalists, and architects had increased75. Again, she characterizes this trend as «an invasion of male prerogatives». In Spain, the acceptance of women into white-collar work was much slower. María Castells y Ballespí became qualified to practice medicine and surgery in 1882, but most women wishing to enter medical careers had to do so in the capacity of support workers: nurses, hygienists, cooks or laundresses in hospitals (Scanlon 72-73). Probably the largest number of Spanish women professionals was concentrated in letters, particularly journalism. Valmont herself is a professional in this respect, but she never offers words of support or encouragement to other women who might aspire to a writing career. The one concession she makes in her editorial stand against professional women is a column in which she sanctions the inclusion of lettered women into learned societies. The date of this column locates it squarely in the middle of the controversy in which Pardo Bazán was embroiled on the admission of women into the Real Academia de las Letras: Ni mujeres hombrunas, ni hombres afeminados. Pero ¿por qué razón se ha de privar a la mujer que en la ciencia, en las letras o en las artes ha podido elevarse al nivel de los hombres, y aun ser superior a ellos, de un privilegio, de un honor que no se ha concedido en un principio al sexo masculino, sino al genio creador, al talento excepcional, a cualidades extraordinarias, que por ser atributos del alma eluden las leyes de la naturaleza física? (16 de agosto de 1891, Año IV, N.o 189) Neither masculine women nor effeminate men. But why should a woman who has reached or even exceeded the abilities of men in science, letters, or the arts be deprived of a privilege that was not conceded to maleness, but to creative genious, exceptional talent, to extraordinary qualities which, since they are attributes of the soul, elude the physical laws of nature?

If a woman has no choice but to enter the ranks of professionals and becomes accomplished in her field, then she is entitled to equal standing and compensation. However, this should never be regarded as the The actual numbers she cites are: «administration», 1871-5,000 women, 18918,546; doctors, 1871-0, 1891-101; nurses, 1871-no figures, 1891-53,000; journalists and writers, 1871-225, 1891-660; painters and sculptors, 1871-1,960, 1891-3,032; architects, 1891-19; music teachers, 1891-19,000; actresses, 1891-3,698 [No figures for 1871.] March 1, 1891, Año IV, N.o 165. 75

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preferred choice for a woman. All aspirations and training should originally be centered on the goal of domesticity. Hay mujeres que se complacen en el estudio de las ciencias sociales y políticas, y peroran o escriben sobre los temas más dificiles de la filosofía, de la economía, de la jurisprudencia, de la medicina o de las matemáticas. Hay, en fin, mujeres que dirigen con acierto la explotación de una industria, o administran bienes, o emprenden negocios financieros con sorprendente habilidad. También hay hombres que sobresalen en la ejecución de labores femeniles, que poseen especial maña para desempeñar los quehaceres domésticos. En todos los idiomas hay palabras para calificar a aquellas mujeres que invaden el dominio de los hombres y a estos hombres que invaden el dominio de las mujeres. (1 de marzo de 1891, Año IV, N.o 165) There are women who indulge themselves in the study of the social sciences or politics, or they make speeches and write articles on the most difficult issues of philosophy, economics, jurisprudence, medicine, or mathematics. There are, finally, women skilled in managing industry, administrating property, or undertaking financial endeavors with surprising ability. There are also men who excel in the performance of feminine work, who possess a special skill in executing domestic tasks. In all languages there are words for those women who invade the territory of men and for those men who invade the territory of women.

There are words for persons of inverted preferences, but Valmont clearly implies that such words are so derogatory that she cannot print any of them. She treats the entry of bourgeois women into «white-collar» professions as a perverse lifestyle choice. In her opinion, domesticity is sanctioned by Christian doctrine and to reject it is to try to rearrange divine order. She makes concessions only to women who have no family or protectors, who have no choice but to support themselves outside the home. La emancipación de la mujer, la conversión de las que han nacido para ser ángeles en el mundo, bajo la forma de hijas, madres, esposas, hermanas, en doctoras, abogadas, ingenieras, todo para que la mujer tenga personalidad propia y pueda por sí sola abrirse paso sin vivir a expensas del hombre; en una palabra, todas esas aspiraciones de algunas desgraciadas que no poseen las virtudes de la mujer cristiana y que se llaman pomposamente las ideas modernas, me parecen aberraciones [...]. (17 de septiembre de 1888, Año I, N.o 37)

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The emancipation of women, the conversion of those born to be angels in the world, in the form of daughters, mothers, wives, and sisters, into doctors, lawyers, engineers, all so that a woman can have her own personality and make her way in the world on her own without living at the expense of men, in a word, all the aspirations of these unfortunates that don’t have the virtues of a Christian woman and that are pompously called ‘modern ideas’ seem to me to be aberrations [...].

Valmont treats the issue of bourgeois working women as separate from that of proletarian women. At this socioeconomic level, Darwin’s principle of «survival of the fittest» operates. Women of the lower classes are sometimes forced to choose work over domesticity by the conditions of industrialized societies, but in «gentler» societies women would be protected from such a choice. La mujer en los países más avanzados de Europa se encuentra ante el terrible dilema de trabajar o sucumbir, y no tiene más remedio que sufrir la ley de Darwin o sea tomar parte activa en lo que el terrible y admirable naturalista llama lucha por la existencia. El problema económico se ha impuesto al problema moral, y la lucha entre los sexos es inevitable. (Año X) Women in the more advanced countries of Europe find themselves in the terrible dilemma of work or succumb, and they have no choice but to suffer Darwin’s law, that is to play an active part in what the terrible and admirable naturalist calls the struggle for existence. The economic problem has become a moral one, and the battle between the sexes is inevitable.

In accord with her concerns about working women and inverted gender roles, Valmont cites the negative example of Belgium. According to Valmont, Belgian factory owners prefer to hire women because they demand less in terms of accommodation and pay. So, instead of taking typical female employment, such as clerical work at the post or telegraph office, Belgian women are working with metal, arms, and explosives. The result is that the homes are empty, and the taverns are full of men who refuse to assume household duties themselves. Los hogares están desiertos, los hijos del pueblo se crían a la buena de Dios, los hombres obligados a la ociosidad llenan las tabernas, y las mujeres salen temprano de casa, pasan el día en el taller y vuelven rendidas sin poder cumplir la misión que en el seno de la familia les está encomendada.

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Gran número de obreros se hallan con este motivo sin trabajo, y es muy frecuente oírles decir: —Ahora somos nosotros mujeres. (7 de agosto de 1892, Año V, N.o 240) The homes are deserted, the children of the villages are brought up any which way, men condemned to idleness fill the taverns, the women leave the house early, spend the day in the workshops, and return worn-out, unable to fulfill their mission in the bosom of the family. A good number of workers consequently find themselves without work, and frequently one hears them say: Now we are the women.

The few activist women’s groups that Valmont endorses have a mission to improve the lives of working women. Such improvement usually involves a program to remove women from the factories and restore them to the home. While covering a feminist conference at the International Exposition in Brussels, Valmont interviews Madame Pierre Froment, director of La acción femenil, who outlines her plans for reconstruction of the proletarian family. Queremos —ha dicho a su interlocutor— restaurar la familia cristiana como medio seguro y eficaz de moralizar la sociedad. Ante todo y sobre todo, hay que reconstituir la familia obrera, la familia proletaria, que sólo existe por rara excepción. La mujer en la fábrica o en el obrador, significa el desorden en la casa, los hijos abandonados, y el marido en la taberna. Utilizando la gran palanca del periodismo moderno, y organizando contínuas conferencias, procuraremos destruir este mal social, y conseguir al mismo tiempo que devolvemos a la mujer sus atribuciones en el hogar, considerando su trabajo en beneficio de su familia superior al que ejecuta ganando un mísero jornal, que este jornal mísero se aumente como es justo, en favor de las jóvenes y de las solteras o viudas; porque no hay motivo para que en igualdad de circunstancias se remunere de un modo el trabajo del hombre y de otro inferior el de la mujer. (5 de septiembre de 1897, Año X, N.o 505) We want [she responds to the interviewer] to restore the Christian family, as the most sure and efficacious way of moralizing society. Before anything else, we have to restore the workers’ family, the proletariat family, that only stays intact in rare exceptions. A woman in the factory or workshop means disorder in the house, the children abandoned, and the husband in the tavern. By using the great influence of modern journalism and organizing continuous conferences, we mean to destroy this social

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ill, at the same time returning to woman her powers in the home, considering the work she does for the benefit of her family more important than that which she does to earn a miserable daily wage, that this miserable wage be raised, as is just, in favor of the young, the single, or the widowed, because there’s no reason that in equal circumstances a man should be paid more than a woman.

In spite of the dire financial straights many working families suffered, Madame Froment declares that the small wage these women are capable of earning cannot make up for disorder in the home. The benefit of rehabilitating woman as guardian of the family far outweighs the miserable pittance she can earn as a worker. The restoration of wives and mothers to the home will mean more positions and better wages for single or widowed women, who have no choice but to work. The other delegates to the Brussels conference whom Valmont chooses to highlight echo Madame Froment’s position. Madame Kergosnard, another Frenchwoman, reiterates the sentiment that the business of the congress should not be to call for working women’s rights, but to aim for «an increase in the number of homes». Miss Drucker, a Dutch representative, calls for special attention to the rights of working-class housewives. Specifically, she wants such women to enjoy legal rights to their husbands’ wages, since it is well known that «a good part of workers spend what they earn in the tavern» (N.o 504). Valmont favors a brand of feminism that concentrates on representing the needs of poor women, but not to the extent that working would become a norm. There seems to be a sort of class displacement in this kind of activism, middle-class women lobbying for the rights of impoverished ones. Valmont and her readers must assume that the middle class woman is happy in her state. Agitation for change is permissible if woman is in a financial, moral, or domestic state that is distant from the bourgeois ideal of domesticity. So, the approved form of feminism is a form of charity, of lobbying for the rights of someone else. Bourgeois women have no reason, that Valmont recognizes, to lament their economic or material standing. If feminism were centered on a middle-class agenda, then the premise would have to be that there is something limiting in domesticity that has nothing to do with economics, but with more abstract conceptions of fulfillment and rights. Valmont cannot approve this kind of problematizing of bourgeois existence.

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The areas in which Valmont does support feminist groups are reform of property and penal laws. The Código Civil of 1889 does not grant women any property rights76. As mentioned previously by Miss Drucker, women need property rights as a precaution against the possibility of male misbehavior. If the man of the family squanders money, then the wife and mother must be able to take protective action. In the case of penal law, Valmont points out that this is the only legal area in which women enjoy the same «rights» as men. She finds it ironic that female responsibility should be acknowledged in penal law while it is not believed that women are responsible enough to manage money77. Condendada a eterna tutela bajo el punto de vista de su personalidad jurídica, sólo es considerada como el hombre por el Derecho penal. Buena para sufrir los castigos que inflige la ley a los que delinquen; buena para pagar los tributos, soportar las cargas y las molestias que se imponen a los ciudadanos; no se la reconoce aptitud para administrar por sí misma sus bienes, cuando vive en familia y no ejerce la funciones de jefe, ni para comparecer como testigo en los actos que corresponden al Derecho civil. De manera que para ser prudentes y justas las aspiraciones femeniles, deben limitarse a pedir y obtener en el orden civil, no por la violencia y el rencor, sino por la bondad, la dulzura e invocando la equidad, que como personalidad jurídica sean considerados el hombre y la mujer con derechos y deberes idénticos. (25 de abril de 1897, Año X, N.o 486) Condemned to eternal tutelage as a legal entity, she only has the same rights as a man under the penal code. She’ll serve to suffer the punishments the law metes out to delinquents; she’ll serve to pay taxes, suffer the responsibilities and the nuisances imposed on the citizen, but there is no recognition of her aptitude to administer her own property, when she’s part of a family rather than acting as a single agent, or to appear as a witness in any civil cases. For feminine aspirations to be prudent and just, they should be limited to asking for and obtaining in the civil sphere, not by means of violence or anger, but by means of goodness, sweetness, and appeal to fairness, that men and women be considered as possessing equal rights and duties as legal entities.

76 See Nash Mujer, familia, y trabajo, 159-193, for pertinent excerpts of the Código Civil of 1889. 77 See Jagoe, 37, 90.

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Valmont’s articulation of her beliefs on women’s rights is very important here. She is for equal civil rights, particularly property rights, but not equal political rights. Valmont believes that feminine moral attributes are in conflict with the qualities necessary to perform in the political arena. She feels that politics is by definition corrupting, and if a woman enters into this arena, then she loses the moral authority to fulfill her duty as wife and mother78. She specifically cites two cautionary examples of women who meddle in politics. The first is the Duchess of Uzés, who has brought shame and scandal upon herself by trying to suborn a government minister and influence his votes (N.o 143). While the Duchess attempted to participate in politics through subterfuge, Luisa Michel has brought ridicule on herself by participating in politics openly, publishing articles and making speeches. «Should a woman involve herself in politics?» Valmont asks. ¿Debe ser la mujer política? Juzgo que no, si ser política u ocuparse en política significa entregarse a esa tarea que consume las fuerzas físicas y morales de los hombres en una lucha que no es ni más ni menos que la tan decantada lucha por la existencia, por más que se la oculta con el relumbrante y desgraciadamente falso concepto del amor a la patria. La política, que para la mayoría de los hombres políticos es una profesión, un medio de vivir [...] no hay orden ni paz, ni prosperidad, y este malestar público se refleja en la vida privada, destruyendo los santos goces de la vida de la familia, base y fundamento de las venturas y grandezas de la vida social. La mujer puede y debe ser política, por el bien de los seres queridos que la rodean, por el bien general que ha de reflejarse en su alma y repercutir en su hogar [...]. Los tres elementos más importantes de la grandeza de los pueblos: la religión, el amor, la caridad, viven en su alma en constante actividad. Su trabajo es modesto, pero continuo y eficaz. Redúcese a inculcar en el corazón del hijo las virtudes que mañana harán de él un hombre justo, y, lo que es más, un hombre valeroso. Y he aquí cómo la mujer, formando buenos hijos y conservando como esposa estas buenas cualidades, puede ofrecer a la patria buenos ciudadanos, que a su vez realicen las aspiraciones de paz y de prosperidad que abriga la mujer, no tanto para ella como para los que viven a su lado en la atmósfera de su cariño. (5 de octubre de 1890, Año III, N.o 144)

78 Valmont cites two Spanish writers on legal rights as the basis of her opinions: Urbano González Serrano, and Francisco García Cuevas, Cartilla del ciudadano español.

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Should women concern themselves with politics? I think not, if being political or entering into politics means giving oneself up to those tasks that consume the physical and moral strength of men in a struggle that is neither more nor less the so-called fight to survive, no matter how much it’s disguised by the dazzling but unfortunately false concept of patriotism [...]. Politics, for the majority of male politicians, is a profession, a way to make a living [...] there’s neither order nor peace, or prosperity, and public unrest becomes reflected in private life, destroying the sacred pleasures of family life, the foundation of all that is good and great in social life. Women can and should interest themselves in politics, for the good of those she holds dear and the general good that’s reflected in her soul and rebounds in her home [...]. The three most important elements of a great society are: religion, love, and charity, and these are constantly active in her soul. Her work is modest, but constant and effective. It comes down to inculcating in the heart of her son the virtues that tomorrow will make a just and worthy man. And thus woman, raising good sons and preserving these qualities as a good wife, can offer the country good citizens, who in their turn will realize the aspirations of peace and prosperity that women hold dear, not so much for themselves as for those who live surrounded by their affection.

Valmont frequently seems to contradict herself by commenting in her columns on such political issues as corruption in management of the public infrastructure, stock market crashes, and the Panama Canal fiasco. In one column, she digresses from reporting on local charity functions to embark on a diatribe against government waste, quoting specific figures for military expenditure. She declares her alarm at the millions of francs that arms alone cost, not to mention the lives and homes they destroy. Estos datos pueden dar una idea a las lectoras de lo que despilfarran los gobiernos para hombrearse unos con otros; y así se explica la situación que atraviesan las naciones de Europa y los sacrificios que imponen los gobiernos a todas las clases sociales. Si al menos sirvieran para mejorar las condiciones morales y materiales de la vida moderna, podrían darse por bien empleados; pero como eso no sucede, bueno es que nosotras nos enteremos de estas cosas para influir por los medios que están a nuestro alcance en favor de la paz, remedio único de las calamidades que nos rodean. (19 de septiembre de 1897, Año X, N.o 507) These figures can give the readers an idea of what governments waste to act tough with each other, and can explain the situation taking place in Europe, and the sacrifices that governments are imposing on every social class.

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If it at least served to improve the moral and material conditions of modern life, it would be well done, but as this isn’t the case, it’s good for us to know about these things so that we can use whatever methods we can to call for peace, the only remedy for the calamities that surround us.

This seems to be exactly the sort of issue Valmont has previously defined as outside of the female sphere. Her justification is that of educating her readers so that they can educate and influence enfranchised citizens, namely their sons and husbands. Women should not be ignorant or indifferent to political issues; they need only refrain from acting in the public arena. In that sphere, politics is a profession, a dirty, corrupt one.79 Woman is and should be a political creature, however, in terms of the education of her children, the nation’s future citizens. The one example of suffrage on which Valmont comments favorably occurs in Norway. A recent law requires community approval, including the vote of women, for the sale of alcoholic beverages or operation of taverns. Valmont concedes that women’s vote is useful on issues that affect domestic and moral values and the quality of life in the place where they raise their families (Año X). As is customary, Valmont flatters her readers by insisting that feminism is not needed in Spain because of the strength of family values there. From her very earliest columns, Valmont has commended her Spanish readers for their femininity, religious values, and social conservatism. [...] interpreto los sentimientos y los instintos de las mujeres españolas; como yo veo, repito, que en ese hermoso país es donde lo femenil se conserva aun en toda su integridad, me complazco en reconocerlo y aplaudirlo, pidiendo a Dios que la moda de hacer doctoras y marisabidas, o sea (como se llaman) seres independientes a las mujeres, no logre nunca despertar más que las sonrisas y a lo sumo los chistes que estas costumbres y estas aspiraciones antinaturales inspiran a las imaginaciones que el hermoso sol de Mediodía fecundiza con sus brillantes rayos. (25 de junio de 1888, Año I, N.o 25) [...] I interpret the feelings and instincts of Spanish women, and I see, I repeat, that it is in this beautiful nation that femininity is still preserved in all its integrity, I’m pleased to note and applaud, begging God that the fashion for making doctors or know-it-alls, or so-called independent beings out of women will never do more than raise a smile or a joke that these customs and unnatural aspirations raise in the imaginations of those warmed by the brilliant rays of the noonday [Mediterranean] sun. 79

See Armstrong on women’s hidden political power, 19, 92.

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Ten years later, Valmont was worried enough about the gains of American and Northern European feminism to publish an interview with the psychologist Paul Bourget, who diagnosed American and English women as «castamente depravadas» [chastely depraved] on account of their relatively free deportment (N.o 476). Bourget, and Valmont, are concerned that as French and Spanish women have growing contact with American and English girls in European resorts and spas, the contamination might take hold and gradually trickle down to the European middle classes. Valmont tries to explain the peculiarities of American women by reasoning that the mix of different religions and nationalities all thrown together in a harsh country have caused the inhabitants to put material well-being first and spiritual matters second. Feminism is the result of economic struggle; women are «cast out» of the home and thrown upon their own resources in a competitive and predatory economic environment. These same economic conditions now prevail in some European countries, but not yet in Spain. El feminismo, como se denomina la tendencia del sexo débil a igualarse con el fuerte, ha podido ser motivo de lástima para unos, de burla para otros, mientras que sólo algunas escritoras han defendido tan peregrina teoria. Si esta crisis no es todavía profunda en paises como España, donde la familia conserva su prestigio y donde la mujer ejerce el hermoso y dulce imperio que es la compensación de los sacrificios que acepta de buen grado; en Inglaterra, en Francia, en Alemania, donde la lucha por la existencia es más constante, activa y encarnizada, el conflicto se acerca y no es extraño que los publicistas hayan considerado la rebelión femenil como asunto digno de estudio y los legisladores hayan juzgado indispensable introducir reformas en la ley [...]. (24 de enero de 1897, Año X, N.o 473) Feminism, as the tendency of the weaker sex to equate itself to the stronger is called, has been considered a pity by some, a joke by others, while only a few women writers have defended such an extraordinary theory. If this crisis isn’t yet profound in countries like Spain, where the family still enjoys prestige and woman exercises the beautiful and sweet power that compensates for all the sacrifices she willingly accepts; in England, France, and Germany, where the struggle for survival is more constant, active and fierce, the battle is coming, and it’s not surprising that journalists consider feminine rebellion a matter worthy of study and that legislators have decided it’s urgent to introduce reforms in the law [...].

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Valmont includes France among the countries in which women are forced out of the domestic arena by modern economic demands. In her fashion writing, France is the most modern and advanced of Western European countries. In the lifestyle section, however, Valmont reveals the price she feels French women pay for progress and modernity. Although Paris is the beacon of fashion for Spanish women, thanks to superior industrial and economic development, this same development causes economic and social pressures that are eroding the quality of French women’s lives. Valmont’s readers are to be envied because traditional social systems are still intact in Spain. Valmont is only able to maintain her editorial position on Spain by omitting mention of the growing industrialization of Madrid and Barcelona. Even more surprising, in all the years of covering developments in the women’s movements in Northern Europe and America, Valmont almost never mentions that similar developments are taking place in Spain and never names any Spanish activists in the feminist cause. Why this evasion when, although located in France, she is writing in Spanish for a Spanish audience? It has long been a maxim of journalism that a publishing concern sells papers by giving the reader an image of themselves in which they want to believe. Valmont’s readership must have wanted to believe that Spain was different —with a gentler, more gracious way of life. These women are willing to read about radical changes in women’s lives abroad; perhaps they are more able to sympathize with distant causes. But they do not want to believe in the same changes at home: that women might be subject to the grinding hardships of a new economy and that there are strident calls for change. Valmont has a delicate task to accomplish with her conservative readers. To make them aware of what she considers the legitimate causes of the women’s movement, she must discuss events at a non-threatening distance. In the case of feminist elements of which she disapproves, she must certainly represent those as occurring abroad and not at home. She cannot offend her readers by criticizing their own society from her position in France. This would completely destroy the device of Spain representing a positive difference, a device that, by 1899, is beginning to look more and more contrived.

THE THREE WARS For all Valmont’s optimism about the power of fashion to reconcile social divisions, there are three notes of foreboding in the later years of

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publication, three areas in which she is afraid that brewing tensions will break into outright warfare. The first struggle that Valmont anticipates will mar the future is class war, and this war had already surfaced in Spain. When Spanish Prime Minister Cánovas del Castillo is assassinated, Valmont writes a column of condolence, referring also to the bombing of the Liceu and other terrorist attacks in Spain80. (She fails to observe that the Anarchists in Barcelona recruited many members from disaffected textile workers —the same workers producing fabric that supplied the fashion industry.) Paris has also suffered its share of bombings; Valmont condemns the terrorists and reports the passage of a death penalty law to be applied to any conspirator using explosives for terrorist purposes. But she adds: «Algo más habría que hacer, porque no es desacertado pensar que los actos de barbarie que cometen obedecen a la desesperación [...]». [There must be more to do, because it’s not inaccurate to think that these barbarous acts are a response to desperation [...]]. (N.o 503). She theorizes that terrorists are individuals who must have grown up without a family environment, admonishing mothers to take greater heed than ever in giving their children a proper upbringing. Over the years, as she tries to make sense of the terrorist phenomenon, Valmont again invokes a mythic age in which the classes lived together in mutual respect and affection. Antiguamente, cuando una misma casa albergaba a los afortunados y a los pobres obreros, los primeros en los aireados y elegantes pisos, y los segundos en las estrechas y míseras buhardillas, unos y otros se conocían y llegaban a estimarse, porque se prodigaban mútuos favores. La mujer del jornalero asistía en la casa del burgués acomodado, y la esposa de éste visitaba a aquella cuando estaba enferma y la llevaba manjares suculentos y apetitosos para la convalecencia. Los niños de los pobres jugaban con los de los ricos, y de este trato resultaba afecto en unos, consideración y respeto en otros. Las nuevas casas han desterrado las pobres viviendas: los jornaleros han tenido que refugiarse en las afueras de las ciudades. Hasta allí no llegan los auxilios de los pudientes, y al verse abandonados y al sufrir penas inspiradas por la necesidad, y lo que en ellos debía ser amor, se convierte en odio. (7 de enero de 1894, Año VII, N.o 314) Anarchist Santiago Salvador threw two bombs into the audience at the Liceu, Barcelona’s opera house, in October of 1893. Cánovas was shot at a spa by Italian anarchist Angiolillo in 1896. See Robert Hughes, Barcelona 415-422 for a summary of anarchist terrorism in the 1890’s in Barcelona, as well as Carr and Núñez Florencio on both terrorism and the Spanish-American War. 80

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Traditionally, when the same house sheltered both the well-off and the poor workers, the former in the airy and elegant lower floors, and the latter in the narrow and miserable garrets, both sides were acquainted and grew to respect each other, because they exchanged mutual favors. The wife of the day laborer helped in the house of the comfortable bourgeois, and the bourgeois wife visited her helper when she would fall ill, bringing her tasty dishes to enjoy during her convalescence. The children of the poor played with those of the rich, and from this interaction came affection in some, consideration and respect in others. The new houses have exiled the housing of the poor: the laborers have had to find refuge at the outskirts of the city. The aid of the wealthy doesn’t reach that far, and upon seeing themselves abandoned and on suffering the pains of necessity, that which should be love converts to hatred.

Valmont believes that Baron Haussmann’s reorganization of the city is, in a large part, responsible for the alienation between the classes81. The solution she suggests for healing the rift is a paternalistic model of custodianship in the private sector. She promotes a plan in which prosperous bourgeois families would adopt proletarian families and look after them. The wealthy family will ensure that their charges are provided with work, medical care, emergency funds, and vocational education for the children. Rather than formulating a solution to the class problem on the basis of an economic model, Valmont insists on applying a family model. As Bonnie Smith says about French women’s charitable organizations, «despite the social warfare that raged around them, despite the assassination of businessmen in the Nord by anarchists, despite strikes and revolutions, their answer remained more love and morality»82. The next confrontation Valmont anticipates is a war between the sexes. She sees the opening salvos of this battle in the great fire at the Charity Bazaar in the faubourg Saint Germain. The Bazaar was first established in 1891, as an outlet for the sale of needlework and crafts made by poor women. The ladies founding the Bazaar were to bear the overhead, so that the beneficiaries could receive the full price of their goods without discounts or commissions. As an extra attraction, twicemonthly concerts, to be attended by «the most aristocratic and opulent» members of society would draw more persons in to buy. See T. J. Clark on Haussmannization. Smith, 160. For an analysis of the tensions between women’s charitable organizations and State welfare programs, see her chapter «Charity versus Capitalism». 81 82

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A good part of the Bazaar’s charm was that upper-class women acted as salesgirls at the booths and waitresses at the refreshment table. The flirtation and eroticism traditionally associated with salesgirls, the added titillation of society women engaging in an activity improper for their class, resulted in the goods fetching much higher prices than their actual material worth83. ¡Complace tanto a las ilustres damas desempeñar en broma las más humildes funciones de las clases que luchan por la existencia! Ellas, que no regatean el precio de sus caprichos, convertirse en vendedoras de flores, de golosinas, de cigarros; servir a los galanes la copa de Madera o de Jeréz, el sabroso savarín o el suculento emparedado, y emplear sus maliciosas miradas, su peregrino ingenio, su chispeante gracia para hacerse pagar en billetes de Banco o luises de oro esos artículos de repostería que en el comercio ordinario se adquieren por uno o dos francos! Esto las encanta, no sólo porque disfrutan en esos momentos de una agradable y discreta libertad, sino porque suponen que aunque la galantería traspase ciertos límites, le serán perdonados estos flirts, en gracia de la buena obra que ejecutan. (Año IX) The illustrious women are so pleased to jokingly assume the humble functions of the classes that struggle for their existence! They, who don’t bargain over the price of their own caprices, turn into salesgirls of flowers, candy, and cigars; they serve men a glass of Madeira or sherry, a delicious cake or a savory sandwich, and they use their mischievous looks, their rare wit, their scintillating charm to bring in banknotes and gold louis for confectionery that would ordinarily sell for one or two francs. This enchants them, not only because they enjoy for these moments a pleasant and discreet freedom, but also because although [men’s] attentiveness might trespass certain limits, these flirtations will be forgiven in the light of the good works they are performing.

During the sixth year of its operation, a fire broke out during a large charity event. The scandal of the fire was not only the number of persons who perished, but the fact that they were mostly women and children. The male bodies that were found were those of working class men —a coachman, a cook, several workmen. The gentlemen apparently saved themselves without assisting women and children. The popular press

83 For more on salesgirls, flirtation, and eroticism see Jones, «Coquettes and Grissettes» 25-53.

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blamed the feminist movement for the disaster. Marcel Prevost, whom Valmont quotes at length, asserts that feminism has eradicated chivalric values and put the sexes on terms of open warfare. According to Prevost, women can no longer expect sympathy or assistance from educated men, since they are aware of and hurt by feminist demands. Only proletariat men, ignorant of changing ideas and still considering women fragile beings to be protected, will come to women’s aid in the future. (N.o 492) Further forensic investigation indicated that not only did gentlemen fail to assist the ladies, but many women appeared to have been trampled to death by men fleeing the building. Valmont now finds herself sadly in agreement with Prevost that this event, together with current competition between men and women for education and jobs, reveals a «rotting sore» on the social body. Considéranse estos funestos resultados como consecuencia natural y lógica del feminismo; y casi todos los escritores que estos días han dedicado artículos a la deserción de los caballeros en el Bazar, y a la brutal actitud de los alumnos de la Escuela de Bellas Artes, atribuyen el triste estado social que ponen de relieve estos sucesos, a la actitud en que se han colocado las que aspirando a la emancipación de la mujer, defienden y propagan con incansable afán exageradas teorías feministas. (13 de junio de 1897, Año X, N.o 493) These terrible results are considered the natural and logical consequence of feminism, and nearly all the writers who have recently dedicated articles to the desertion of gentlemen in the Bazaar, and the brutal attitude of the male students [toward female admissions] in the School of Fine Arts, attribute the sad state of society, emphasized by these events, to the stance taken by those who aspire to female emancipation, zealously defending and propagating exaggerated feminist theories.

With the outbreak of the Spanish American war, Valmont is able to combine all the themes that have occupied her for years: the honor of nations, the proper use of money, and the role of women in public and private life. Although she denies that La Última Moda is the place to talk politics, she assures her Spanish readers of the solidarity that other women feel with them. She characterizes the United States as a rich bully and promises that «Europa [...] no consentirá que el país de los dollars sacrifique al país de la hidalguía, el valor y el patriotismo» [Europe won’t allow the country of nobility, valor and patriotism to be sacrificed to the country of dollars] (N.o 536).

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Again, Valmont asserts that the ultimate resolution to the conflict lies in the extension of domestic values, cultivated by women, to the national arena. [...] la mujer sin apercibirse de ello es quien resuelve los más árduos problemas del hogar, y contribuye indirecta o directamente a veces, a la solución de los que afectan a las naciones. [...] ¿Qué es la patria sino la gran familia que constituyen todas las familias formadas por séres de una misma raza [...]? (17 de abril de 1898, Año XI, N.o 537) [...] woman, without being aware of it, is the one who solves the most difficult problems of the home and contributes indirectly and, sometimes, even directly to the solution of the problems that affect nations. [...] What is the nation but the great family made up of all the families of the race [...]?

According to Valmont, patriotism is a kind of collective domesticity. As she did ten years ago in a column on the trade embargo between France and Spain, she likens national conflict to conflicts within the family. In this case, however, the United States is an interloper directly offending the «father and, above all, the mother» to greedy ends (N.o 538). In her earlier column, she wrote that Fashion would transcend political squabbles and economic rivalries. It could be the channel through which communication and good will could be kept alive. In the latter instance, however, Valmont suggests that European women boycott American products, using their power as consumers as a weapon. A few weeks later, American women reacted. Angered by France’s support of Spain, particularly the efforts of French women to hold fund-raising benefits in aid of the neighboring country, the wealthy women of New York, Chicago, Boston, and Washington threatened a boycott of Parisian designers. Valmont angrily reports the attempts of the designers to placate their American clients. Doucet insists that he is willing to design the gowns that American women will wear to victory celebrations. Madame Nicant complains that the papers have been very irresponsible in reporting that Paris hopes to see Spain victorious. Worth, of the most famous and powerful design house in Paris, who enjoyed the patronage of both American and Spanish clients, tries to respond diplomatically84. 84 Charles Frederick Worth died in 1895. Here Valmont is referring to one of his sons, Gaston or Jean, but she does not specify which.

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Worth por su parte, dió una vez más la prueba de su gran mundología. «Quiere V. saber —dijo al reporter— ¿cuál de las dos naciones que pelean merece mis simpatías? Es usted muy cruel, y es para mí difícil responder a su interrogación. Mi situación ante ese deplorable espectáculo que ofrecen dos naciones dignas de consideración y de aprecio, es la de un padre que, teniendo a dos de sus hijos gravemente enfermos, le preguntasen cuál de los dos quería que sucumbiese». (19 de junio de 1898, Año XI, N.o 546) Worth, for his part, once again gave proof of his worldliness. «You want to know», he said to the reporter, «which of the two warring nations deserve my sympathy? You’re very cruel, and I find it difficult to answer your question. My position in this deplorable situation between two countries both worthy of consideration and respect is that of a father who, having two sons gravely ill, is asked which one he would prefer to succumb».

Valmont does not appreciate Worth’s use of the metaphor she so often uses herself, that of trifling family conflict. She responds to his remarks with cynicism: Se escapó por la tangente con su gran habilidad; pero ni los radicales ni los eclécticos engañan a nadie. Los que viven del lujo y despilfarro de las altas clases, no pensarán ni sentirán jamás como los que tienen la suerte de reconocer la justicia, rindiéndola homenaje. (N.o 546) He skillfully got off the hook, but neither the radicals nor the ‘fence-sitters’ fool anybody. Those who live off the luxury and waste of the upper classes will never think or feel as those who have the good fortune to be able to recognize justice and pay it homage.

In all her years as a columnist, Valmont has described fashion as a unifying force. It has been represented as an institution able to transcend national difference, and it equips women trained in its values to diplomatically resolve or rise above any public conflict. During the turmoil of the war, however, Valmont encourages women to join in the fray, using their power as consumers as a weapon. We can never know whether she adopted this position only briefly in solidarity with her Spanish readers or assumed a new, long-term vision of the political uses of fashion. Only a few months later, without warning, La Última Moda ceased publication.

CHAPTER FOUR PRO-CONSUMERIST DISCOURSE IN LITERATURE By the second half of the nineteenth century, the theme of consumption moves to the center of the Peninsular urban novel. Many studies of the representation of consumerism in the novel focus on an anti-consumerist stance. However, as Valmont’s columns clearly demonstrate, the reading public also had exposure to pro-consumerist cultural production. Valmont’s columns establish a conjunction between consumerism and domesticity that makes the family function as an economic unit in the service of public life. The question of whether consumerism conflicts with the prescribed moral values of the domestic angel is no longer as important as questions of how consumer values mediate social hierarchies, economic systems, family structures, and gender roles. This chapter will examine two literary works, Benito Pérez Galdós’s Lo prohibido [Forbidden Fruit] and Narcís Oller’s La febre d’or [Gold Fever]. Lo prohibido (1888) is one of a group of «contemporary» novels in which Galdós, the most prolific author of the Spanish realist novel, examines the effect of consumer values and the desire to imitate court society on the middle classes of Madrid. The essential theme of the entire group of novels is that the protagonists «quieren y no pueden» —that is, the middle classes want to imitate the rich, but they have not the means to do so. However, I will argue that more is at stake in Lo prohibido’s portrayal of consumer values than frivolous class aspirations. The Catalan novel La febre d’or (1890-1892) represents consumerism from a different perspective than Galdós’s novels. The action of the novel takes place in Barcelona, a center of industry and finance rather than the

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home of the court. Persons who come from the country into the city to take advantage of new economic opportunities must quickly learn imitative consumerism as a means of assimilation. In my study of both Galdós’s and Oller’s works, I particularly wish to examine the ways in which women must work out for themselves their roles as consumers within the social ideology of domesticity. The dramatic tension of both novels stems from whether these women will behave properly as consumers and still fulfill their duties to home and family, in accordance with Blanca Valmont’s vision.

COURTSHIP AND CONSUMERISM: THE EROTICS OF SPENDING AND THRIFT IN LO PROHIBIDO Lo prohibido is presented to the reader as José María Bueno de Guzmán’s confession; the text is a narration of the process by which he transfers his adulterous passions from his spendthrift cousin Eloísa (married to Carrillo) to the thrifty cousin Camila (married to Constantino Miquis). By the end of his confession, José María hopes to represent himself as being somewhat redeemed by a long overdue realization that some things cannot be bought85. In counterpoint to José María’s redemption (enforced by paralysis) is Eloísa’s eventual ruin: her story is a cautionary tale on the folly of hungering for and purchasing things one cannot afford, a favorite theme of Galdós from La desheredada and La de Bringas through the rest of the contemporary novels. Yet things are not quite so simple; the dynamics of attraction and courtship in the liaisons that José María pursues with his cousins call for closer examination. One of the most fascinating dimensions of Lo prohibido is the way in which such matters as personal attractiveness, sexual conquest, and male and female gender roles are connected to contemporary attitudes towards consumerism. The Catholic Church was one institution which attempted to control consumer practices, and its major effort was in the direction of restraint. In Galdós y la literatura popular, Alicia Andreu examines the history of anti-consumerist propaganda in the nineteenth century, linking the Church’s attacks on consumerism directly to the confiscations of ecclesiastical property in 1836 and 1854. According to Catholic pamphlets of 85 For discussion of José María’s reliability as a narrator see Terry, 62-89, Engler, and Aldaraca, 189-196.

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the time, materialism and the desire for luxury had set the government and the Church at odds; the corrupting influence of consumerism had led politicians to appropriate the assets of the Church in order to furnish their own palaces (Andreu 21-22). From the perspective of the Church, consumer practices were not neutral acts. Consumer behavior had the potential to be either harmful or beneficial to the interests of any given group (political, religious, or mercantile), depending on the circumstances. Church authorities saw that such a powerful force needed to be controlled: the stage was set for the Church and others (including novelists) to invest consumer behavior with a moral quality. Many novelists and essayists from the conservative sector of the bourgeoisie adopted the Church’s anti-materialist stance. These authors, together with the Church itself, associated consumerism not only with the greed and corruption of politicians, but also with a perceived decline in family values and domestic stability. In his 1866 essay «La moralidad en España», J. Jimeno Agius blamed the increasing birthrate of illegitimate children on women’s increasing desire for luxury, that is to say, on their acceptance of the values of consumer society (Andreu 21-22). Such an accusation explicitly linked consumer desire with sexual misbehavior. Illegitimate children were the side effects of the exchange of sex for merchandise. Some writers of bourgeois fiction tried to formulate an antidote to the lure of consumerism; their corrective, the embodiment of anti-materialist ideology, was the domestic angel. In contrast to the type of woman to whom Agius refers, el ángel del hogar was perceived to be a woman completely content in her socioeconomic niche, devoting all her energies to caring for her husband and children and to limiting her material needs in order to conserve the family’s financial resources86. Not only was this angel immune to the desire for consumer goods, she was also devoid of sexual desire, save what was strictly necessary for procreation. The effect of the prominence of the «angel of the house» in popular and bourgeois culture was that the moral burden of consumerism was now placed squarely on the woman in her role as wife (including her sexual duties and responsibilities) and as mother (guardian of her children’s education, material comfort and future prospects in society). 86 The term «angel of the house» was first coined in Coventry Patmore’s 1854 poem «The Angel in the House». The term comes into literary criticism through the writings of Virginia Woolf. See Gilbert and Gubar, 17, 22. For a thorough discussion of the characteristics of the ángel del hogar in Spain, see Andreu and Aldaraca.

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The growing circulation of fashion and lifestyle magazines during the latter half of the nineteenth century indicates that not everyone was of the same mind regarding the morality or propriety of consumer values and practices. The fact that domestic angel stories often appeared in magazines that were otherwise engaged in promoting the latest trends in fashionable attire and home furnishings attests to the probability that individual attitudes towards consumerism were not always consistent, to say the least87. Magazine editors and readers alike must have felt the conflicting tugs of moral uprightness on the one hand and desire on the other. Moreover, values and morals aside, consumerism was necessary for the health of a modern, urban economy. Anti-consumerist writing, with its avowed purpose of preserving the fabric of Spanish society, inevitably collided with the reality of the demands of the important consumerdriven sector of Spain’s economy (Aldaraca 98-102). Naturally the readers of fashion magazines did not wish to feel that they were guilty of anything that would be morally reprehensible88. In response to the attacks of the conservative faction, columnists justified or rationalized consumerism by grafting it onto other discourses such as domestic science, hygiene, or the discourse of accepted gender roles89. Conservative thinkers believed consumerism posed a threat to women’s established domestic role; the shopping impulse jeopardized the domestic economy, it endangered the stability of marriage, it somehow made the woman more susceptible to sexual misadventure. In essence, consumerism was perceived as a force which encouraged women to rearrange their priorities in favor of the public arena (to see and be seen) rather than contenting themselves with the private sphere. Fashion writers answered these charges by utilizing the discourse of domesticity in support of consumerism. Consumerism, especially in the case of fashion (Parisian, of course), was equated with the ascendancy of European civilization. According to Valmont, a woman with the latest wardrobe, a well-furnished home and well-turned-out children was the hallmark of progress and modernity. See Andreu on the apparent conflicts within the contents of women’s magazines. Indeed, Blanca Valmont often explicitly appealed to her readers’ Catholic values in her columns. 89 One may recall Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Vol. I, in which the author discusses the way in which discourses of public health and welfare were applied to sexual behavior as a regulating strategy. Consumerism is also a behavior with a public potential which called for regulation and management. 87 88

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Valmont encouraged women to view consumer behavior not only as a duty involved in the fulfillment of their domestic role, but as a means of raising the fulfillment of this role to the plane of a creative art, the best possible sphere for a woman’s self-expression and the activity from which she should derive great pride and self-esteem. The manner in which the housewife managed her resources, the choices she made from the vast array of goods which modern retailing made available to her, were indications of the wisdom and talent she brought to the task of caring for her family. Women were still meant to live within the traditional roles of wife and mother, but their scope of operation was expanding into the public realm. After all, what was consumed had to be seen, so the domestic arena was opened up to the public arena. Furthermore, while anti-consumerist writers related consumer values to sexual misbehavior (perverse or even diseased) and the degradation of women, Valmont’s ideology (along with that of other pro-consumerist writers) made consumer behavior an important component of seduction and sexuality within the sanctions of marriage. Keeping up with fashion, learning certain standards of taste, was an important component in the socialization of young bourgeois women. Consumption of fashion ensured that a woman would attract a husband and win a place in the domestic sphere (with its assurance of economic security), thereby guaranteeing her conformity with bourgeois values and standards of behavior. Within marriage, a woman remained attractive to her husband by means of fashion. Thus, consumerism helped women to fulfill their guardianship of the family by keeping the husband from straying, resorting to prostitutes or demi-mondaines and thereby threatening not only the peace but also, possibly, the medical health of the family90. Both anti- and pro-consumerist writers construct a connection between forces of attraction and seduction (both within and outside of marriage) and consumer practices. Critics have tended to focus their attention on the anti-consumerist stance and the figure of the fallen woman, the classic negative example to which anti-consumerists pointed as proof of their arguments. Yet Lo prohibido charts some very interesting uses and abuses of pro-consumerist doctrine, especially as this relates to the discourse of domesticity.

90

See Andreu, 56-57 and Aldaraca, 96.

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On taking his first stroll through Madrid after relocating to the capital, one of the many changes at which José María marvels is the remarkably improved quality of the shops, «las variadas y aparatosas tiendas, no inferiores, por lo que desde la calle se ve, a las de París o Londres [...]» [the varied and ostentatious shops, none inferior, judging by what could be seen from the street, to those of Paris or London](48)91. While José María applauds the air of wealth and industry he encounters in the city, his new life takes a very different direction. José María fills his idle hours with the adulterous pursuit of his cousins, complemented by numerous forays into the aforementioned shops. In fact, it is through a shared desire for merchandise and shared habits of shopping and of money management that José María interacts with the women he wants to seduce. While José María and Eloísa are falling in love, they are busy decorating his bachelor quarters. José María wants his rooms to have all the sumptuousness which his wealth and social position accord, but, insecure in matters of taste, he frequently consults with his cousin. Eloísa, the «musa del Buen Gusto» [muse of Good Taste], spends hour after hour with José María chatting about the smallest details of design and ornamentation (88). Recalling these happy hours in his narrative, José María declares that it is through their shared affinity for material goods that he and Eloísa arrive at emotional closeness, through their conversations on home decorating that they begin to talk of «cosas hondas, como política, religión» [profound issues, such as politics and religion] (95). Improbable or superficial as this declaration may sound, we must remember that Valmont is trying to make precisely this connection between consumerism and «profound issues», insisting on the relationship between woman’s consumer behavior and her religious/moral standing, on the importance of her role as the angel of the house for the preservation of social norms and the national economy (whether the vision be of an economy of scarcity/saving or an economy of abundance/consumption). At this early point in the story, José María idolizes Eloísa as an angel «condenada a la existencia terrestre» [condemned to an earthly existence] (62): she is beautiful and gentle in manner, she helps to manage her parents’ home, she has nursed her cousin through an illness (Aldaraca 198). Yet these are not the

91 For more on the economic geography of Madrid in Lo prohibido, see Labanyi’s Gender and Modernization in the Spanish Realist Novel, 126-138.

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only factors governing José María’s vision. Eloísa embodies the pro-consumerist ideal of the angel of the house, the woman who turns her knowledge of fashion and her abilities as a consumer to the task of creating a wholesome and pleasing environment for the man of the house. The conflation of the characteristics of a modern shopper with those of the domestic angel strongly influences the entire course of the cousins’ relationship by trying to evoke a nostalgia in José María for the wonderful times they had planning purchases and going shopping together; Eloísa tells him: Repito que todo lo he traído para que tú lo veas y digas si es bonito. Siempre que compraba algo, me decía: «¿Le gustará esto?» Y cuando se me figuraba que no te había de gustar, ni regalado lo quería [...]. Ven a mi casa, sin malicia, con buen fin, como un amigo y te enseñaré mis compras de París. No te preparo ninguna emboscada [...]. (309) I repeat that I’ve brought everything so that you can take a look at it and say whether it’s pretty. Every time I would buy something, I’d ask myself «Would he like this?» And when I decided that you wouldn’t like something, then I wouldn’t want it, even as a gift [...]. Come to my house, with no hard feelings, as a friend, and I’ll show you what I bought in Paris. I’m not preparing any ambush [...].

Even though by now Eloísa is a far cry from the angel that José María once imagined her to be, her plea is in the spirit of the advice of fashion writers such as Valmont, who stressed the importance of building consumer values into a relationship so that the married woman could please her husband with her purchases and thereby prolong her seductive appeal. As José María and Eloísa are spending more time together on the pretext of furnishing his house, Eloísa begins to reveal a rich fantasy life, filled with dreams of what she would have if she were rich. Una casa bien puesta —me decía— es para mí la mayor delicia del mundo. Siempre tuve el mismo gusto. Cuando era chiquitina, más que las muñecas me gustaban los muebles de muñecas [...] me atontaba delante de los escaparates de Baudevin y de Prevost [...]. Yo soñaba que sería muy rica y que tendría una cosa como la que ves, mejor aún, mucho mejor [...]. ¡Qué lástima no poseer muchísimos millones para comprar todo lo que me gusta!... Después de comprar en casa de Bach un bronce, veía otro en casa de Eguía que me gustaba más [...]. Por las noches me acostaba pensando en la soberbia pieza. ¿Qué crees? He pasado noches crueles, delirando con un tapíz chino, con un cofrecito de bronce esmaltado, con una colección de

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mayólicas [...]. Pero me decía yo: «Todas las cosas han de tener un límite [...]». ¿Sabes lo que me consuela? Pues lo mismo que me atormenta: la imaginación. Nada, que cuando me siento tocada, dejo a esa loca que salte y brinque todo lo que quiera, la suelto, le doy cuerda, y ella, al fin, acaba por hacerme ver todo lo que poseo como superior, muy superior a lo que es realmente [...]. Yo me acuesto pensando que soy la señora de Rothschild [...] y así me voy engañando, así me voy entreteniendo, así voy narcotizando el vicio [...]. (113-115) A well-furnished house, she said, is for me the greatest pleasure in the world. I always had the same tastes. When I was small, I liked doll furniture more than I liked dolls themselves [...]. I’d stand stupefied in front of the shop windows of Baudevin and Prevost [...]. I used to dream I would be very rich, and that I’d have a house like the one you see now, even better, much better [...]. What a pity to not have millions with which to buy everything that I like!... After buying a bronze at Bach’s, I would see another in Eguía’s that I liked more [...] I’d go to bed thinking of the splendid piece. What do you think? I’ve passed some cruel nights, delirious over a Chinese tapestry, or an enamel box, or a set of tiles [...]. But I’d say to myself: «Everything has to have a limit [...]». Do you know what consoles me? The same thing that torments me: my imagination. Whenever I feel taken, I give the madness free reign, and, in the end, it ends by making me see everything that I have as superior, very superior to what it really is [...] I go to bed thinking that I’m Madame Rothschild [...] and in this manner I delude myself, entertain myself, and drug the vice [...].

In The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, Colin Campbell coins the term «autonomous imaginative hedonism» in order to describe the role of fantasy and imagination in consumer society: Modern hedonism is marked […] by a preoccupation with «pleasure», envisaged as a potential quality of all experience. In order to extract this from life, however, the individual has to substitute illusory for real stimuli, and by creating and manipulating illusions and hence the emotive dimension of consciousness, construct his own pleasurable environment [...][this] commonly manifests itself as day-dreaming and fantasizing. (203)

Indeed, this kind of fantasy is what drives a modern consumer economy. The individual must be able to conjure a picture of him/herself living in a desired manner, with the appropriate accessories. Eloísa has grown up desiring the lifestyle of a chatelaine, and she knows precisely

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which things she needs to buy in order to achieve an approximation of her fantasy. Yet desire alone is not enough to keep a consumer economy growing, and the pleasure of imaginative hedonism demands novelty. Were it not for a constant dissatisfaction on the part of the imaginative hedonist, or the shopper, desire for goods would reach a saturation point, and the economy would stagnate. Campbell explains: At the same time, the joys of longing rival those of actual gratification, with disillusionment the necessary concomitant of the purchase and use of goods; characteristics which also help to explain the dynamic and disaquiring nature of modern consumer behavior [...] not only is modern consumerism to be understood in these terms, but [...] romantic love and the crucial modern phenomenon of dynamic fashion should also be viewed as dependent upon autonomous, self-illusory hedonism. (203)

Campbell’s description helps explain how Eloísa’s imagination, and her actual consumer behavior once she has money, spiral out of control. The things which she can actually buy soon cease to be of interest to her, and she keeps hankering for some object that has the quality of being unattainable. Thus she almost immediately looks at her purchases with disdain, complaining that they are only «cosas industriales; de que se encuentran idénticos en todas las tiendas [...] lujo, al alcance de todas las fortunas» [manufactured goods, the same as one can find in any shop [...] luxury within the reach of everyone] (269). Eloísa seems only to want that which is so novel and so expensive that it cannot be had by anyone else; such an object can only exist in the realm of the imagination. Her own possessions may have had such status before they were actually purchased, but once she has found that the objects are attainable after all, they are no longer of interest to her. Of course the irony of Eloísa’s position is that although she is dismayed that her things can be had by anyone, such is the nature of fashion that she does not wish to own something that no one else has, or at least wants. If we accept Campbell’s assertion that romantic love is a product of the same imaginative hedonism that is responsible for modern consumerism, then it seems eminently fitting that consumerism should be such an integral part in the affair between José María and Eloísa. The time they spend together is divided between fantasizing about possible purchases, going shopping together, and displaying the new acquisitions for their mutual pleasure. These pastimes, which have an erotic charge

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all their own, take place within the larger fantasy that José María and Eloísa are made for each other, that she has married the wrong person. When she and Carrillo first move into their new mansion, Eloísa takes José María off alone in order to give him the grand tour of the house. She shows off her new purchases one by one, leading him arm in arm through the rooms, caressing the back of his neck as he bends to marvel over each ornament. Her excitement begins to manifest physical symptoms, for it is impossible to separate sexual excitement from the excitement of displaying her possessions. Eloísa gozaba con mi sorpresa y con mis alabanzas tanto como con la posesión de aquellas preciosidades. Júbilo vanidoso animaba su semblante; sus ojos brillaban; entrábale inquietud espasmódica, y su charlar rápido, sus observaciones, los términos atropellados con que encomiaba todo, señalándolo a mi admiración, decíanme bien claro el dominio que tales cosas tenían en su alma. Poníase al cabo tan nerviosa, que creía sentir amenazas de la diátesis de familia en el cosquilleo de garganta producido por la interposición imaginaria de una pluma. Tragando mucha saliva, procuraba serenarse. (112) Eloísa enjoyed my surprise and my praise as much as the possession of those beautiful things. A vain pleasure animated her features; her eyes shone, a spasmodic restlessness took hold of her, and her rapid speech, her observations, the hasty terms with which she praised everything, pointing things out for me to admire, showed me clearly the dominion these things had in her soul. She finally became so nervous, that she thought she felt the threat of that family disorder in the form of a tickle in her throat produced by an imaginary feather. Swallowing hard, she tried to calm herself.

The symptoms of nervous excitement are those which we have seen before in Isidora Rufete (La desheredada) and Rosalía Bringas (La de Bringas) when they are seized with the acute desire to make a purchase. Yet these symptoms, especially globus hystericus, are also the classic manifestations of female hysteria, which nineteenth-century clinicians associated with diseased sexuality (Aldaraca 210). The cousins may be wishing that they were a married couple, they may be playing at shopping and furnishing their homes together as a domestic unit, but the reader can see the signs of disease which undermine the fantasy. Assuming that José María is the direct narrator of the scene, the reader may even begin to question whether José María is simply exploiting a simulation of domesticity in order to take advantage of Eloísa. If he, as

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well as the reader, is aware that Eloísa is quite possibly deranged, then he is not so truly caught up in the fantasy of domesticity as he appears. At the height of their affair, our happy couple have a very romantic time together in Paris. Carrillo’s illness has given them the best opportunity yet of living out their fantasy of being husband and wife. They spend most of their time in the new department stores and in the establishments of the top designers and couturiers. The pair justifies their expenditure by rationalizing that the merchandise would have cost twice as much in Madrid, that they are buying in order to economize. The construction their imaginations put on the situation is that they have accomplished a coup which will benefit domestic economy. Each extravagance must be justified as an enrichment of the setting the couple inhabits —the households and bank accounts which they wish they lawfully shared. The splendid Thursday evenings which Eloísa institutes in her home after her return from Paris provide a forum for her talent and artistry as a consumer/hostess. José María derives a narcissistic self-satisfaction from the display, feeling that Eloísa’s triumphs are credits to his own power and worth. Eloísa era más hermosa desde que estaba en relaciones conmigo; como mujer valía más, mucho más que antes. Su elegancia superaba a los encomios que hacía de ella la lisonja. Desde que se instaló en su nueva y primorosa vivienda, parecía que había subido de golpe al último grado de esa nobleza del vestir, que no tiene nombre en castellano. Todas las seducciones se reunían en ella. Y yo...¡para que vean ustedes cómo me puse! [...] la miraba como miraría el artista su obra maestra. No es esto, no, lo que quiero decir: mirábala como una planta que yo había regado con mi aliento, abrigado con mi calor y fertilizado con mi dinero, criándola para goce mío y recreo de la vista de los demás. (132) Eloísa was more beautiful after our liaison began; as a woman she was worth more, much more than before. Her elegance surpassed the praises of flattery. Since she had installed herself in her new and exquisite house, she appeared to have risen all at once to the ultimate degree of elegance in dress, for which there is no word in Castilian. Everything seductive came together in her. And myself...so that you can see how I became [...]. I looked at her as an artist would look at his masterpiece. No, that isn’t what I mean to say: I looked on her like a plant that I had irrigated with my breath, sheltered with my heat and fertilized with my money, raising her for my own pleasure and to entertain the eyes of others.

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What José María has described is, in essence, the domestic contract between husband and wife. The man provides the home, the «flower bed», as it were, and the financial resources, while the wife works upon these materials so that she may present herself and her household to the public in a way that favorably reflects back upon the husband. Is consuming in the mode of a domestic unit meant to legitimize the affair, or is the fantasy of being a married couple legitimizing the consumption? José María envisions Eloísa as an «ángel del hogar», or at least pretends he does, but the only way he knows how to seduce and hold a woman is through purchasing his way into her affections. However, his very success might endanger the fantasy, uncovering a mercenary element in the character of his angel. The only way José María can sustain both his fantasy and the efficacy of his methods is by resorting to the kind of rhetoric Valmont and other proconsumerist writers employ to reconcile consumerism with the discourse of domesticity. Like any self-respecting millionaire in nineteenth-century literature, José María enjoys having the power to grant wishes, and he lavishes gifts on Eloísa. Taking pity on her obvious longing for every knickknack she sees in a shop window, José María administers what he says is «la única medicina eficaz» [the only effective medicine]: he buys her the desired object (133). The expression he uses harkens back to the language of illness and addiction that Eloísa uses earlier when describing her drive to consume. Even alongside the construction of domestic bliss that José María and Eloísa are creating, hints of future disaster are accumulating. When José María buys the fabulous inlaid mirror and candlesticks that have given Eloísa a severe attack of globus hystericus and makes her a present of them, she recognizes that the goods come from «la sucursal del infierno» [a branch-store of hell]. Once the presents have stopped and José María, already half-decided to leave her, is urging Eloísa to divest herself of her possessions, she reminds him that he has been her «Mefistofoles»; he has been instrumental in fostering her addiction to the vice of consumption (250). In a consciousness shaped and governed by imaginative hedonism, once the object of romantic affection is completely available, the lover’s interest begins to wane and to shift to another, more novel and less accessible object. Campbell’s conception of romantic love is perfectly embodied by the Don Juan figure, a personality driven by the same search for novelty in seeking new lovers that compels the consumer

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to seek out new goods92. Just as Eloísa quickly tires of her paintings and vases once she possesses them, so José María tires of Eloísa once Carrillo dies, and there is no longer any obstacle to her becoming his wife in reality. As he becomes disenchanted with his paramour and rejects the idea of marrying her, his descriptions of her consumerism shift away from the discourse of domesticity and towards the psychiatric-medical discourse so stridently used by anti-consumerist writers. The potential for disease that is hinted at by Eloísa’s childhood attacks of fever and delirium when denied a plaything in a store window is fully realized thanks to the fantasies in which she and José María have indulged. When José María begins to see Eloísa’s spending behavior as more and more perverse, he begins to think of her sexuality as more and more perverse as well. Though he once believed her fashionable appearance was a tremendous compliment to himself, he now sardonically remarks on her apparent lack of feminine modesty: «Generalmente vestía con sencillez, siempre que por sencillez se entienda poca tela de medio cuerpo arriba [...]. Yo, como dueño de aquella carnicería marmórea, no la veía con gusto tan publicada» [She generally dressed with simplicity, as long as one understands simplicity to mean very little fabric from the waist up [...]. As the owner of that marble flesh, I didn’t like to see it made so public] (152). Later on, he begins to notice subtle changes in Eloísa’s manner of speech: «Iba ella adquiriendo la costumbre de emplear a troche y moche expresiones de gusto dudoso, empleándolas también groseras cuando hablaba con personas de toda confianza» [She was acquiring the habit of using haphazardly expressions in doubtful taste, even speaking crudely when she was with persons she knew well] (248). Eloísa’s new, or newly noticed, coarseness is another early symptom of the degeneration that eventually leads to her prostitution and her horrific illness (after her recovery she unrepentantly resumes her career of seducing wealthy men). As the trajectory of José María’s emotions for his cousin goes from infatuation to possessive passion to disgust, so his representation of Eloísa travels the spectrum of contemporary stances toward consumer behavior: from the idealization of consumerism as the duty of the angel of the house in order to assure her loved ones’ comfort and status

92 Aldaraca raises the issue of «Don Juanism» and novelty, but does not discuss possible parallels with consumer behavior. 204-209.

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to the vilification of consumer behavior as resulting in the degradation and depravity of the fallen woman. Having tired of Eloísa, in accord with his consumerist mentality, José María turns the values of idealized domesticity against her. He reasons that because she has been a mistress, she cannot be a wife. Because she has spent beyond her means, she cannot be trusted with the family coffers. Pro-consumerist writers such as Valmont, for form’s sake at least, were always careful to mention the household budget somewhere in their promotional articles. Representa un deber para la hermosa mitad del género humano vestir bien, y vestir a la moda; por supuesto dentro siempre de los límites de la posición que la suerte ha ajudicado a cada uno. (19 de marzo, 1888) It’s a duty for the fairer sex to dress well and to dress in accord with fashion, always, of course, within the limits of the position that fortune has assigned to each.

Although José María and Eloísa have been playing at being a household unit throughout the course of their long shopping spree, staying within the limits of their fortune is precisely what they have not done. Once again in the manner of Isidora Rufete in La desheredada and Rosalía Bringas in La de Bringas, José María and Eloísa seem to sometimes suffer from a kind of math disability. They just do not seem to be able to take control of the way the numbers are going to add up; the figures will insist on showing an expenditure far beyond what was expected or what can be paid. For José María, mathematics turn out to be the supreme moral imperative. Although he seems not to care when his love affair becomes public, having bought the family’s silence with gifts, he is genuinely alarmed and fearful when caught «en flagrante delito contra las augustas leyes de la aritmética» [in flagrante with the august laws of arithmetic] (136). It is no accident that José María describes the situation with a term that most often is used to describe the act of being caught out in illicit sexual activity. When consumerism is grafted onto the discourse of domesticity, sex (licit and illicit) can be spoken of within the discourse of household finances. José María experiences a constant struggle between his desires and the demands of mathematics. «Las benditas cifras» [the blessed numbers] are frequently «ahogadas temporalmente por la pasión» [temporarily

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drowned out by passion] (190). This struggle seems to have been built into his heritage; he is the child of an Andalusian father (known for his passionate extra-marital affairs) and an English mother (repository of reason and the British principles of economics) (Blanco 66). Throughout his life he has been trained to respect numbers; when the principles of arithmetic have been violated, then the fantasy that his and Eloísa’s consumption is within the accepted principles of domesticity is also threatened. Now it is time for him to «answer her caresses with numbers». The couple tries to shore up their carefully constructed fantasy of domesticity by making a game out of saving as they once made a game out of shopping. They bring the same coquettish approach to their new game that they had for their old one. Indeed, according to Campbell, morally idealized self-images make ideal material for imaginative hedonism (213). The two now spend hours together dreaming up a romanticized vision of poverty, drawing up impossibly virtuous budgets, still indulging themselves with the fantastic notion that they fit into the mold of bourgeois domesticity envisioned by pro-consumerist writers. Their erotic play now takes place at José María’s desk, while he works on their accounts: Aún tenía en la mano la pluma, plector infeliz de aquel poema de garabatos, cuando Eloísa llegó a mí pasito a pasito por la espalda, echóme los brazos al cuello, cruzó sus manos sobre mi corbata, oprimiéndome la garganta hasta cortarme la respiración, alborotándome el pelo y echándome atrás la cabeza para lavarme la frente con sus labios húmedos; a todas éstas riendo, diciendo mil tonterías, llenándome de saliva los párpados y las mejillas y vertiéndo en mi oído un filtro, un veneno de palabras cariñosas, que después, por maldita ley física, se había de convertir en zumbidos insoportables. Dejé la pluma y me volví hacia ella. Nunca la vi vestida con más sencillez y al mismo tiempo con más elegancia. Venía en traje matutino y traía en la mano el libro de misa. Era domingo, y antes de ir a mi casa había entrado en las Calatravas. Sin duda prevalecían en su espíritu las ideas religiosas, porque me dijo que yo era un ángel [...]. (194-195) I still had the pen in my hand, the unhappy plectrum of a poem of scribbles, when Eloísa tip-toed up behind me, threw her arms around my neck, crossed her hands over my tie, pressing on my throat so much as to cut off my breath, mussing my hair and pulling back my head in order to wash my face with her wet lips, all the time laughing, saying a thousand silly things, drooling on my eyelids and cheeks, and pouring in my ears a philtre, a poison of tender words, that afterwards, for some damned law of physics, turned to an unbearable buzzing. I put down the pen and turned to her.

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I had never before seen her dressed with more simplicity or more elegance. She had come in a morning gown and carried her missalet. It was Sunday, and before coming to my house, she had gone to the convent of the Calatravas. Without a doubt her spirit was still filled with religious ideas, because she said I was an angel [...].

This scene might be an ideal picture of domesticity: the husband dutifully at work on the household accounts, the wife playfully affectionate but still maintaining suitable decorum in her dress and her religious duties. Yet there is a note of ridicule in José María’s description of the scene which betrays the fragility of the situation; he seems to find Eloísa’s attentions mildly annoying. For her own part, Eloísa herself is not able to derive any imaginative pleasure from the idea of saving for very long. She is already addicted to luxury and, to her mind, only a fool would have more fun saving money than spending it. As she senses José María’s growing aloofness she is only willing to agree to save money as a last desperate attempt to seduce or entrap her cousin into marriage: «¿Me quitas el lujo? Pues dame el nombre [...]. Tú puedes domarme, pero no con el látigo de las cuentas. Amor a cambio de lujo». [Will you take luxury away from me? Then give me your name [...]. You can tame me, but not with the whip of bills and figures. Give me love in exchange for luxuries] (250-251). By this point, José María has transferred his passion from Eloísa to Camila. The irony of José María’s desire is that he desires only that which is forbidden, yet he wants «lo prohibido» only in its most respectable form —that of domestic angel. Camila seems to him much more likely to fit into his fantasy, a fantasy which Eloísa has rejected or for which she is no longer suited. For Eloísa, the attractive aspect of the «angel of the house» fantasy which she and José María shared seems to have been that it legitimized her spending. Legitimized consumerism turns out not to have been José María’s primary interest in the fantasy. He wants the angel herself. María Juana might seem a likely candidate; her household is, after all, «un templo de exactitud financiera» [a temple of financial exactitude] (327). Yet María Juana makes herself easily available as a lover. She does not have the quality of elusiveness which her cousin’s imaginative hedonism calls for. When Eloísa snipes, «Camila te conviene porque es barata» [Camila appeals to you because she’s cheap], the remark is ironic because José María is willing to spend just as much money on Camila as he has done on the older sister (413). It is not that Camila can

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be had for a lower price, but that she insists she cannot be had at all. Only Camila possesses the unassailable instinct for domestic management and the unassailable virtue which José María’s fantasy requires. In keeping with the characteristics of a domestic couple, José María’s friendship with Camila grows through their mutual respect for arithmetic; he often acts as her mathematics tutor. Their language of affection is the language of money management: «Soy tu caja de ahorros», [I’m your savings bank] José María tells Camila (275). «Tú empeñando en arruinarte, y yo en que has de ser rico. ¡Si al fin tendré que ser tu administradora [...]!» [You trying to ruin yourself, and me trying to make you rich. In the end, I’ll have to become your administrator [...]! Camila exclaims] (299). Because the strategy worked so well in Eloísa’s case, José María tries to seduce Camila by taking her shopping, offering to lavish on her everything her heart desires. He seems to believe that he can seduce her without making her unsuitable for his fantasy; he is seeking a woman who is susceptible to the attractions of consumerism, but within the ideology of domesticity. Nor is Camila immune to the attraction of material goods. During Eloísa’s illness, Camila is once caught in her sister’s wardrobe admiring the dresses and trying on the shoes and hats. When she visits shops with José María, she takes everything in with a combination of enthusiasm and wistfulness. Indeed, there is a conceptual space in which Camila can fully enjoy the pleasures of consumerism: that of her marriage. She and Constantino plan and save for their purchases together; they share complete companionship in the matter of consumerism as in all other things. Their consumption even has a healthy, tender eroticism to it. Camila always chooses bedtime to give a gift, to reveal and display a new purchase: «¡Qué fiesta! ¡Cómo gozo viendo su sorpresa, su alegría y los extremos de cariño que me hace! Volvemos a apagar la luz...y a dormir hasta por la mañana» [What a celebration! How I enjoy seeing his surprise, his happiness, and the tenderness he heaps on me! We turn out the light again...and sleep until morning] [Ellipsis the author’s] (406)93. The Miquis’ exemplary marriage seems to demonstrate the viability of the pro-consumerist position, the successful integration of consumerism into the accepted ideology of domesticity and the sexuality of marriage.

93 On Camila’s sexuality see Montesinos, 188-189, and Scanlon, «Heroism in an Unheroic Society» 831-845.

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Consumerism in moderation is an element of the couple’s closeness. They often have to make sacrifices to purchase a luxury and still stay within the household budget, yet these shared sacrifices strengthen their sense of companionship. There is no sense of deprivation in the household; Camila’s and Constantino’s sacrifices are made in order to purchase merchandise or entertainments that will sow one person’s affection and attraction for the other, and the thanks are always expressed in the bedroom. In her own efforts to justify a consumer ethic for all socio-economic classes Valmont also envisions the bonding powers of sacrifice and the erotic power of mutually enjoyed purchases. Is Galdós saying that the institution of marriage somehow redeems consumer values? José María tries to tempt his cousins with shopping sprees in order to undermine their marriages. Ironically, he utilizes an ideology of consumerism formulated to contain consumer (and erotic) desire within the bounds of marriage. Taking the idea that domesticity to some extent legitimizes consumerism, he twists the logic in such a way as to convince Eloísa that shared acts of consumption will eventually end up as a domestic arrangement. Eloísa sinks to the depths of the fallen woman, but she arrives there by way of the ideal of the domestic angel. Few, if any, of Galdós’s characters begin trading in sex simply in order to make the money needed to buy new things, as anti-consumerist tracts accuse. Most of the «fallen women» in Galdós’s novels start out wanting social legitimacy, wanting a domestic space which they can shape into a tangible presentation of their talent and worth. Their fierce desire to transform themselves into consumers of the domestic angel mode makes these women easy targets for the exploitation of shopkeepers, creditors, and would-be lovers. The simple, direct opposition between consumerism and domesticity in which the anti-consumerists would have their readers believe does not exist. In contrast, the case of Camila and Constantino seems to demonstrate that consumer behavior can be compatible with traditional domestic values, when there is enough trust and commitment between partners. But can the reader trust this picture? Much has been written on the mutual love and respect within the marriage of Camila and Constantino, on Galdós’s success in creating an angel of the house more strong-minded, sensual and vital than any of the artificial idealizations of popular fiction94. Yet we must remember

94

See Scanlon and Aldaraca, 218-230.

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the two-tiered subversion of the narrator’s reliability. In the first place, José María often reconstitutes reality to accord with his posturings as romantic hero or naturalistic victim (Scanlon 836). In the second place, at the end of the story, the reader learns that the real chronicler of events has all along been José Ido del Sagrario, the sensationalist folletinista from Tormento and deluded madman in Fortunata y Jacinta. Critics have written about the Miquis marriage as if it were a direct representation of Galdós’s own vision. However, the logic of narration requires that this representation be read under the same assumption of unreliable narration as the rest of the text. The harmonious co-existence of consumerism and domesticity which Camila’s and Constantino’s marriage seems to embody may be yet another construction of José María’s imagination or a narrative revision committed by Ido del Sagrario. It is, then, not so easy to come to conclusions about Galdós’s views on consumer values and practices. Certainly he does not use the novel as a simple endorsement of either anti- or pro-consumerist ideology. Lo prohibido is an artistic exploration of the tensions in the public consciousness generated by conflicting positions in consumer discourse and the effect of these tensions on fantasy and eroticism in domestic life. Indeed, Galdós utilizes the frame of the unreliable narration to ensure that we read the text as art, not as tract.

A DIFFERENT WORLD: SOCIAL MOBILITY AND ASSIMILATION IN LA FEBRE D’OR Lo prohibido represents a relatively closed society. The persons in José María’s circle may try to outshine their peers in terms of the lavishness of their lifestyle, but no one is out of their class. These persons may manage their money foolishly, the propriety of their taste or behavior may be questionable, but their right to visibility in society is unquestioned. Moreover, even if such persons lose their wealth, it does not automatically follow that they lose their position in society. A wealthy person may arguably enjoy his upper-class standing to a fuller extent, yet an impoverished aristocrat is still an aristocrat. However, the increasing economic and political power of entrepreneurs and professionals afforded them entry into social circles from which they had previously been excluded. As these persons gained authority in national life, it became increasingly difficult to conceive of social rank as a function of birthright alone.

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By the end of the nineteenth century, the region of Catalonia was undergoing profound demographic and economic changes. During the 1880’s large numbers of people migrated from the countryside to Barcelona in order to find work in the industrial and consumer sectors of the economy95. Because growing industries and expanding railway networks required huge infusions of capital, investment banking gained enormous importance as a social and economic force. Speculation allowed a certain amount of social mobility as middle-class investors sometimes unexpectedly made fortunes out of a lucky venture. Gil Foix, the protagonist of Narcís Oller’s La febre d’or, is the beneficiary of just such luck. La febre d’or, Oller’s most famous novel, is an examination of the private and domestic consequences of class mobility as experienced by Gilet and his family. At the time Oller published La febre d’or (1890-1892), other novels about the stock market were in publication, such as Zola’s L’argent (1890) and Julián Martel’s La bolsa (1891). Indeed, Oller hurried publication of the first part of the novel so that it would appear before L’argent, and he could avoid accusations of plagiarism (Tayadella i Oller 650-651). Yet in its focus La febre d’or differs significantly from the other two novels. Oller’s primary concern here is not the morality of speculation or the detrimental effect of speculators on the national economy. He does not question the assumptions about value, market commodities, and money that form the foundation of speculation, as Dreiser would twenty years later in The Financier (Michaels 61-83). Oller is certainly aware of the moral and economic risks of speculation and does not gloss over the dangers. In his earlier novel L’escanyapobres, as well as in La febre d’or, the failure of speculative ventures is responsible for setbacks to regional economy as well as the loss of personal fortunes. However, Oller’s primary interest in La febre d’or is how the Foix family adapts to its improved social standing. In describing the Foix’s assimilation into high society, Oller represents consumer values in a new way within the context of public discourse about materialism and the display of wealth. The promotion of consumer habits took on a special importance in Barcelona because of large numbers of people coming into the city from the comarques [rural counties]. Newcomers needed to observe and imitate

95 A good summary of Oller’s concerns with demographic and economic issues can be found in Alan Yates’ introduction to L’escanyapobres, 5-25.

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fashions in dress and lifestyle in order to assimilate and, if they were lucky, become upwardly mobile. Valmont is writing for just such persons when she asserts that the fashion magazine can be used as an instructive aid. When Gil Foix is first married and starts a family, he is a village carpenter. Later, desirous of building a fortune for the benefit of his children, he runs away to Cuba and learns the workings of the world of business and finance. On his return, the family relocates to Barcelona where Gilet gradually acquires a reputation as a shrewd investor and gains a following of persons who would not dream of making a move at the Stock Exchange without his guidance. Gilet has become a very visible and powerful person in a short period of time, and the family’s dark, cramped living quarters are inappropriate to his new position. The family must quickly adopt a new way of living and learn new standards of urban taste and consumption. The appearance of doing well is of paramount importance to Gilet’s expanding business. The credibility of a speculator and his ability to attract new clients rest largely on the speculator’s clear manifestation of having successfully predicted the turns of the market. As Gil says, «Cada posició porta les seves exigències [...] qui no es dóna importància està perdut» [Every position has its demands [...] whoever doesn’t take them seriously is lost] (vol. I, 51). Gil therefore insists on new offices and a new and lavishly furnished home. He encourages Catarina to go shopping, to get out to the Liceu more often on the premise that not only are they now able to enjoy more luxury, but that they must do so in order to preserve the gains they have made and to strengthen their position. Although the family must quickly adopt a lifestyle appropriate to their new wealth and social position, if this lifestyle is going to serve as an advertisement for Gilet’s abilities as an investment banker, the display of wealth must in no way appear natural rather than earned. Gil does his best to make sure everyone gets the point of his display; whenever he receives guests at the new house on the carrer Ample, he shows a propensity for quoting the prices of the new furnishings. This habit may seem the height of bad taste, yet the practice is very useful to the rationale behind Gil’s consumption —it demonstrates how far he has been able to come in a short time thanks to a combination of luck, drive, and skill. His daughter Delfineta, however, is scandalized by the public mention of any object’s price; to her mind, the best strategy for legitimizing the family’s position is to carry on as if they have always been entitled to it.

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Senyora Mónica, Gilet’s mother-in-law, takes an even more extreme position than Delfineta. Delfina believes the family should conceal its petit bourgeois origins as a matter of decorum. For Senyora Mónica, the family’s display of wealth violates the «readability» of society, the system by which each person knows his place in relation to others96. On her first visit to the Foix mansion she scolds: Tinc por que en feu massa: em sembla que aixó Déu no ho vol [...]. A la gent del meu temps també ens agradava guanyar [...] però per a guardar-ho. Els comerciants vivien amb més senzillesa. Aixó que ara feu és per a marquesos. Si un negociant s’hagués plantat com tu, hauria espantat la gent. (vol. I, 54-57) I’m afraid it’s too much: it seems to me against God’s will [...]. People in my time also liked to earn money [...] but in order to save it. Businessmen used to live more simply. Now they live like marquis. If a businessman had set himself up as you have, he would have frightened people.

Senyora Mónica believes the traditional social order to be sanctioned by god, natural and inviolable. Any one individual’s attempt to modify this order poses a threat to the whole group, making everyone uncertain of their position. On another occasion, while Senyora Mónica is fretting to her daughter about the hectic social and domestic life the latter leads, she exclaims «no entenc com pots veure a casa teva tanta barreja de castes [...]». [I don’t understand how you can tolerate such a confusion of castes in your home [...]] (vol. I, 138). Once again, Senyora Mónica is disturbed by the apparent neglect of the social forms that indicate a person’s identity and rank. Her remarks reflect anxiety about class «impostors», the fear that «anyone could pretend to be anything if he or she had money for clothes» (Clark 47).

I have borrowed the term «readability» from T. J. Clark’s work The Painting of Modern Life. In his discussion of the Haussmannization of Paris, Clark states: «A city, some said, ought to be readable and maintain a certain separation of parts; it ought to contain different functions, different quartiers, different kinds of dress; sign languages which established even for the stranger —and certainly for the native— where one belonged in the city and whom one should be with. These languages and separations had to be finely tuned: too much distinction and the city would forfeit the possibility of being read as a whole by all its citizens; too great a commingling of signs and it would be unclear what any one meant and to whom it belonged». 47. 96

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Senyora Mónica’s assertion that a businessman will frighten away his clients by a display of wealth is particularly inappropriate to Gilet’s situation. The entire enterprise of speculation is based on belief, for the most part, a belief in what is going to happen or what commodity is going to exist at some future date (Michaels 64-68). It is often not possible to see the commodity or venture which is the object of speculation. This invisibility may be frightening for potential investors, so the function of being visible and believable devolves upon Gilet in his role as the principal speculator. Moreover, the clients are usually not interested in the commodities or industrial ventures so much as in the possibilities of fulfilling their desires for wealth. Gilet’s spending serves the twofold purpose of bolstering confidence in his expertise by providing solid evidence of his financial success and encouraging the clients to keep investing by stimulating their desires. Not only has the appearance of how the family fits into public society changed; relations within the family change as well. The Foix’s new fortune and the necessity of remaking their image bring on modulations in the identity of each family member. The changes Gil tries to effect in the public presentation of himself and his home cause domestic tensions to mount considerably. Gilet experiences such a degree of resistance to change from his wife that it is no surprise that the greater part of fictional self-made men have no families at all97. (When Gil first decides that he wants to change his profession and his place in the world, he runs away to Cuba, far away from his family and anyone who knows him.) Gil’s reinvention of himself as an important financier is curtailed by his family’s recollection of the person he has previously been; their expectations of his identity are limiting to his vision of his possibilities. During one of the increasingly frequent altercations he has with his wife Catarina, Gil explodes: Tu segueixes veient-me com al carrer d’en Gíriti, i, noia, el teu marit és tot un altre. L’home no és una essència pura, perennement una, pura, invariable: l’home és com una esponja que s’amara, es tenyeix i dóna de si segons les substàncies amb què la mulles. El medi ambient [...]. Però, qué et conto, ara, si no ho entendries? (vol. I, 244) 97 Shulman, 100. Shulman notes that «[...] embodiments of the upwardly mobile hero are imagined as orphans [...] for [Horatio] Alger the rising youth must be almost totally self-created and not burdened at all by the involvements of family».

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You persist in seeing me as I was when we lived on Gíriti street, and, girl, your husband is someone else altogether. Man isn’t pure essence, always one, pure, invariable: man is like a sponge that soaks up and gives out again whatever substance you put it into. The environment [...] but why am I telling you, since you don’t understand?

How profound is the change that Gil claims he has undergone? Is the public image that he has created merely a false advertisement for public consumption, with his fundamental nature remaining unchanged? Catarina and, to some extent, the reader may prefer to believe that this is the case. Early in the novel, it seems that Gil maintains a private space apart from the public spectacle of his career. Even in his own home, in spite of the pleasure he takes in the lavishness of the public and family rooms, his private quarters are quite different. On entering them he experiences the «nou plaer en veure’s rodejat de sos antics mobles de caoba; amics estranyets, peró francs i senzills [...]». [the new pleasure of being surrounded by his old mahogany furniture; old friends, but honest and simple [...]] (vol. I, 51). The passage seems to suggest that Gil has an intimate, original nature apart from what the public sees, a self that has nothing to do with the pretentious luxury of the purchases he has made for the rest of the house. Even so, the qualities of this posited original self are still expressed through the objects that Gil possesses. And eventually, the «honest» and «simple» furniture is banished from the house as Gil becomes more ambitious and forms a stronger idea of how powerful he can become in society. It may be impossible to divorce the things Gil wants, the image he wants to put forth, from the person he actually is. Valmont would surely assert that his consumption is an expression of his personality. It may be true that Gil does not seek or derive much satisfaction from products themselves, as Eloísa does in Lo prohibido. But thanks to his own imagination and the models he has observed in «el medi ambient» [the environment], Gil has constructed a mental picture of a mode of existence that is appropriate to the position he now occupies. The actual goods that are purchased are props in the mental picture; they translate into reality the picture that Gilet has constructed in his imagination (Campbell 89-90). Insofar as consumption of goods does serve Gilet’s desires and imagination, the goods are an expression of his subjectivity. But if Gilet’s consumption is an expression of his self and of his enthusiasm for his new role, what can be said about the hopeless vulgarity

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of many of the things he chooses to buy? Oller makes it clear that Gil spends a great deal of his money on useless junk: Pare i noia prenien subscripcions inútils, compraven a desdir, a voltes per caritat; ell, en Foix, ho feia de cop i volta, per mer capritxo, sense gust ni pla preconcebut de dar-hi col.locació com si els diners li pesessin a la butxaca. I així anava, aquella casa, omplint-se de trastos inútils, rellotges estranys muntats sobre peluix, capses de música, quadros amb vaixellets de moviment, gerros feixucs, moble incòmodes i lletgísims fets amb banyes de bou o barabes de ferro; veritables cabòries d’inventors extravagants, rebuigs de taller i de botiga que només s’empassa la ignorància adinerada. (vol. I, 75) Father and daughter pledged useless causes and bought things right and left, sometimes out of charity; he, Foix would do so all of a sudden, out of mere caprice, without taste or any idea of where he would put things, as if the money was too heavy in his pocket. In this manner, the house was filling up with useless junk: strange clocks mounted in velvet, music boxes, nautical paintings, odd jars, uncomfortable and ugly furniture, made with bull’s horn and iron studs, follies of extravagant inventors, and junk from studios and shops that only the foolish rich are capable of buying.

Is one devalued because the merchandise one selects is inferior? The tastelessness of the objects the family buys is somewhat redeemed by the fact that they often buy out of charity, with the intention of «giving a start» to a friend or family member. An ethic of sincerity of consumption seems to replace any criterion of taste. Although they may be ignorant, Oller’s tone is never so biting as to make readers feel that his intent is to humiliate the family for their attempts to rise. Oller’s characters may make mistakes, but at least they are trying to learn how to fit into the urban society that surrounds them. Their taste may be vulgar now, but they are educable. In his review of La febre d’or in La Veu de Catalunya, Josep Yxart remarks that the characters of the novel are persons «amb educació apenas desbastada y barnisso d’un cosmopolitisme aprés en pocas horas» [with barely adequate manners and a veneer of urbanity learned in a few hours]98. Notably, Yxart does not contest the right of the characters to lay 98 Yxart, 159-160. This article is a Catalan translation of an excerpt from a longer review in the Madrid periodical El Imparcial. Yxart used the Catalan version of the review to inaugurate his monthly column on Catalan literature for La Veu de Catalunya.

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claim to a higher social position. In addition, he attributes their missteps to an incomplete process of education rather than to a natural inability to present themselves in a «tasteful» way. Yxart’s position is an important departure from traditional aristocratic concepts of taste. In the face of anxiety over the social mobility of just such persons as the Foix family, the aristocracy laid exclusive claim, on the basis of nature, to the possession of good taste, in aesthetic matters as well as in social behavior. According to the aristocratic stance, for those who did not possess taste naturally, as a birthright, any attempt to imitate the standards of the noble, or to forge new aesthetic standards was doomed to vulgarity (Campbell 159). Pierre Bourdieu, in his discussion of the «class-centrism» of the aristocracy with regard to the matter of taste, is not convinced, however, by the idea that any taste can truly be natural: The ideology of natural taste owes its plausibility and its efficacy to the fact that, like all the ideological strategies generated in the everyday class struggle, it naturalizes real differences, converting differences in the mode of acquisition of culture into differences of nature; it only recognizes as legitimate the relation to culture (or language) which least bears the visible marks of its genesis, which has nothing ‘academic’, ‘scholastic’, ‘bookish’, affected’ or ‘studied’ about it, but manifests by its ease and naturalness that true culture is nature —a new mystery of immaculate conception99.

In other words, no culture or taste is natural; one must learn the rules. As Yxart points out, the principal characters of La febre d’or are just not quite as far along in learning as others may be. Moreover, the Foix family’s method of learning is quite different from that which the aristocracy has enjoyed. The long-established upper classes have had the benefit of acquiring culture or taste domestically, by daily contact with fine things, by long «immersion in a world of cultivated people, practices and objects» (Bourdieu, Distinction 75). Such a manner of acquisition is so gradual and subtle that it is not difficult for the aristocracy to claim taste as a function of nature rather than of learning. In contrast, Gilet must try to acquire taste through rapid and haphazard education, attempting to imitate, with countless errors, mere reports of how the «better» classes live, eat, and entertain. 99 Bourdieu, Distinction, 68. Bourdieu defines «natural» as being «both as a matter of course and based on nature». The Field of Cultural Production, 217.

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The effect of mode of acquisition is most marked in the ordinary choices of everyday existence, such as furniture, clothing or cooking, which are particularly revealing of deep-rooted and long-standing dispositions because, lying outside the scope of the educational system, they have to be confronted, as it were, by naked taste, without any explicit prescription or proscription, other than from semi-legitimate legitimizing agencies such as women’s weeklies or ‘ideal home’ magazines. (Bourdieu, Distinction 77)

Delfina is working through a different framework of beliefs about social place and taste than that of her father. Gil embarks on a program of consumption for the benefit of his business, never questioning his right to enjoy the luxuries he acquires. Delfina, on the other hand, is preoccupied with how her personal style measures up to the patterns of taste and behavior endorsed by her aristocratic acquaintances. Early in the novel, Delfina’s pretentious airs make her nearly insufferable; she constantly affects a show of having been born to wealth when everyone, including the reader, knows that she was not. Only after she breaks off relations with her «society» acquaintances and so has no one she need pretend for does Delfina become an increasingly likable character. At first, after her failed romance with the Baron d’Esmalrich, she is in the mood for withdrawal from the world. Her depression and disillusion initially find expression in a rejection of consumerism and her life of luxury. She admits that she enjoys the pretty dresses and the amusements that wealth has made available to her, but she is slowly becoming aware that «felicitat i riquesa no són dues branques d’un mateix arbre [...]». [happiness and riches are not two branches of the same tree]. (vol. I, 171) The symptoms of Delfina’s distress take the form of moping about the house, taking perverse enjoyment in simple pleasures, and avoiding any opportunity to go to the Liceu. After several days of reflection, however, she begins to re-think her objections to the consumption of beautiful things. She arrives at the conclusion that good taste can be natural without her social position being so. Francesc, a painter as well as Delfina’s uncle and husband-to-be, confirms her belief that she possesses natural taste. Francesc and Gilet are in constant opposition, the opposition between the emotional sensibilities of the artist and the utilitarian consumption of the businessman. Gilet wants to commission some pictures because he believes that not only would new paintings improve the decor and tone of the house but also that someone in his position should be patronizing an artist.

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Offended by the materialistic impulses of Gil’s desires, Francesc firmly refuses to paint for the family. The only assistance he will give is to advise them to trust in Delfina’s judgment; in his opinion, she has the sensitivity to recognize fine art. In the picture gallery, Delfina does indeed prove to have the faculties necessary to make good choices. Yet while Francesc asserts that Delfina has charismatic taste, Bourdieu would point out that she has by now spent a great deal of time with people from the upper classes. Her socalled charismatic taste is actually a product of the training she has acquired in the company of persons such as the Llopis and the Baron. Out of his disdain for bourgeois values, Francesc, perhaps, simply does not wish to acknowledge how access to money and exposure to high society have changed Delfina. The gallery scene illustrates the precise level of education Delfina has reached and provides an interesting contrast with the relative lack of training of the older generation, who have had less time and opportunity to gain the knowledge required to complement their new social status. Because Catarina and Senyor Llasada are completely without any artistic competency, they are unable to enjoy any qualities in the paintings other than economic or utilitarian value (Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production 220, 227). In fact, Senyor Llassada chooses his pictures according to the measure of space he needs to fill on the walls of his house. In contrast, Delfina, S’estacionava temps i temps davant la tela més insignificant, cercant debades un criteri segur per a fallar i escollir, sempre dubtant i temerosa de fer un disbarat. I allí es fonia consumida pel dubte, mudant de pensar a cada moment. Ella hauria volgut un parell de quadros delicats, sensits, expressius, simpátics de to, elegants de línia [...] però el cor li deia que ella no sabia apreciar aquelles qualitats, i la noia suava d’angúnia. (vol. I, 209) She stood for a long time before the most insignificant canvas, searching for some certain criterion for choosing, always doubting and fearing to make a mistake. And so she was consumed by doubt, changing her mind every minute. She would have liked a pair of delicate paintings, sensitive, expressive, agreeable in tone, and elegant of line [...] but her heart told her that she didn’t know how to recognize these qualities, and she [perspired] in agony.

Despite her fears, Delfina is able to acquit herself well and impress the dealer with her choices. Her artistic competence is not such that she

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knows anything about schools, periods, and styles, yet on some level she must be aware that part of her taste is the product of education, otherwise she would not be so self-conscious about her ignorance. However, she never goes so far as to articulate to herself the possibility that her taste is anything other than natural. Delfina may possess the emotional sensibilities to appreciate art, but, unlike Francesc, she feels no discomfort in situating art in a market economy. When Catarina complains about the cost of the paintings Delfina has chosen, the latter pacifies her mother with the assurance that the purchase of art is a shrewd investment —that paintings «sempre son diners» [are always worth money] (vol. I, 213). Later, Delfina comes to believe that the expressive value which she associates with art is also present in the choices one makes about impersonal effects and other consumer goods. ¿Per ventura el desig de les bones aparences exteriors no era tan seriós i delicat com el més delicat i seriós dels desigs? ¿per ventura revelava sempre vanitat, fum, frivolitat pura? Dins d’un militaret curro, polit, ¿no s’hi troba bensovint un cor brau, un home de debó? ¿Es troben totes les ànimes distinguides, totes les persones de vàlua, sins de les levitotes estranyes, dels vestits mal engiponats, sota els barrets lleigs o les mantellines de dispersa? [...] No, de cap de les maneres [...]. Presentar se-li [al tio Francesc] malgirbada, com havia fet aquells dies, era un disbarat [...]. (vol. I, 208) Could it be that the desire for good appearance was as serious and refined as the most refined and serious of desires? Did it always indicate vanity, airs, and pure frivolity? Within the impeccable uniform of a soldier couldn’t one often find a brave heart, a true man? Does one find all the distinguished spirits, all the persons of worth, in odd coats, ill-sewn dresses, ugly hats, or worn shawls? [...] No, of course not [...]. Presenting herself so untidily [to her Uncle Francesc], as she had done in the past few days, was foolishness [...].

Delfina arrives at the conclusion that the desire to have an attractive appearance is a legitimate desire, that outward appearance can show inner worth. Oller’s representation of a sympathetic character reflecting on appearance and, by extension, consumer values in this way is new in nineteenth-century fiction in Spain. Pro-consumerist writers such as Valmont take the logic of Delfina’s conclusions one step further when they recommend the cultivation of a fashionable appearance in order to

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demonstrate to the public the order, harmony, and economic stability of the family. Far from being in opposition to domestic duty, fashionable consumption is the bridge between domesticity and the public life. These are precisely the recommendations which the Foix family puts into practice. But if consumerism can be the articulation of the individual’s impulses and imagination, the means by which one shows one’s self to the public, does this blurring of the line between public and private endanger family structure and social cohesion? In order for the public and domestic spheres of family life to fit together in a seamless image, both Gil and his wife, Catarina, must to some extent enter the other partner’s sphere. Since Gilet has seen more of urban middle-class life than his small-town wife, he cannot leave domestic arrangements completely in her hands if he hopes to make a good impression. To Catarina’s annoyance, Gil undertakes the purchase and decoration of their new showcase home. Yet Gil is not stripping Catarina of her authority or responsibility in helping the family’s endeavors to succeed. He expects Catarina to master the new skills necessary to a social life carried on in the public eye. Foix hopes to soon be associating with industrial barons and government ministers; his wife will require the same skills of salesmanship and diplomacy that he uses at the banks and Stock Exchange. Catarina’s evolution as a consumer provides an interesting picture of assimilation into urban bourgeois culture. As the story opens, Catarina is the standard version of the domestic angel. She is constantly preoccupied with the containment of desire, especially the desires and ambitions of her husband. Catarina is especially frightened by Gil’s plans to expand his stockbrokerage. Aside from her concerns that Gilet’s ambition will take still more of his time and attention away from the family, she abhors any venture that carries a risk and believes that investment in real property is the only true safeguard of her children’s patrimony. Catarina’s tradition-bound approach to finance has its complement in her reluctance to spend money on so-called non-essentials for herself or for the family home. She persists in wearing the same simple clothing and hairstyles that she did when she lived in Vilaniu. The events at the end of the novel seem to validate Catarina’s caution in the matter of speculation. However, in the body of the novel, Catarina does learn to consume, to become a member of stylish urban society. Moreover, in accord with Valmont’s views, she justifies her transformation by means of the rhetoric of the domestic angel.

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When Catarina grudgingly concedes to the new home and all its luxury, she explains to her brother Francesc: Prou mortificada que em veig per tot aquest capgirell, i callo. A en Gilet i a la noia els agrada, i no els puc contradir si vull tenir pau. Ademés, si em diuen que els temps ho porten i que ho hem de fer pel nom de la casa, què vols que hi faci, jo: Si m’hi oposo i per casualitat s’estronca la sort d’en Gilet, diran que jo n’he tingut la culpa, que no m’estimo el marit ni el fills. (vol. I, 52) I’m embarrassed enough by all this folderol, and that’s all I have to say. Gilet and the girl like it, and I can’t gainsay them if I want to have any peace. Besides, if they tell me the situation demands it, and that we have to do it for the reputation of the business, what do you want me to do? If I stand in their way, and, by chance, Gilet’s luck turns, they’ll say I’m to blame, that I don’t love my husband and children.

Catarina justifies her concessions to this new lifestyle in terms of personal sacrifice for the sake of the business, of putting the wishes of her husband first, of having the economic interests of her children uppermost in her mind. She will become accustomed to the style of a great lady because it is her duty as a wife. As the novel progresses, Catarina learns to become an urban consumer: updating her hairstyle, learning to appreciate the gifts of jewelry Gilet bestows on her, becoming habituated to the round of social calls and theatre evenings her husband’s position requires. Catarina learns the ropes under the tutelage of Delfina, who having spent time around people of a higher class, has learned superior taste and social skills. Yet we can see the measure of how well the mother learns her lessons when Catarina chides Delfina for a «phase» in which her daughter seems disaffected from the rituals of dressing up and being seen around town. On one occasion Delfina is rather sternly upbraided by her mother for trying to go out in only a house dress and a shawl (Catarina’s usual public dress only a few months before). Delfina is violating standards of public decorum, is not being mindful of the family’s interests. If Delfina intends to persist in her selfish, anti-social disregard for what other people think, Catarina exclaims, she might as well leave the public sphere altogether and withdraw to a convent. Catarina’s willingness to play the part of a cosmopolitan lady is not only important to the family’s public presentation. It also has bearing on the stability of her marriage. Catarina does not always compare favorably with other women who, like herself, have recently come to Barcelona

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from the comarques. When one day Eladi comments on how elegant and entertaining Montserrat Rodon has become, Gilet grumbles: «Això, és el que jo voldria a casa, home! això, és el que jo voldria! [...] Però les de casa són un parell d’òlibes capaces de fer avorrir la família i tot el que vulguis» [That’s what I would like at home, man, that’s what I would like! But those two at home are like a pair of owls] (vol. II, 96). When Gilet does stray and take a mistress, he does so with the primary objective of enjoying himself with someone who will happily spend money, who will be seen with him in all the right places. Gilet vastly overestimates Catarina’s tolerance in the matter of his affair, but in the end, she asks his pardon for not being a cooperative wife, for not being supportive of his plans orappreciative of his generosity when he gives her money to spend. In the world of La febre d’or, the consumption of goods is expedient for public relations. By contrast, Oller faults his characters for their indiscriminate cultivation of people in order to feel popular and powerful. When Pauleta Balenyà and Montserrat Rodon go out on spending sprees, Oller offers no criticism of shopping as a recreational activity. Yet he ridicules the ladies’ practice of inviting into their homes anyone they happen to meet on their excursions, be the person only someone they encounter on the stairs on their way to a shop or someone seated in the neighboring box at the theatre. The two women, like many other characters, have failed to learn the proprieties of social distance. In Oller’s novel, anxiety over the consumption of goods themselves is displaced by anxiety over maintaining the integrity of the line between the public and private in a society in which everything must be on display. Because of the nature of his business, and especially once he has entered into plans to build a railway line, Gil must give constant attention to cultivating relations with bankers, industrialists, and politicians. Yet this necessity often comes into conflict with the duties he owes his family. At Senyora Mónica’s funeral, for example, he violates the privacy of mourning by using the occasion as an opportunity to assemble contacts who might be useful to him. The places in the funeral procession which should be occupied by members of the immediate family are all taken up by Gil’s business and political cronies. Even the act of grieving is supplanted as Gil begins to cry, not from sorrow, but out of gratification that millionaires, commercial figures, the foremost powers in Barcelona are paying homage to him by braving the many flights of stairs that lead to his mother-in-law’s apartments.

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In further efforts to boost his public image, Gilet violates even more intimate family bonds. Gil is planning a grand tour of European business capitals in order to diversify his investments and expand his clientele. He decides to take along a mistress, largely for business purposes, for the prestige it will give him. En canvi, no faltarien, als boulevards, barcelonins que veurien el nou personatge de Barcelona lluint aquella maitresse, i a París i a Barcelona es parlaria d’ell amb el somrís tolerant als llavis, l’admiració alegre als ulls. Promouria, en una paraula, una murmuració benèvola, d’aquelles que augmenten el prestigi d’un home públic engrandint les resplendors de ses despreocupacions, de sa virilitat: no l’escàndol que degrada i abat a un home per sempre més. (vol. II, 40-41) On the other hand, there wouldn’t be lacking, on the boulevards, Barcelonans who would see the new man-about-town showing off his mistress, and in Paris and Barcelona they would talk about him with a tolerant smile on their lips, happy admiration in their eyes. It would promote, in a word, that kindly murmur that enhances the prestige of a public man, increasing the glories of his nonchalance, of his virility: not the scandal that degrades and humiliates a man for ever more.

Gil acquires Mimi’s companionship in a contract arrangement, believing that demonstration of his ability to afford an expensive mistress can only enhance his credibility in business affairs. In their private time together, Foix does not seem to derive much satisfaction from Mimi; he misses the familiarity of his wife. Only when Mimi is showing off the gowns and jewels that have cost Gilet dearly does he actually enjoy her company. At these moments, Mimi is fulfilling the role for which Catarina has been inadequate. She is increasing his public prestige by helping to make his wealth visible, but, perhaps more importantly, her appreciation of his wealth and her desire to help spend it are a compliment to him and his power. Gil eventually loses his investments, yet it is important to note that when the business fails, it is not because of any flaw in his logic that the family must orchestrate an appearance of prosperity in order to keep the business healthy. Countless nineteenth-century novels end with a family or personal enterprise coming to ruin because of a desire for ostentatious show beyond one’s means. Oller, however, is very careful to remind the reader frequently that Gil Foix never, ever spends money he does not

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have on consumer goods. Neither does Foix speculate with his own family’s money; his constant refrain is «treballar amb honor, amb lleialtat, amb honradesa» [to work with honor, with loyalty, with integrity] (vol. I, 72). In trying to claim more power and influence, Gilet may behave in a vain and ostentatious manner, but his principal motivation in business is devotion to his family. The problem lies in Gilet’s having tried to apply an outmoded model of family enterprise to investment banking. Gilet attempts to bring all the members of his extensive family into his business so that everyone may profit by his good fortune. Within the framework of a traditional economy, Gil’s generous intentions might have been realized. An agricultural concern or a carpentry shop involves tangibles over which there can exist shared ownership among all the family partners. Yet in speculation, the funds which clients entrust for investment cannot be owned by numerous family members. Having failed to establish policies governing power and liability, Foix loses everything because trusted relations in his employ attempt a scheme involving unethical trading of stocks. The patriarchal, protective system of family enterprise that Gil is trying to apply is not compatible with speculation. His unfortunate mistake in this issue is largely the result of his own vanity, his compulsion to be everyone’s benefactor. Yet this vanity, much like Gil’s bad taste, is not wholly characterized as a failing; judgment is tempered by the fact that Gil’s motivation is devotion to the family. In addition, as his brother Bernat theorizes, this vanity has a raison d’être in terms of the laws governing the circulation of money: No ho dubtin: hi ha una llei providencial que, de tant en tant, desperta l’afany de riqueses, i vénen aquestes febrades a enterbolir el seny i els ulls de la multitud desconfiada, i a llançar fins el mateix avaro pel mar de l’especulació. Doncs això és necessari, perquè sols així es restitueix al comú allò que l’egoisme li roba. Sols així poden tornar-se al torrent circulatori les riqueses que la por havia empantanegat i les que la cobdícia de l’avaro anava entaforant. Sols així es concentren en mans intel.ligents i útils aquests grans capitals que la indústria, el comerç i el progrés general reclamen. (vol. I, 84) Don’t doubt it: there is a providential law that, from time to time, awakens the hunger for riches; and these gold fevers come to cloud the eyes and minds of this unbelieving multitude and to push even the miser into the sea of speculation. And this is necessary, because only in this way will that

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which egoism has robbed be restored to the community. Only in this way can the riches, stagnated by fear and caution or buried by the greed of the miser be returned to the circulatory flow. Only in this way can the huge capital that industry, commerce and general progress require be concentrated in intelligent and capable hands.

According to Bernat’s vision, a cycle exists in which the two most important agents of the circulation of wealth and the achievement of progress are the egotistical miser and the ambitious and equally egotistical speculator/entrepreneur. This theory contrasts sharply with the economic model of traditional society, in which wealth is meant to stay in a family generation after generation. In La febre d’or, however, progress requires that money move through as many «egos» as possible. At the close of the novel, the family is forced to liquidate most of their possessions, but they have the means to survive thanks to Catarina’s earlier caution in preserving some assets in real estate. Gilet tries to heal his disappointment by resuming carpentry. Catarina and Delfina return to roles of pre-consumerist angels, carefully managing the family resources so that they can live «amb summa modèstia, però santament» [with utmost modesty, but honestly] (vol. II, 177). Yet this return to a former state need not be read as an indictment of consumer behavior. At no point in the novel is it ever suggested that consumerism is responsible for the Foix’s eventual reversal of fortune, or that it has not indeed been necessary for the family to learn the tastes appropriate to their class and to consume goods according to their means. The women serve the family’s interests in both their pre- and post-consumer incarnations of the good homemaker. Oller quite flexibly employs a double usage of the figure of the domestic angel, depending on the economic status of the family at the time. Furthermore, the family does not suffer so complete a defeat that they are forced to return to the countryside. The family stays in Barcelona, and Francesc continues to paint. Who knows? If he were to attract the notice of the right people, the family would perhaps get a second chance to enter high society, and the women would once again need the consumer skills they have honed.

CONCLUSION What makes fashions fashionable? What does fashion express? In very general terms, nineteenth-century writers who attempted to theorize about fashion, such as Balzac, Baudelaire, and Octave Uzanne, state that fashion expresses both social aspirations and individual psychology. Economists from Georges D’Avenel to Thorstein Veblen tried to explain fashion as a struggle for position in capitalist society. Blanca Valmont’s particular concern is to reconcile consumer values with the ideology of domesticity. Valmont was a distinctive fashion journalist because of her willingness to theorize the social and ethical functions of fashion. She thus becomes the longest running fashion critic of her time in Spain. She attaches consumption not only to a discourse of domesticity, but also to a generalized political discourse of civilized society. According to her mission statement, fashion magazines should serve as forums of information that will give women of all classes access to fashion and to bourgeois social norms. She claims that the proliferation of information and images offered in fashion magazines encourages the mental habits of reflection and choice, thereby establishing a relationship between the evolution of a democratic society and the evolution of the fashion system. Women did not generally read political magazines, but through the fashion magazine Valmont had the power to shape women’s ideology. The characteristics of a good housekeeper change significantly if consumer values and domestic values are treated as allied systems rather than as opposing ones. In many instances, both in journalism and in fiction, consumerism is not necessarily in conflict with the ideals of the

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good wife and mother. On the contrary, in order to be a good wife and mother, a woman had to learn how to be a skilled consumer. Although many authors represent consumerism as being compatible with the discourse of domesticity, there is a movement of the woman’s scope of operation into the public realm. After all, what is consumed has to be seen, so the domestic arena is opened up to the public arena. Once women are perceived to have a strategic role in using economic resources to construct the family’s public image, then the link formed between domesticity and market economy affords women a source of power without divesting them of the desirable feminine characteristics of the time. While much anti-consumerist literature treats consumption as a sin or excess, the texts examined here are not didactic in the sense that a reader might expect; gender roles, sexual morality, social mobility, and issues of economic responsibility are all refracted by consumerism. For example, when Gil Foix takes a mistress, he is not simply judged a bad husband according to some straightforward code of sexual morality. Instead, the intersection of sexual morality with consumerism creates a new matrix of values and judgments in which some blame is attached to Catarina for not consuming in a manner that is supportive to Gil and his business. In the novels included in this study, as well as in many novels of Europe and the Americas in the nineteenth century, an absolute moral valuation of consumerism as right or wrong is replaced by an artistic exploration of how consumerism functions as an agent in the transition from aristocratic to bourgeois society and in the progressive interpenetration of public and private life.

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NÚÑEZ ORGAZ, Adela: «Las modistillas de Madrid, tradición y realidad (18841920)». La sociedad madrileña durante la Restauración. 1876-1931. Angel Bahamonde Magro, Luis Enrique Otero, eds. Vol. II, Madrid: n.p., 1989. 436-450. OLLER, Narcís: La febre d’or. 2 vols. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1980. —: L’escanyapobres. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1981. PARDO BAZÁN, Emilia: «La mujer española». La España Moderna. (May-August, 1890). PÉREZ GALDÓS, Benito: Lo prohibido. Ed. José F. Montesinos. Madrid: Castalia, 1971. PERINAT, Adolfo and María Isabel Marrades: Mujer, prensa y sociedad en España: 1800-1939. Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 1980. PERROT, Michelle: A History of Private Life: Vol. IV From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990. PERROT, Philippe: Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth-Century. Trans. Richard Bienvenu. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994. PORCEL RAMON, Carme: «L’argent de Emile Zola y La febre d’or de Narcís Oller». Master’s Thesis, University of Barcelona, 1972. QUIÑONES, Ubaldo R.: La educación moral de la mujer. Madrid: Alvarez Hermanos, 1877. RABINE, Leslie W.: «A Woman’s Two Bodies: Fashion Magazines, Consumerism, and Feminism». On Fashion. Eds. Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1994. 59-75. RAPPAPORT, Erika: «A Husband and His Wife’s Dresses: Consumer Credit and the Debtor Family in England, 1864-1914». The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective. Eds. Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1996. 163-187. ROUSSEAU, J.J.: Emile or On Education. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1979. RYDELL, Robert W.: «The Literature of International Expositions». The Books of the Fairs: Materials about World’s Fairs, 1834-1916, in the Smithsonian Institution Libraries. Chicago: American Library Ass., 1992. 2-62. SCANLON, Geraldine: «Heroism in an Unheroic Society: Galdós’ Lo prohibido». Modern Language Review 79, Oct. 1984, 831-845. —: La polémica feminista en la España contemporánea. Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1986. SEGURA, Isabel and Marta Selva: Revistes de dones 1846-1935. Barcelona: Edhasa, 1984. SHULMAN, Robert: Social Criticism and Nineteenth-Century American Fictions. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987.

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SIMMEL, Georg: On Individual and Social Forms: Selected Writings. Eds. Donald N. Levine and Morris Janowitz. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1972. SIMON PALMER, María del Carmen: Revistas femeninas madrileñas. Madrid: Ayuntamiento de Madrid, Area de Cultura, 1993. —: La mujer madrileña del siglo XIX. Madrid: Ayuntamiento de Madrid, Area de cultura, 1982. —: Escritoras españolas del siglo XIX: manual bio-bibliográfico. Madrid: Castalia, 1991. SMITH, Bonnie G.: Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981. SPANG, Rebecca L.: The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2000. STEELE, Valerie: Paris Fashion: A Cultural History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. TAYADELLA I OLLER, Antònia: «Narcís Oller i el naturalisme», Història de la literatura catalana. Eds. Joaquim Molas, Antoni Comas, Martí de Riquer. Vol. VII. Barcelona: Editorial Ariel, S.A., 1986. 645-668. TERRY, Arthur: «Lo prohibido. Unreliable Narrator and Untruthful Narrative». Galdós Studies, ed. J. Varey. London: Tamesis, 1970. 62-89. THORNTON, Lynne: Women as Portrayed in Orientalist Painting. Paris: ACR, 1994. VEBLEN, Thorstein: The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Mentor, 1953. VECELLIO, Cesare. Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo. Two vol. Paris: Typ. de Firmin Didot, 1859-1860. VERGÉS, Oriol and Ignasi Sarrias: Barbes i bigotis a l’Exposició Universal de 1888. Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 1988. VICKERY, Amanda: «Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History». Historical Journal, 36, 2, 1993, 383-414. VILLANUEVA, Ramón Maruri: «Vestir el cuerpo, vestir la casa. El consumo de textiles en la burguesía mercantil de Santander, 1750-1850». Consumo, condiciones de vida y comercialización: Cataluña y Castilla, siglos XVII-XIX. Eds. J. Torras and B. Yun. Junta de Castilla y León: Consejería de educación y cultura, 1999. 159-180. WEBER, Eugen: France: Fin de Siècle. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard Univ. Press, 1986. UZANNE, Octave: The Modern Parisienne. [Trans. of La femme a Paris. Paris: Quantin, 1894]. New York: Putnam’s, 1912. VALIS, Noël: The Culture of Cursilería: Bad Taste, Kitsch, and Class in Modern Spain. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2002.

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VEBLEN, Thorstein: The Theory of the Leisure Class. Ontario, Canada: Mentor, 1953. WILLIAMS, Rosalind H.: Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late NineteenthCentury France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. WILSON, Elizabeth: Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. YATES, Alan: «Introduction to L’escanyapobres». Barcelona: Edicions 62. 1981. 5-25. YXART, Josep: «La febre d’or, per Narcís Oller». La Veu de Catalunya N.o 14. 2 abril, 1893. 159-161. ZOLA, Emile: Ladies’ Paradise. [Au Bonheur des Dames]. Trans. Brian Nelson. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Toddler’s wear ‘Trajes para niñas de 2 a 4 años’ La Última Moda (Courtesy of the Hemeroteca Municipal de Madrid)

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Masthead, 1888 Detalle de un ejemplar de la revista La Última Moda, 9 de enero de 1888. (Courtesy of the Hemeroteca Municipal de Madrid)

166 THE LATEST STYLE

Masthead, 1890 Detalle de un ejemplar de la revista La Última Moda, 16 de marzo de 1890. (Courtesy of the Hemeroteca Municipal de Madrid)

ILLUSTRATIONS 167

Masthead, 1891 Detalle de un ejemplar de la revista La Última Moda, 20 de enero de 1891. (Courtesy of the Hemeroteca Municipal de Madrid)

168 THE LATEST STYLE

ILLUSTRATIONS

Dress for receiving visitors ‘Trajes para recepción’ La Última Moda (Courtesy of the Hemeroteca Municipal de Madrid)

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Tennis wear ‘Traje para tenis’ La Última Moda (Courtesy of the Hemeroteca Municipal de Madrid)

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Beachwear ‘Trajes para playa’ La Última Moda (Courtesy of the Hemeroteca Municipal de Madrid)

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Visiting dress for the country ‘Toilettes para visita en el campo’ La Última Moda (Courtesy of the Hemeroteca Municipal de Madrid)

ILLUSTRATIONS

Cycling wear ‘Trajes para ciclista’ La Última Moda (Courtesy of the Hemeroteca Municipal de Madrid)

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Dress for strolling ‘Traje para paseo’ La Última Moda (Courtesy of the Hemeroteca Municipal de Madrid)

LA CASA DE LA RIQUEZA ESTUDIOS DE CULTURA DE ESPAÑA

1. José-Carlos Mainer: La doma de la Quimera. Ensayos sobre nacionalismo y cultura en España. Madrid / Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana / Vervuert 2004; segunda edición aumentada. 2 Sabine Schmitz; José Luis Bernal Salgado (eds.): Poesía lírica y Progreso tecnológico (1868-1939). Madrid / Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana / Vervuert 2003. 3. Kathleen E. Davis: The latest style. The fashion writing of Blanca Valmont and economies of domesticity. Madrid / Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana / Vervuert 2004. 4. del Valle, José del; Gabriel-Stheman, Luis (eds.): La batalla del idoma: La intelectualidad hispánica ante la lengua. Madrid / Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana / Vervuert 2004.

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