Marginal Subjects: Gender and Deviance in Nineteenth Century Spain 9781442695160

Citation preview

MARGINAL SUBJECTS

This page intentionally left blank

AKIKO TSUCHIYA

Marginal Subjects Gender and Deviance in Fin-de-Siècle Spain

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2011 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4294-2

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Tsuchiya, Akiko, 1959– Marginal subjects : gender and deviance in fin-de-siècle Spain / Akiko Tsuchiya. (University of Toronto romance series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4294-2 1. Spanish fiction – 19th century – History and criticism. 2. Women in literature. 3. Gay men in literature. 4. Deviant behavior in literature. 5. Marginality, Social, in literature. 6. Outsiders in literature. I. Title. II. Series: University of Toronto romance series PQ6073.W65T78 2011

863′.509353

C2010-907627-3

This book has been published with the help of a subvention from the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

In memory of John W. Kronik

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

Acknowledgments Credits

ix

xi

Note on the Translations List of Illustrations

xii

xiii

Introduction: Discourses on Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Spain 3 1 The Deviant Female Body under Surveillance: Galdós’s La desheredada 28 2 ‘Las Micaelas por fuera y por dentro’: Discipline and Resistance in Fortunata y Jacinta 57 3 Consuming Subjects: Female Reading and Deviant Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Spain 76 4 Gender Trouble and the Crisis of Masculinity in the fin de siglo: Clarín’s Su único hijo and Pardo Bazán’s Memorias de un solterón 112 5 Gender, Orientalism, and the Performance of National Identity in Pardo Bazán’s Insolación 136 6 Taming the Prostitute’s Body: Desire, Knowledge, and the Naturalist Gaze in López Bago’s La prostituta Series 162 7 Female Subjectivity and Agency in Matilde Cherner’s María Magdalena 191

viii

Contents

Conclusion Notes

217

Works Cited Index

213

267

251

Acknowledgments

There are numerous individuals without whom this project would not have been possible. I would like to acknowledge the professional support and mentorship of my department chair, Elzbieta Sklodowska, throughout the process of writing this book. I also thank all of my colleagues from the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Washington University for providing me with a collegial and supportive environment in which to work. A Faculty Fellowship from Washington University’s Center for the Humanities, which granted me a semester’s release time in spring 2007, allowed me to make significant progress on the project. I thank the Director, Gerald Early, and the other Faculty Fellows, Gerald Izenberg and Patrick Burke, for creating a forum for intellectual dialogue throughout this semester. Jo Labanyi’s lecture and workshop session during her visit to the Center for the Humanities stimulated my work, for which I am very grateful to her. Many colleagues offered assistance with bibliographical information and provided access to research materials that were difficult to obtain in the United States. Pura Fernández was an invaluable source of knowledge, generously sharing bibliography and texts that were fundamental to the completion of this project. Maryellen Bieder, Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Anne Cruz, Teresa Fuentes, Roberta Johnson, Elisa Martí-López, Tili Boon Cuillé, and Seth Graebner also lent me their advice along the way. Cristina Patiño-Eirín and Carmen Servén kindly sent me copies of their publications, which were crucial to my research on the third chapter. Elena Delgado’s astute commentaries on my introduction, and Anne Cruz’s sharp editorial eye, helped to improve the final product. Brandan Grayson did a diligent job in proofreading my manuscript, as did Miaowei Weng with my bibliography. Elena Del-

x Acknowledgments

gado and fellow galdosiano, Pepe Schraibman, shared countless conversations, both personal and professional, and read many portions of this work. I am especially grateful to them for their constant encouragement and friendship. Pepe also offered suggestions on difficult English translations. The bibliographers at the Library of the Real Academia Nacional de Medicina in Madrid, especially Nacho Díaz-Delgado Peñas, aided me in locating nineteenth-century medical texts that were critical to my research. I also appreciate the assistance of the staff of the libraries and archives I visited to conduct research on my project – the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Hemeroteca Municipal and the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, in Madrid. Lou Charnon-Deutsch advised me on the preparation of images for publication and kindly provided me with a digital version of an image included in chapter 3. Back home at Washington University, I relied much on the technological expertise of Bob Chapman, Steven Vance, and Sarah Bombich. I am grateful to my editor, Richard Ratzlaff, of the University of Toronto Press, for his interest in the project and the professionalism with which he and his staff expedited the editorial process. The two anonymous reviewers and the reader of the Manuscript Review Committee for the Press gave me valuable feedback on my work, and I am appreciative of the attention with which they read my manuscript. On a more personal note, I thank Jonathan Mayhew for his companionship and support, and for a meticulous job as my private editor, and Julia Tsuchiya-Mayhew, who cheered me on with her optimism and her music. Jonathan and Julia have helped me realize that the seemingly elusive balance between work and family is possible to achieve. Finally, I am deeply indebted to my dear friend and mentor, the late John W. Kronik. It was in his classroom at Cornell University that I first learned to love the works and authors to which I have decided to dedicate my academic life. No other scholar has given me such unflagging support and encouragement for my professional endeavours. Although, sadly, he is unable to be present to see this project come to fruition, my work owes much to his intellectual legacy. To his memory I dedicate this book.

Credits

I acknowledge the following editors and publishers who have granted me permission to reproduce previously published work: ‘Género y orientalismo en Insolación de Emilia Pardo Bazán.’ La Literatura de Emilia Pardo Bazán. Ed. José Manuel González Herrán, Cristina Patiño Eirín, and Ermitas Penas Varela. La Coruña: Real Academia Galega, 2009. 771–9; ‘Deseo y desviación sexual en la nueva sociedad de consumo: la lectura femenina en La Tribuna de Emilia Pardo Bazán.’ La mujer de letras o la letraherida: textos y representaciones del discurso médico-social y cultural sobre la mujer escritora en el siglo XIX. Ed. Pura Fernández and MarieLinda Ortega. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2008. 137–50; ‘Taming the Deviant Body: Representations of the Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century Spain.’ Anales Galdosianos 36 (2001): 255–67; ‘The Female Body under Surveillance: Galdós’s La desheredada.’ Intertextual Pursuits: Literary Mediations in Modern Spanish Narrative. Ed. Jeanne P. Brownlow and John W. Kronik. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1998. 201–21; and ‘“Las Micaelas por fuera y por dentro”: Discipline and Resistance in Fortunata y Jacinta.’ A Sesquicentennial Tribute to Galdós 1843/1993. Ed. Linda M. Willem. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 1993. 56–71. Finally, I would like to thank Isabel Coll for permission to use on my book cover the photograph of Ramon Casas’s ‘Busto femenino’ published in her catalogue Ramon Casas 1866–1932: Catálogo razonado. Murcia, Spain: De la Cierva Editores, 2002.

Note on the Translations

My translations of La desheredada, Fortunata y Jacinta, La Tribuna, and Su único hijo are based on existing English translations. I have modified these translations when a more literal translation of the original was necessary for the understanding of the textual analysis being undertaken. Where I have borrowed or modified an existing translation, I reference the source in a note when the translation first appears in each chapter. All other translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated. In the case of primary texts, the English translation follows the Spanish original. With secondary texts, only the English translation is used. Paginations are from the Spanish original. The original orthography and accentuation of nineteenth-century texts have been maintained in the quotations.

List of Illustrations

1 ‘Una lectora impresionable’ [‘An Impressionable Reader’] by Conrado Kiesel. Source: La Ilustración Española y Americana Año 28, Núm. 4 (30 enero 1884): 64. 80 2 ‘La vida moderna’ [‘Modern Life’] by Lorenzo Casanova. Source: Ilustración Artística, Año 3, Núm. 109 (28 enero 1884): 37. 82 3 ‘La primera novela’ [‘The First Novel’] by J. Raffel. Source: Ilustración Artística, Año 1, Núm. 11 (12 marzo 1882): 85. 86 4 ‘Una historia de amor’ [‘A Love Story’] by A. Johnson. Source: Ilustración Artística, Año 12, Núm. 606 (7 agosto 1893): 512. 88 5 ‘El recreo’ [‘Entertainment’] by Jass. Source: La Ilustración de la Mujer, Año 2, Núm. 15 (1º enero 1884): n/p. 92 6 ‘Lectura alegre’ [‘Happy Reading’] by F. Andreotti. Source: Ilustración Artística, Año 13, Núm. 636 (5 marzo 1894): 152. 94

This page intentionally left blank

MARGINAL SUBJECTS

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction: Discourses on Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Spain

Gender deviance, which has been a source of fascination since the origins of Western culture, takes centre stage in literature and the visual arts in nineteenth-century Spain. This fascination, which finds expression in recurrent literary and artistic archetypes – such as the adulteress, the prostitute, the seduced woman, as well as the male dandy – is not limited to Spain alone, and reflects more widespread anxieties about the breakdown of established social categories during a critical moment of transition in European history. The social and economic transformations brought about by the implantation of industrial capitalism in the late eighteenth century in most Western European nations, and the subsequent emergence of a consumer society in the nineteenth century, led to women’s greater access to education, literacy, and the marketplace, and, in turn, to a shifting of established gender roles and categories for both women and men. It is in this context that we see the rise of fiction that obsessively features the problem of gender deviance. The sheer abundance of deviant figures in nineteenth-century literary and visual representations who struggle to assert their subjectivities from the margins of society is striking. From Balzac’s decadent and materialistic courtesans (Jenny Cadine in La Cousine Bette or Esther in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes) to the ‘fallen woman’ in Dickens’s novels (such as Oliver Twist and David Copperfield), the adulterous woman in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to the ‘man-devouring’ prostitute Nana in Zola’s novel of the same title (not to mention Édouard Manet’s famous painting of this figure), and the decadent dandy in Oscar Wilde’s works – these representations became the point of convergence for cultural anxieties about the crisis of gen-

4

Marginal Subjects

der in general, and, in particular, about women’s place in nineteenthcentury Europe.1 Reflecting this broader European trend, the obsession of nineteenthcentury Spanish writers, artists, and intellectuals with gender deviance found expression in a wide variety of cultural representations – from literary fiction to the visual arts, medical tracts to anthropological texts. Deviant subjects – mostly women, but also feminized men – figured widely in novels by canonical realist authors of the 1880s and 1890s, including Benito Pérez Galdós, Leopoldo Alas (Clarín), and Emilia Pardo Bazán, as well as in those of lesser-known but commercially successful writers of the 1880s, such as Eduardo López Bago, Alejandro Sawa, Remigio Vega Armentero, and Enrique Sánchez Seña. This latter group of writers, called the ‘radical naturalists,’ were fervent champions of Zola’s naturalism: they took the French novelist’s theory to an extreme, claiming to find scientific ‘truth’ by reducing the human being to his or her physiology and by documenting the most sordid aspects of human existence. In particular, many of these novels depicted sexual deviance – including rape, incest, homosexuality, and sadomasochism – in an explicit and oftentimes sensationalistic manner. What were the issues at stake in this fascination with gender deviants, particularly with female deviants, at the end of the nineteenth century in Spain? This book attempts to answer this question, scrutinizing the meanings behind the obsessive interest in gender deviance during a turbulent period in the nation’s history, when intellectuals were plagued by fears of domestic unrest and the loss of empire abroad. In recent years, critics have examined the constructions of gender, nation, empire, and race – and their interrelationships – in textual and visual representations of late nineteenth-century Spain, showing how anxieties about the Spanish nation and its imperial status translated into an overarching preoccupation with questions of gender and sexuality.2 No book-length study, however, has investigated the problem of gender deviance as a privileged trope in the literary texts of the period.3 Marginal Subjects seeks to fill this gap by scrutinizing the reasons for the insistent use of this trope in Spanish fiction of the 1880s and 1890s. Literary fiction, which will be the subject of my study, allows for a multiplicity of voices, authorial masks, and focalization strategies that often betray the ambiguities and contradictions at the root of cultural anxieties about deviance. Literature thus provides a unique space for the representation of the cultural imaginary, where unresolved conflicts about gender and other social categories often find expression.4 Fur-

Introduction

5

thermore, the literary text, with its greater level of self-consciousness about its own discursive nature, often lays bare the fissures in conventional configurations of the ‘normative’ and the ‘deviant,’ while blurring any clear line of demarcation between them. Although literary and non-literary discourses alike may incur contradictions in representing the deviant other, the heteroglossic nature of literary language sharply brings these contradictions to the surface. By the same token, representations of gender deviance in literary texts expose the fundamental ambivalence of the realist/naturalist project itself in its relation to subjects who lie outside of the norm. While one of the aims of realist fiction is to attempt – often unsuccessfully – to contain disorder and deviance (Labanyi, Gender 77), this fiction betrays an equally powerful impulse to resist normativity, opening up new spaces of subjectivity (if not always of agency) and redefining the limits of what the dominant culture takes for granted as ‘reality.’ Michel De Certeau’s theory on the relationship between narrative and spatial practices will permit me to probe into narrative’s fundamental role in (re)figuring the spaces that the subject is allowed to occupy in the real world; his or her displacement through narrative space marks his or her conscious act of deviation from accepted social norms as defined by realist fiction. Judith Butler’s exploration of fantasy as a way of transcending what social norms have cast as the ‘real,’ of founding new spaces of subjectivity, will be central to my exploration of the challenge that the nineteenth-century Spanish novel poses to gender norms, at least in the terrain of the imaginary. In my approach to both canonical and lesser-known works of nineteenth-century Spanish literature, I dialogue actively with scholars who have investigated the problem of gender deviance in other European contexts. While I do not believe the situation of other Western European nations should serve as the normative referent for scholarly research on Spain, it is crucial that we acknowledge the many points of contact that occurred through cultural exchange across national borders. This is not to deny the specificity of Spain’s historical context and its difference from other Western European nations, such as England and France. Capitalism and industrialization arrived in Spain in the mid-nineteenth century much later than in France or in England, impeding the formation of a solid bourgeoisie necessary for the emergence of a liberal political program, including feminism, before the turn of the century. The institutional power of the politically and socially conservative Catholic Church, well into the twentieth century, made it difficult for a political

6

Marginal Subjects

women’s movement to take root in Spain. In addition, whereas other European nations were expanding and consolidating their imperialist project in Africa, Asia, and Oceania, Spain was suffering imperial losses in both the New World and Africa.5 The Spanish nation’s anxieties over imperial loss and its sense of belated progress toward ‘modernity’ visà-vis the rest of Western Europe were exacerbated by the destabilization of established notions of social identity, including gender identity, at the end of the century. Bearing in mind these historical circumstances that distinguished Spain from its neighbouring nations in the nineteenth century, Marginal Subjects will give attention to the many cultural exchanges taking place between Spain and the rest of Western Europe in the disciplines of science, medicine, anthropology, and criminology, as well as in literature and the arts. Spanish discourses on women’s reading and writing, education, hygiene, sexuality, and criminality (particularly those on prostitution and hysteria, which belong to the latter four categories) often echoed those that prevailed in other European nations. Spanish intellectuals translated and imported these ideas from abroad, often adapting and appropriating them to suit the specific national circumstances. Bentham’s panopticon, Lombrosian criminology, Bénédict Augustin Morel’s treatise on degeneration, Charcot’s studies of hysteria, Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet and Josephine Butler’s work on prostitution, and Zola’s naturalism, all had a notable impact on the Spanish political and cultural scene shortly after their original appearance in their home countries.6 Given this exchange between Spain and its neighbours, I draw on the theoretical insights of critics who have scrutinized the problem of gender deviance in other European contexts to frame my own literary analyses, but without neglecting the specificity of the Spanish situation. The privileging of literary texts as my subjects of study, therefore, does not imply a categorical distinction between literary and non-literary texts in the analysis of cultural discourses. Instead, I will show how literature itself represents a site of convergence of larger debates on gender and deviance in the nineteenth century. On the Question of Norms A discussion of deviant subjectivity calls for an understanding of how norms function within society. This function, and the instability of the borders that demarcate what is considered the norm, have been examined by cultural critics as diverse as Michel Foucault, Pierre Macherey,

Introduction

7

and Michel de Certeau, as well as by recent gender theorists such as Judith Butler and Diana Fuss. To theorize the subject’s location in relation to the norm, many critics have resorted to spatial metaphors – such as inside versus outside, centre versus periphery – only to deconstruct, in the end, the binary oppositions suggested by them. Foucault defines the ‘norm’ through the idea of the ‘limit,’ which depends paradoxically on the very possibility of its transgression: ‘a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable and, reciprocally, transgression would be pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows’ (‘A Preface’ 34). To Foucault, therefore, norms exist to be challenged; that is, if not subject to challenge, they have no reason to exist. Similarly, de Certeau, approaching narrative as a spatial practice, asserts that while ‘the story tirelessly marks out frontiers,’ these frontiers are ambiguous, and the distinction between ‘(legitimate) space and its (alien) exteriority’ is difficult to determine (126). While setting boundaries and presumably establishing norms, narrative activity ‘bring[s] movement in through the very act of fixing, in the name of delimitation’ (129). Interestingly, de Certeau defines the story as a ‘delinquency in reserve’ that, through its mobility, defies the stability of fixed places and, by extension, of the established order; that is, narrative displacement becomes a metaphor for social delinquency (130). Requisite to any definition of the ‘social’ is the existence of a norm that, according to François Ewald, represents a ‘common standard, a common language that binds individuals together, making exchange and communication possible’ (159). For Macherey, similarly, the norm defines ‘a field of possible experiences’ for subjects belonging to a given society; that is, the ‘normative apparatus’ produced within a network of power is crucial to the formation of the subject (180). However, while norms enable subject formation, their inherent instability allows for vested political interests to fix the boundaries between what is ‘normal’ and the ‘abnormal’ (Ewald 158). Cesare Lombroso’s study of the ‘criminal woman’ is a case in point; since the Italian criminologist could not establish a typology of the ‘normal’ woman distinguishable from the ‘criminal’ woman, he concluded that ‘it was impossible to determine where the normal state ends and the pathological begins’ (36). Frustrated with the lack of clear scientific markers to define the ‘normal’ woman, Lombroso sought to resolve the problem by constructing woman as ‘both normal in her pathology and pathological in her normality’ (Horn 121). That is, by positing that all women were potentially dangerous, he justified every woman’s transformation into a target of continuous

8

Marginal Subjects

surveillance. As Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla have argued, the unanticipated consequence of these presumably scientific methods for maintaining the distinctions between the ‘normal’ and the ‘deviant’ was precisely the erosion of the possibility of fixing such distinctions, thus fuelling even greater anxieties over the encroachment of deviance into ‘normal’ social life (7). The political and cultural interests vested in fixing the inevitably fluid borders of the ‘normal’ and the ‘abnormal’ have also been topics of discussion among contemporary gender theorists. Bodies and the subjectivities have become contested sites of struggle for the meaning of what is or is not normal (Terry and Urla 6). Following Foucault in linking power, knowledge, and bodies, Judith Butler has claimed that gender/sexual identity is defined socially in relation to a normative ideal; however, this ideal is ultimately no more than a regulatory fiction (Gender 32). This is not to deny the power of these identity categories in our lives, since in the ‘real’ social world, these still define and circumscribe us as legitimate subjects and bodies. Regulatory fictions such as gender or any other identity category are necessary for the very articulation of the social subject. When violence is done to bodies and subjects who fail to conform to the norm, Butler argues, gender deviants are obligated to present themselves as ‘bounded beings, distinct, recognizable, delineated, subjects before the law’ (Undoing 20). Paradoxically, marginal subjects must appeal to the norm in order to establish their own legitimacy legally, ethically, and on human terms. Ultimately, therefore, norms need to be acknowledged before they can be challenged and potentially reconceptualized. Resisting Discipline: Spatial Practices and the Marginal Subject One of the issues I address in this book is the manner in which deviant subjects are able to mobilize resistance to the normalizing discourses of a disciplinary society. Foucault’s view of the normalizing function of social discourse in constituting what in society then becomes marginal subjects and bodies has been key to a number of readings of literature of the Restoration period in Spain (T. Fuentes, Visions; Labanyi, Gender).7 As Jo Labanyi has shown, drawing on Foucault, the realist novel was linked to the project of nineteenth-century social reform through which means were sought to reintegrate deviant elements of the population into a homogeneous bourgeois social body (Gender 53–4). Such a social program found manifestation in ‘the new obsession with documenting and classifying every troubling aspect of society … to control it by turn-

Introduction

9

ing it into an ordered narrative’ (65). Along with many other forms of discourse – medical, scientific, legal, political, the list goes on – Spanish realist literature, according to Labanyi, served such a normalizing function. However, equally important to consider, as Michel de Certeau has pointed out in a more general critique of Foucault, is the ‘network of an antidiscipline’ formed by ‘a multitude of “tactics” articulated in the details of everyday life’ (xiv–xv). De Certeau’s notion of the ‘tactic,’ as an action determined by the absence of power and of a ‘proper’ spatial and institutional locus to exercise it, allows us to conceptualize how (and to what extent) the ‘everyday practices’ of deviant or otherwise marginalized subjects result in forms of resistance to power (xix). For de Certeau, narrative has a fundamental role in (re)figuring subjectivities. Arguing that ‘spatial and signifying practices’ are closely linked (105), he establishes a comparison between the act of walking and the act of enunciating a narrative. Like the walker, who in his or her trajectory through space actualizes an ensemble of possibilities and interdictions, narratives also unfold in time and space, ‘organiz[ing] places through the displacements they “describe”’ (98, 116). De Certeau’s premise is that narrative is a foundational activity: while one of its functions is continually to mark out boundaries, to establish a distinction that ‘separates a subject from its exteriority’ (123), these boundaries may be rendered ambiguous through symbolic acts of crossing, ‘inversions and displacements,’ through acts of ‘deviation’ (128). (In fact, the dual connotation of the word ‘desviación’ in Spanish – which means both ‘deviation’ and ‘deviance’ – is significant in this context: the subject’s movement away from the centre, from the stability of the ‘place,’ in de Certeau’s sense of the word, connotes his or her departure from established social norms and practices.) The subject, then, defines him or herself through spatial practices, through the narrative trajectory she or he traces against restrictive norms, often traversing limits and boundaries. In actualizing his or her spatial trajectory, the deviant subject marks out new frontiers, opening up the potential for the disruption and resignification of these norms. In the nineteenth-century literature I study, we see how the deviant subject’s tactics of antidiscipline undermine not only social norms, but also the narrative conventions that uphold such norms in the realm of the imaginary. On the Birth of the Deviant in Restoration Spain According to Michel Foucault, the ‘delinquent’ or ‘dangerous individual’ became a discursive category in nineteenth-century Europe, through

10

Marginal Subjects

a gradual process of pathologization of crime (‘About the Concept’ 2–3). The French philosopher goes on to show that the emergence of criminology in the second half of the century within the framework of the medical sciences, particularly psychiatry, sought to provide ‘a sort of public hygiene’ to combat the dangers considered inherent to the social body (6). Ann-Louise Shapiro, in her commentary of Foucault’s work, explains how the effects of industrialization and the resulting transformations in social structures during this period produced a ‘malaise of modernity’ that led to fears of political disorder – such as unruly crowds, anarchism, revolution, and violence (25). These fears, in turn, were connected to more generalized anxieties about crime, prostitution, vagrancy, alcoholism, and insanity. Thus, any manifestation of deviance, even of the most insignificant form, came to be perceived as a symptom of degeneration and, in turn, a potential danger of pathological dimensions to society.8 The goal of certain nineteenthcentury sciences, such as anthropology and criminology, was to create a mechanism for the defence of society by producing a comprehensive knowledge system to characterize the deviant. The new anthropological school brought about a shift ‘from the crime to the criminal; from the act as it was actually committed to the danger potentially inherent in the individual’ (Foucault, ‘About the Concept’ 13; Campos Marín et al. 108). The development of criminology as a discipline in Western Europe came hand in hand with the establishment of new discursive practices to ‘apprehend the criminal’ (Leps 8). In Spain, the influence of criminal anthropology was felt in the late 1880s, following the publication of the French translation of Lombroso’s L’uomo delinquente (1876) in 1887, and Rafael Salillas’s lecture in the Ateneo of Madrid on ‘La antropología en el derecho penal’ (Anthropology in Criminal Law), which was regarded as the first significant exposition of Lombrosian theory in Spain (Maristany). Other Spanish disciples of Lombroso, such as Pedro Dorado and Bernaldo de Quirós, contributed to the diffusion of the Italian criminologist’s ideas by publishing important criminological studies of their own in the late 1880s and 1890s. Spanish preoccupation with the identification of deviants in Spain coincided with the Restoration period, during which the nation faced social, economic, and political upheavals and the decadence of its empire, which culminated in the loss of the nation’s last colonies (Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines) in 1898. It was a period of escalating fears about social instability and imperial decline, with the increase of political acts such as strikes, terrorism, and assassinations, and of social

Introduction

11

problems such as unemployment, mendicancy, violent crime, prostitution, and venereal disease. The disorder and the erosion of familiar boundaries resulting from these social transformations led logically to the attempt to control and to contain disorder through the heightening of disciplinary measures, which had been proliferating since the end of the eighteenth century. As Pedro Trinidad Fernández, Julia Varela, and others have shown, it was during the Restoration when disciplinary measures and institutions became widespread in Spain, with a closer surveillance of the social space for signs of deviant individuals who might pose a threat to the health of society as a whole: that is, from murderers to vagrants, prostitutes to anarchists. During the second half of the nineteenth century, government authorities prompted the construction of institutions, including insane asylums and prisons such as the cárcel-modelo; the enactment of legislation against vagrancy and other forms of social disorder (throughout the 1880s the mayor of Madrid imposed ordinances to control mendicancy in the city); and the reorganization of the urban police force and the Civil Guard to assure increased efficiency. Other measures included the introduction of criminology into the university curriculum; the establishment of central police registers to track the criminal history of prisoners (1886); and the systematic use of anthropometric techniques to identify delinquents (1896).9 The crystallization of these mechanisms of social control transformed the deviant into the target of punitive intervention, thus further inciting the public’s fear of those subjects who were marginalized from the social centre. Restoration society’s efforts to combat the threat of disorder, blamed on the socially marginal, was not limited to the establishment of concrete disciplinary measures, such as the passage of new legislation, or the creation of prisons, asylums, and other institutions of social control. As in France and England, these measures, which in Spain crystallized during the late nineteenth century, formed a part of a matrix of ‘power-knowledge’ that elaborated new disciplinary practices (especially through the use of mass culture) to combat social disorder and deviance (Leps 8). As was also the case in other Western European nations during the earlier period of transition to industrial capitalism, the fear of disorder found expression, in Restoration Spain, in a variety of publications concerned obsessively with staking out the boundaries between the ‘normal’ and the ‘abnormal’ or deviant (Labanyi, Gender 79–81). Jo Labanyi and Esteban Rodríguez Ocaña have shown that social control was achieved during this period in Spain through the new disciplines

12

Marginal Subjects

of public and private hygiene – called ‘social medicine’ by Rodríguez Ocaña – which produced an abundance of publications such as medical journals and conduct manuals, beginning in the 1840s, but reaching its height during the Restoration (Labanyi, Gender 70–1; Rodríguez Ocaña 17–51). Likewise, in all of nineteenth-century Europe, medical discourse, increasingly obsessive in its attempts to classify bodies considered to be disorderly, played an active role in generating a social order based on the utility of the subject (Cardwell, ‘Médicos 98). In Spain, this translated, for example, into the debate among psychiatric authorities who sought to establish ‘scientifically’ the distinction between madness and delinquency, in order to justify their methods for containing the deviant subject through their institutionalization in either the prison or the insane asylum (Alvarez-Uría, ‘Políticas psiquiátricas’).10 In addition to these medical and scientific discourses, a proliferation of literary and journalistic publications – the realist/naturalist novel, the folletín, and the periodical press – dedicated many pages to the conduct of ‘“different, abnormal and sick people”’ and transformed deviance into an object of central interest and concern (Rivière Gómez, Caídas 30). The rise of realism (or naturalism, as the two terms were often used interchangeably in the Spanish context) during the social and political turmoil of the Restoration period makes the realist novel a particularly productive site for the exploration of deviant subjectivity, since discursive strategies intended to re-establish social differentiations emerge typically in the face of social disorder. Gabriela Nouzeilles, who scrutinizes the disciplinary function of nineteenth-century literary naturalism in another context, goes on to suggest that literature targeted for vigilance, in particular, marginal groups, such as the poor, immigrants, and women, as was also the case in Spain and other countries.11 Many marginal subjects – be they madmen and madwomen, prostitutes, adulteresses, beggars, vagrants, or hysterics – populate the pages of realist fiction by Galdós, Clarín, Pardo Bazán, and Palacio Valdés. Women such as Galdós’s Fortunata, Isidora Rufete, Tristana, and Mauricia la Dura; Clarín’s Ana Ozores and Emma Valcárcel (Su único hijo); Pardo Bazán’s Amparo (La Tribuna), Asís Taboada (Insolación), and Feíta Neira (Doña Milagros and Memorias de un solterón); are all in some way deviant with respect to social norms. Very few are the female protagonists of the nineteenth-century novel who actually embody the norm of bourgeois femininity. Even women who might, at first, seem to embrace such an ideal – María Egipcíaca in Galdós’s La familia de León Roch, Lina in Pardo Bazán’s Dulce dueño, and Marta in Palacio Valdés’s

Introduction

13

Marta y María, to cite only a few cases – find ways of resisting this ideal through mysticism, hysteria, neurasthenia, and other bodily disorders. Moreover, manifestations of gender deviance in the fiction of the period are hardly limited to female characters. Emasculated or feminized men who challenge normative masculinity are also abundant and include examples such as Galdós’s Nazarín, Maxi Rubín (Fortunata y Jacinta), Máximo Manso (El amigo Manso), Francisco de Bringas (La de Bringas), and José María Bueno de Guzmán (Lo prohibido); Clarín’s Bonifacio Reyes (Su único hijo) and the acolyte Celedonio (La Regenta); Pardo Bazán’s Julián Álvarez (Los Pazos de Ulloa), Mauro Pareja (Memorias de un solterón), and Silvio Lago (La quimera); Father Gil in Placio Valdés (La fe) – the list goes on.12 Writing at the same time as the canonical realist authors were the once immensely popular ‘radical naturalists’ of the 1880s – Eduardo López Bago, Alejandro Sawa, Enrique Sánchez Seña, and Remigio Vega Armentero – whose works were much more explicit in depicting violent crimes and deviant sexuality. These novels, which the authors themselves often labelled as novela social (social novel) or novela médico-social (medical-social novel), straddled the ambiguous territory between the literary, the socio-political, and the medical-scientific. The goal of the radical naturalists was ostensibly to take Zola’s model of naturalism to an extreme, inscribing the deviant figure within medical treatises and subordinating the novel’s aesthetic elements to scientific/ positivistic analysis. Yet they also consciously appropriated the formulas of serialized popular fiction, resorting to sensationalistic plots and lurid representations of deviant sexuality to awaken the reader’s fascination and fear.13 Journalism was another fertile terrain for sensationalistic narratives of acts of deviance. Whereas journalistic accounts of deviance are commonly presumed to be factual, and literary accounts, fictional, both kinds of writing enacted a similar function in constructing the figure of the deviant. For example, the representation of the deviant subject in Galdós’s La incógnita – a literary fiction inspired by the famous crime of the calle de Fuencarral – closely echoes his own journalistic accounts of the same crime, as well as those that appeared in contemporary periodicals such as La Correspondencia de España, La Época, and El Imparcial. As Wadda Ríos-Font has shown, Galdós’s writings on this crime, in both the literary and the journalistic modes, afforded him the opportunity to reflect on the topics of deviance and normalcy under the influence of the new Lombrosian theories (90–117). The intersections among

14

Marginal Subjects

literary, journalistic, sociological, and medico-scientific writings on the deviant subject reveal nineteenth-century Spanish society’s collective fascination and horror with the various manifestations of this figure, and the stake it had in identifying and in isolating the deviant from the rest of the social body. Gender and the Construction of Deviance How does the fear of deviance in general, then, translate into anxieties about gender in particular? And how is it that these cultural anxieties then transform gender into a privileged metaphor for other social categorizations, such as class and nationality (Kirkpatrick, Mujer 86), which in turn differentiate marginal subjects from those in the social centre? Female deviance and sexuality were typically conflated in the nineteenth century through a linkage between deviance and the female body. Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla have examined the commonly held notion of ‘embodied deviance,’ by which they refer to ‘the scientific and popular postulate that the bodies of subjects classified as deviant are essentially marked in some recognizable fashion’ (2). Although connections have been drawn between deviancy and the body in relation to both men and women, given the traditional identification of women with corporeality, female deviance was automatically translated into sexual deviance, assumed to manifest itself in the materiality of the body. In the introduction to their English translation of Lombroso’s Criminal Woman, Nicole Rafter and Mary Gibson show that the Italian criminologist was not original in equating female deviance with sexuality; however, his grounding in ‘science’ to confirm this association has had far-reaching implications in pathologizing the female body and sexuality in general, since female sexuality was always automatically suspect in its potential to slip easily into pathology at any moment (28–9). It is hardly surprising, then, that the prostitute and the adulteress, the two most popular prototypes of female sexual deviance, figured prominently in the realist novel, reflecting a similar tendency in scientific studies to group together all sexually deviant women, including nymphomaniacs, lesbians, and prostitutes, under a single category (Groneman 234). This phenomenon may be seen in the representations of ‘exceptional’ female criminality that abounded in the romances in circulation during the period and were linked to sexual deviance: female murderers, in these accounts, were often motivated by carnal desire, particularly incestuous or adulterous desire, which

Introduction

15

drove them to commit the most brutal crimes, such as parricide or infanticide.14 In nineteenth-century Spain, while marginal male and female subjects alike were targeted for containment through both literary and non-literary discourses, the construction of deviance was hardly gender-neutral. Not only was the category of gender crucial to constructing deviant subjectivities – and we see this most clearly in writings on prostitution – but sexual deviance itself became gendered as feminine. This is not surprising given that disorder – and revolution – have always been feminized both in political discourses and in literary fiction, such as Galdós’s La de Bringas and La desheredada, and Pardo Bazán’s La Tribuna.15 As Jo Labanyi has observed, women became a key trope in talking about the [Spanish] ‘nation’s “ills,” whether as cause or solution’ (Gender 74).16 The contradiction, however, is that the studies produced by bourgeois male criminologists in Spain, France, and Italy alike, themselves representatives of the dominant culture, found more deviants among the male population. Lombroso himself struggled with this contradiction when he suggested that all women were to some degree deviant, while acknowledging that female delinquents were actually fewer in number than males (183).17 All the same, anxieties about social instability and disorder, as reflected in the cultural imagination of the period, often centred specifically on the figure of the female deviant. There were various social and historical factors that linked women and the possibility of revolution in late nineteenth-century Spain. Isabel II, who was queen of Spain from 1843 until her overthrow by the Glorious Revolution of 1868, was, by the end of her reign, portrayed in political discourse as a disorderly, ignorant, and irrational monarch who brought dishonour and disgrace to the nation (White). What was most noteworthy about the construction of the queen as a female political symbol of the nation, as historian Sarah White notes, was the conflation between the national body and the female body, that is, between ‘the public life of the nation’ and ‘the private life of the queen’ (235). The private life to which White refers, of course, was the queen’s deviant sexual life, which included her adulterous affairs with two of the three generals (Serrano and Topete) who eventually plotted her overthrow (239). While the (obvious) fact is that male generals carried out the Glorious Revolution against a female ruler, it is female disorder – of a sexual nature, no less – that was blamed for the political, social, and economic woes that plagued the nation during the Isabelline period and beyond,

16

Marginal Subjects

well into the Restoration. Disorder, therefore, became troped as feminine, with both liberals and monarchists holding the queen responsible for the political and social instability of the nation. The connection between women and social disorder became heightened during the final decades of the century. During this period, the ‘woman question’ – the question of her role in society and of her rights – became the centre of heated debate in various public forums, most notably in the Congresos Pedagógicos (Pedagogical Conferences) of 1882 and 1892, even though there was no organized political feminist movement in Spain at the time. Progressive female (and even male) intellectuals began to promote women’s education in the public forum, and laws were passed to establish centres for women’s education and professional training (mostly as teachers of young children).18 Thus, for many male writers and intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the threat of woman’s emancipation was at the forefront of their social concerns. On the one hand, increasing numbers of bourgeois women were gaining education, literacy, and visibility in the public sphere (these included women writers, in particular) during the second half of the nineteenth century; on the other, some members of the male intellectual and literary establishment made concerted efforts to combat the shifting tide which seemed to favour the advancement of women. A case in point, as we will see in chapter 3, are the many lectures, treatises, and conduct manuals directed to women in which female reading was condemned as presenting a sure path to sexual deviance and criminality. With the images of female disorder, deviance, and degeneration dominating the political, social, and cultural discourses of the second half of the nineteenth century, the popular perception that society as a whole was moving toward gender indifferentiation posed a threat to the bourgeois masculine establishment. In Spain, as well as in Western Europe as a whole, the ideal of ‘civilization’ was identified with masculinity, whereas social, cultural, and aesthetic decadence (and degeneration) were identified with femininity (Dijkstra; Kirkpatrick, ‘Gender’; Siegel).19 According to Bram Dijkstra, Max Nordau, under the influence of Darwin’s theory of evolution, established the identification between cultural degeneration and sexual ambiguity. Nordau’s treatise Degeneration (1892) achieved great success precisely because it gave expression to anxieties about gender that were widespread in Western European culture (Dijkstra 212–13). Similarly, other thinkers, such as the Austrian Otto Weininger, measured social progress based

Introduction

17

on the degree of differentiation between the sexes, defining man as the force of evolution and woman as an agent of degeneration (Dijkstra 218–21). Both the ‘masculine woman’ and the ‘feminine man’ stood for reversion to a primitive state of sexual indeterminacy, a view shared by criminal anthropologists such as Lombroso, for whom the tendency toward sexual ambiguity was a clear sign of degeneration (178). Ultimately, ‘the feminine’ became a trope to signal all those subjects who fell outside of established norms and were therefore identified with transgression, disorder, and degeneration: among them were the prostitute, the hysteric, the feminist (the ‘New Woman’), the homosexual, and the revolutionary. As Richard Cleminson and Francisco Vázquez García rightly observe: ‘What begins to haunt medical doctors, pedagogues, moralists, politicians and novelists during the last third of the nineteenth century is not so much sexual deviance but more the trope of gender deviance, something which is held to occasion the ruin of the family and the nation’ (42). The fact that gender deviance, rather than sexual deviance (by the latter, I refer specifically to the subject’s deviance from heterosexual norms), is the focus of my study requires an explanation. While contemporary gender theory separates these two categories analytically (though, of course, they are mutually interdependent), the fact is that in nineteenth-century Spain, sexual deviation was still subsumed under the category of gender deviance (Cleminson and Vázquez García 66–9). The discursive shift from ‘sex’ to ‘sexuality’ that Foucault saw as beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century in France and Germany would not occur in Spain until well into the twentieth century (History 43).20 In this sense, it is difficult to speak of ‘sexual deviance’ as a discrete phenomenon during the period under study. At the same time, the conflation of gender and sexual deviance under the trope of the ‘feminine’ in the discourses of late nineteenth-century Spain suggests that gender was, in fact, prioritized over sexuality in discussions of deviance. A focus on gender in this study, of course, will not preclude a consideration of sexuality; at the same time, any discussion of sexual or gender deviance needs to be situated within its specific historical context. What issues, then, were at stake in the transformation of gender deviance into a trope in the writings of this period? More specifically, what function did literature fulfil in the face of anxieties about gender during the Restoration? Works of literature, like the scientific discourses of medicine or anthropology, represented a means of channelling col-

18

Marginal Subjects

lective cultural anxieties in the face of social disorder and of ‘asserting their own right to control the socially deviant’ under the illusion – and, I will stress, it was an illusion – that to describe and to archive was to contain and to control disorder (Labanyi, Gender 76–7). Knowledge, it was assumed, would allow for the regulation of desire, which was thought to be provoked by the deviant (female) body. At the same time, as Foucault himself would have us believe, strategies of regulation and containment within the field of power relations depended precisely on those of resistance (History 96). Many literary works of the late nineteenth century – and realist novels, in particular – reveal an equally powerful impulse to resist order, redefining the limits of reality and of subjectivity, as we know it, even as they often struggle to control and contain deviance. Jann Matlock, in her discussion of the nineteenthcentury French novel, has shown convincingly how even the ‘most containing discourse’ had the potential to give rise to strategies of resistance (13). The same claim could be made about the Spanish realist novel, which often reveals a critical attitude toward the disciplinary project through the representation of characters that deviate from the social norm. This study will focus on the role of gender in imagining the possibility – if not always the realization – of new spaces of subjectivity and desire that lie outside of the social norm. That is, the deviant subject’s acts of transgression often allow him or her to conceptualize new gender roles and identities that hold the potential to resignify the norm. In writings about Spain, particularly by those in other parts of the Western world, the tendency has been to see this nation as particularly recalcitrant to progress and change: reasons frequently given for this are the repressive power of the Catholic Church (which has, since the fifteenth century, routinely persecuted racial and cultural ‘others,’ turning them over to the state for punishment) and a State in which modern liberalism never took root owing to a failed bourgeois revolution in the nineteenth century that left the nation with a weak and fragmented bourgeoisie.21 Yet, as my analysis of deviance in the literature of the late nineteenth century will show, these narratives on Spanish culture and history by both Spanish and foreign critics often fail to consider the resistances of subjects who are marginalized from the dominant culture. It is often these marginal subjects and their acts of resistance, their potential to produce ruptures in the norm, that become the material for the nineteenth-century novel and a fertile ground of exploration for literary and cultural critics.

Introduction

19

Gender and Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Spanish Literature The past twenty years have seen significant paradigm shifts in the field of nineteenth-century Peninsular literature, thanks to such interdisciplinary approaches as gender and cultural studies. Pioneers in the U.S. academy – among them, Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Jo Labanyi, Susan Kirkpatrick, Alda Blanco, and Maryellen Bieder – have pointed us to ways of reading literary texts differently by foregrounding gender as a fundamental category of analysis (as it relates to other categories such as race, class, and nationality). They have also expanded the scope of our discipline by encouraging the inclusion of non-canonical literary texts, particularly those written by women, as well as of other forms of cultural representation – visual images, medical and scientific texts, and political tracts – as legitimate objects of scholarly investigation. My work on gender deviance in nineteenth-century Spain grew out of a dialogue with the scholarship of other feminist and cultural critics in my field. Jo Labanyi’s groundbreaking book on Gender and Modernization in the Spanish Realist Novel, which probes the link between gender and modernity in the Spanish realist novel and in the broader context of late nineteenth-century cultural debates on modernity, was fundamental to establishing the contextual framework for my study of gender deviance. Susan Kirkpatrick’s analysis of the trope of gender in fin-de-siglo narratives was crucial to my conceptualization of the relation between gender and deviance. Teresa Fuentes’s Visions of Filth: Deviancy and Social Control in the Novels of Galdós directed me to a wealth of materials on nineteenth-century Spanish social history from which I was able to draw to formulate my thoughts on the construction of ‘deviancy’ during this period. Lou Charnon-Deutsch’s extensive work on nineteenth-century women writers has served as a foundation from which to develop my own analyses of female desire and subjectivity, and Maryellen Bieder’s studies on Pardo Bazán’s relationship to and participation in feminist discourse stimulated my own reflections on the feminist author’s rhetorical strategies. Luisa Elena Delgado’s essay on ‘wandering subjectivities’ and spatial practice in Galdós’s novels anticipates my own discussion of the deviant itineraries of the female subjects who constitute the focus of the chapters to follow. In the Spanish academy, Ricardo Campos Marín, José Martínez Pérez, and Rafael Huertas García-Alejo, among others, have carried out important historical research on marginal social subjects – including delinquents, the mentally ill, and the racial other – showing how writ-

20

Marginal Subjects

ings on deviance, particularly sexual deviance, originating from outside of Spain, were appropriated and re-elaborated in the Spanish national context. Fewer, however, are studies by literary scholars in the Spanish academy that frame the analysis of nineteenth-century gender and culture within the theoretical framework of feminist cultural criticism. A notable exception is Pura Fernández’s Mujer pública y vida privada: del arte eunuco a la novela lupanaria, which studies the function of the literary prostitute within contemporary cultural debates on prostitution, in particular, as well as on sexuality, disease, and hygiene. I dialogue with Fernández, particularly in chapters 6 and 7, in situating my own approach to prostitution within a theoretical paradigm that addresses the relation between gender and knowledge beyond the immediate Spanish context. Drawing on scholarship from both sides of the Atlantic, I hope to bridge in some measure the gap between the historical research carried out in the Spanish academy, a necessary starting point for cultural criticism, and the more theoretically oriented feminist scholarship practised in the Anglo-American academy. My first two chapters examine female deviance as it is represented in two of Benito Pérez Galdós’s novels, La desheredada (1881) and Fortunata y Jacinta (1886–7), through an analysis of the strategies deployed by the deviant woman to resist the system of power-knowledge that seeks her control and regulation. Consequently, the deviant body of the female character becomes a contested site where discourses of discipline and desire vie for control. While I might have chosen any number of Galdós’s novels whose female protagonists undermine the dominant discourses of power through their bodies and sexualities (Tristana, Tormento, and La de Bringas come to mind as examples of other such works), the two novels chosen here display, in an even more sustained fashion than in the shorter works, the complexity of the tensions created by the conflict between the deviant female body and the forces of discipline that seek to regulate it. Moreover, La desheredada, as the first novel of Galdós’s Novelas Españolas Contemporáneas series, is a pivotal work in his literary trajectory and in the nineteenth-century Spanish realist canon, as is his four-part Fortunata y Jacinta, considered by many to be his masterpiece.22 Chapter 1, ‘The Deviant Female Body under Surveillance: Galdós’s La desheredada,’ centres on the novel’s protagonist, Isidora Rufete, as the point of convergence for cultural anxieties about female desire, consumption, and mobility in late nineteenth-century Spain. Isidora,

Introduction

21

through her excessive reading of popular novels, comes to believe that she is the heir of a deceased marchioness and has been unjustly denied her inheritance. Consuming excessively in order to live in high style, as befits what she believes to be her class position, Isidora liquidates all of her possessions and is forced to take on a series of lovers in an attempt to maintain her luxurious lifestyle. In the end, rather than abandoning her desire, she embraces the life of the street prostitute. Isidora’s deviant trajectory reflects her struggle to assert herself as a desiring subject, eluding the gaze, authority, and disciplining hand of the (presumably male) naturalist narrator, who, for his part, maintains an ironic and ambivalent stance vis-à-vis the protagonist. Regardless of how we interpret Isidora’s final fall into prostitution (or, perhaps, it might be more appropriate to say, her choice to become a prostitute), her deviant itinerary, I will argue, ultimately allows her to negotiate new spaces of subjectivity that lie beyond the norm. Through his protagonist, the realist author is able to envision imaginary spaces that challenge the limits of the world we take to be ‘real.’ Chapter 2, ‘“Las Micaelas por fuera y por dentro”: Discipline and Resistance in Fortunata y Jacinta,’ focuses on two deviant female figures, Fortunata (a concubine, adulteress, and prostitute) and Mauricia la Dura (an alcoholic and ‘loose’ woman), whose appearance in the episode of the Micaelas convent in Book Two serves as a metaphor for the panoptical strategies at work in the novel. Like Isidora Rufete, the female protagonist of Fortunata asserts herself as a desiring subject, resisting the disciplinary mechanisms of bourgeois society that seek to convert her into a docile body. A woman of humble origins, Fortunata pursues the course of desire, becoming the mistress of a decadent bourgeois señorito,23 Juanito Santa Cruz, returning to him repeatedly even after her marriage of convenience to the petit bourgeois (and impotent) Maxi Rubín. When Maxi’s family sends her to the Micaelas convent to be ‘corrected,’ she befriends the unruly alcoholic, Mauricia la Dura, who plays a crucial role in kindling her rebellion against bourgeois society. While Fortunata emerges from the convent, apparently reformed, she has, in fact, learned, through Mauricia’s influence, to map out a space of desire that escapes social surveillance and discipline. After leaving the convent, she falls again into adultery, until she is abandoned by her lover, pregnant with his son, and dies shortly after childbirth. While Fortunata, like La desheredada, might seem to end with the ‘punishment’ of the deviant woman, the novel’s focalization through the female pro-

22

Marginal Subjects

tagonist’s perspective – and its insistence on affirming the female characters’ narratives of desire and resistance in the Micaelas episode itself – complicate any such facile interpretation. The texts examined in the first two chapters are among the most celebrated and widely read works of a male realist author who occupies a central place in the Spanish literary canon, while chapters 3 to 5 address the works of a prominent woman author of the same period. Emilia Pardo Bazán, as virtually the only female – and feminist – writer of the late nineteenth century who has gained entry, over the years, into the predominantly male literary canon, merits special attention. Moreover, the three works of Pardo Bazán chosen for analysis in my chapters represent different moments in the writer’s trajectory and, hence, different ways of responding to the problem of female deviance. La Tribuna (1883), considered her first sustained experimentation with the naturalist genre, coincides more or less with the elaboration of her famous naturalist manifesto, La cuestión palpitante (1882–3), which scandalized the Spanish male literary establishment; Insolación (1889) inaugurates the more openly feminist phase of her literary activity, with its celebration of female desire and sexuality; and Memorias de un solterón (1896) was published during the decade when the author’s feminist concerns predominate over her earlier naturalist tendencies, in both her fictional and essayistic productions. Chapter 3, ‘Consuming Subjects: Female Reading and Deviant Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Spain,’ turns to the archetype of the female reader, whose identification with deviant sexuality represents a projection of masculine anxieties about women’s literacy, education, and consumption in the late nineteenth century. While literary and medical texts alike (including conduct manuals) suggested the dangers of novel reading in general, they typically targeted female reading, fearing its potential to generate deviant desires. These texts, along with visual representations of the female reader in illustrated periodicals of the late nineteenth century, which associated reading with dangerous erotic pleasures, form the backdrop for my analysis of Pardo Bazán’s early naturalist novel, La Tribuna.24 This novel illustrates the dangers of female reading through the figure of the working-class protagonist Amparo by linking her act of reading to sexual deviance and the potential for revolution. Like Isidora Rufete, whose consumption of popular fiction incites her desire, empowering her to negotiate new spaces of subjectivity, Amparo exercises agency through her act of reading: she makes a private act public by reading newspaper articles aloud to her

Introduction

23

fellow factory workers to awaken their revolutionary fervour. Pardo Bazán’s representation of Amparo as a naive reader, easily caught up in the revolutionary rhetoric of the texts she reads, parallels the protagonist’s attempt to live her private life based on the formula of the sentimental novel she has consumed uncritically. In hopes of marrying the bourgeois Baltasar and, therefore, eliminating class distinctions, Amparo, like Galdós’s Isidora, becomes a consumer, spending lavishly on articles of self-adornment. While Pardo Bazán, in the prologue to the novel, appears to condemn the absurdity of a revolutionary project engendered by female desire, the ironic tone of the author’s rhetoric of apology undermines a literal-minded reading of her text. The author’s classism aside, I will argue that her fictional protagonist, as reader, engages in a much more complex negotiation of the (proletariat) woman’s place in a new consumer society, where class distinctions were becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. Given the fact that gender deviance affects male, as well as female, subjectivity, chapter 4, ‘Gender Trouble and the Crisis of Masculinity in the fin de siglo: Clarín’s Su único hijo and Pardo Bazán’s Memorias de un solterón,’ centres on men who defy the ideal of normative masculinity. Women’s changing roles, the gradual collapse between the private and the public, and the emergent influence of feminist ideas from abroad on Spanish women writers and intellectuals at the turn of the century naturally led to anxieties about male identity. Taking as my point of departure Rita Felski’s idea that the ‘feminized male’ became an emblem of the crisis of masculinity in the fin de siècle (92), particularly in the aesthetic realm, this chapter explores the responses of two authors – not only of different genders, but also antithetical in their gender ideologies – to this crisis. Clarín’s Su único hijo and Pardo Bazán’s Memorias de un solterón, both published in the final decade of the nineteenth century, reflect their obsession with gender inversion, particularly as it finds expression in the characters’ exaggerated aestheticism. Su único hijo is not the only work by Clarín that dramatizes the crisis of masculinity; representations of deviant or otherwise conflicted masculinities also abound in Clarín’s masterpiece, La Regenta. (The figure of the perverse acolyte Celedonio, as well as the more obvious case of the priest Fermín de Pas, immediately come to mind).25 Su único hijo, however, merits special consideration as an emblematic work of the fin de siècle that explicitly foregrounds the crisis of masculinity and, more generally, that of gender. While Clarín addresses the crisis of gender (or perhaps the Spanish word género here is more appropriate to signal the general crisis of cat-

24

Marginal Subjects

egory in the fin de siglo) in order to reinscribe it within the parameters of normative masculinity, Emilia Pardo Bazán appropriates the figure of the male aesthete to challenge and reconfigure prevailing notions of gender. In Clarín’s novel, it is the female artist figure (Emma) who transforms her husband (Bonifacio) into a dandy figure by aestheticizing and feminizing him, while Bonifacio himself fails in his search for ‘authentic’ masculinity through paternity. In the end, the male gaze that focalizes the narrative insists on asserting the male protagonist’s authority over his art and progeny (his ‘only son’), yet Emma’s sexual deviance (adultery) debases and subverts his artistic project, questioning its legitimacy. In Pardo Bazán’s Memorias de un solterón, on the other hand, the crisis of masculinity that the New Woman provokes in the feminized dandy figure ultimately leads to the transformation of the masculine subject, enabling the conceptualization of new configurations of gender for both men and women. The discussions in the first four chapters address gender, sexuality, and class as the primary categories through which the novels’ protagonists express their deviancy. Chapter 5, ‘Gender, Orientalism, and the Performance of National Identity in Pardo Bazán’s Insolación,’ centres on the interrelations of gender and sexuality with ‘race’ and nation in the construction of deviant subjectivities. Insolación, which is structured on the north/south, European/African, civilization/barbarism binary, takes the orientalist myth of Andalusia as the basis on which the female protagonist Asís negotiates her subjectivity; by transforming her lover Pacheco, a native of Andalusia, into the racial/national other, she is enabled as a desiring subject. Even as Asís seeks to resist (unsuccessfully) her desire for the southerner, whom dominant cultural discourses of the times (and Pardo Bazán herself) have cast as the barbaric (African) other, her fascination with her lover’s otherness forces her to confront the complexity of racial and national identity, frustrating her attempts to reduce herself and her lover to stable signs of nationality. The performances of gender in which both Asís and her Andalusian lover engage throughout the novel lead to an ambiguous conclusion, in spite of the final consummation of their desire, ultimately foreclosing any simple resolution to the female protagonist’s struggle to come to terms with a racial and cultural otherness that constitutes Spain’s own national heritage. The ambivalences and contradictions in Asís’s narrative of desire, which culminates in the novel’s final lack of resolution, serves as a reflection of Pardo Bazán’s own conflicted attitude toward the racial other.

Introduction

25

Shifting our attention away from canonical authors, chapters 6 and 7 explore the treatment of gender and sexual deviance in the works of the less familiar (to modern readers) and critically neglected literary figures of the same period. These chapters probe the privileged place that the figure of the prostitute – an emblem of female sexual deviance par excellence – occupied in the cultural imaginary of the late nineteenth century. Chapter 6, ‘Taming the Prostitute’s Body: Desire, Knowledge, and the Naturalist Gaze in López Bago’s La prostituta Series’ centres on the works of Eduardo López Bago, the most widely read author in Spain of his times, and a ‘radical naturalist’ who launched a campaign against legalized prostitution through his writings. As such, his fiction served as a paradigm for the other male radical naturalists of the 1880s in Spain, who likewise took up the radical naturalist banner through representations of prostitution and other forms of sexual deviance in their works. This chapter analyses the contradictions that emerge in the representation of the prostitute in López Bago’s ‘medical-social’ novels. On the one hand, the masculine narrator of La prostituta series positions himself as the authoritative voice of the naturalist writer, who imposes a scientific knowledge system on the prostitute to contain and to control her threat to the social order. Yet his voyeuristic investment in the deviant female body, which becomes an unconscious fantasy of seduction based on stereotypical images of the prostitute, undermines his claim to scientific authority. Drawing on Homi Bhabha’s discussion of stereotype as an ‘ambivalent mode of knowledge and power’ when confronting otherness (66), my discussion of the prostitute in López Bago’s work will serve to illuminate the naturalist writer’s own ambivalent role in confronting anxieties about the sexually deviant woman. López Bago’s work elides the question of the prostitute’s own desire, ultimately stripping her of agency and of the potential for resistance, in spite of the fact that the masculine narrator appears to grant her a certain degree of subjectivity through free indirect discourse, frequently presenting her thoughts from her own point of view.26 In contrast, María Magdalena, authored by his contemporary Matilde Cherner (under the masculine pseudonym ‘Rafael Luna’), the only known novel on prostitution by a woman of the same period, seeks to lay claim to a space of resistance denied the prostitute by López Bago by assigning her a first-person narrative. As such, her work merits examination in spite of its critical obscurity. Chapter 7, ‘Female Subjectivity and Agency in Matilde Cherner’s María Magdalena,’ shows that in order to act out the prostitute’s tactics of resistance, Cherner positioned her dis-

26

Marginal Subjects

course strategically, making use of what Josefina Ludmer, in another context, has called ‘las tretas del débil’ (the tricks of the weak). That is, the female protagonist – and, by extension, the author of the novel – enunciates her political denunciation against legalized prostitution from within the personal space of a diary, which was traditionally considered an appropriate form of female expression, and through the act of writing transforms her private experience as a victim of prostitution into a matter of public import. At the same time, the prostitute’s memoirs are framed by the narrations of two masculine figures: an introduction narrated by a male writer who publishes María Magdalena’s memoirs, followed by the account of a male physician who cared for the protagonist in her last days and turns over her memoirs to the narrator for publication. These masculine voices, then, establish the framework for the reception of the prostitute’s memoir, which is a clichéd love story modelled on the conventions of French romanticism, rather than a medical-social work in the vein of López Bago’s ‘radical naturalism.’ Thus, in the end, we are left doubtful as to the extent to which the prostitute’s subjective consciousness translates into agency; at the same time, the strategic play of narrative voices allows the author to bring the prostitute’s experience out into the public light in a way that undermines dominant cultural constructions of deviant female subjectivity. In approaching these texts critically, we turn to several methodological issues. First, in some novels, there is seemingly little separation between the author’s ostensible gender ideology and the discursive perspective from which the narratives focalize gender deviance. This is particularly true in the case of López Bago or Cherner, whose ‘medical-social’ (or ‘social’ in Cherner’s case) novels are written in a more overtly propagandistic vein, in contrast to the more ‘literary’ style of Galdós, Clarín, and Pardo Bazán. Nevertheless, even in cases in which a particular speaking subject – whether a character or a narrator – appears to serve as the biographical author’s spokesperson, his or her words cannot be taken at face value; representations of subjectivity demand to be scrutinized from within the social context in which they are inscribed. Thus, characters and narrators cannot be seen as mere repositories of authorial ideology, even assuming this ideology is easily identifiable. Even in overtly propagandistic fiction these literary representations are fraught with contradictions. Second, while it is important to avoid any simplistic or essentialist claims about the representation of the deviant subject based on the gender of the author, it is crucial to take into account the ways in which

Introduction

27

discursive strategies are inflected culturally by considerations of gender – as well as of class, race, and nation. Therefore, we need to interrogate the impact of these socially constructed and imposed differences on literary representations of female deviance. Precisely because of women authors’ marginality within the dominant male culture, we should ask how their position as ‘marginal subjects’ necessitates different strategies to legitimize their literary representations – particularly, if these representations are also of deviant subjects.27 That is to say, the fictional characters’ cultural negotiations often reflect, to a certain degree, those of the author herself. The fact that women authors such as Pardo Bazán and Matilde Cherner felt a need to articulate a tactic of self-defence in the prologues to their novels, through rhetorical manoeuvrings that often called attention to their own cultural marginality, is telling in this regard. These chapters hone in on the articulations of gender deviance in the Spanish novels under discussion and reveal the cultural exigencies that this trope fulfils in the national imaginary of late nineteenth-century Spain. Responding to internal social turmoil and the loss of empire abroad, Spanish novelists project their anxieties onto the figure of the female deviant – or the feminized male deviant – who escapes social control and discipline. The female deviant, in particular, embodies the complex negotiations of gender, class, race, and nationality taking place in Spain at the turn of the century. At the same time, the deviant subject does much more than to give symbolic expression to cultural anxieties. He or she can also have a productive role, allowing us to imagine identities that have the potential to challenge and redefine established norms. It is this foundational possibility of realist and naturalist literature that forms the centre of my analysis of gender deviance in fin-desiècle Spain.

1 The Deviant Female Body under Surveillance: Galdós’s La desheredada

Deviant female subjects abound in the novels of Galdós, as in many other realist/naturalist works of the same period, and their deviance is tied to the representation of their bodies, both in physical and symbolic terms. In the deviant woman’s struggle to mobilize resistance to power, her body becomes a contested site where desire and discipline vie for control. Many of Galdós’s protagonists are women who defy, through the deployment of their bodies and sexualities, the bourgeois norms of feminine conduct and, more specifically, the institution of marriage itself. Whether they are unmarried women entering into sexual relations outside of marriage (Tormento, Tristana), adulteresses (Fortunata, Rosalía de Bringas), or ‘prostitutes’ (Fortunata, Isidora, and Rosalía), all of these categories of female deviance were conflated in the nineteenthcentury popular imagination in representing bodies, desires, and sexualities that resisted bourgeois disciplinary society’s attempts to regulate them. As Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla have argued in their introduction to the anthology Deviant Bodies, deviancy and the body have been linked closely in scientific and other forms of discourse since the nineteenth century. Given that the ‘delinquent’ came to be defined as a discursive category in the nineteenth century, the connection between deviant subjectivity and the (gendered) body is central to our analysis of the realist novel. Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, which has been crucial to bringing to light the linkage between power, knowledge, and the body, has laid the foundations for feminist studies focusing on the production of the body as a gendered construct, bound up with systems of ‘representation, cultural production, and socioeconomic exchange’ (Grosz 19). If deviance is ‘always somehow embodied’ (Terry

Galdós’s La desheredada

29

and Urla 4) within a system of unequal relations of power in which some models of the body are held up to be the normative ideal, bodies seen as deviating from these norms have become transformed into targets of disciplinary intervention. In spite of the belatedness of Spain’s industrialization in relation to other Western European societies, occurring in mid-century, rather than at the turn of the nineteenth century, Spain was no different from the other nations in that the rise of bourgeois capitalism and industrialization was accompanied by a proliferation of social institutions and measures whose function was to keep the body and sexuality under surveillance (Foucault, History 126). Given the historical backdrop of Galdós’s novels in the Restoration period, which historians have seen as the moment of crystallization of a disciplinary society in Spain (Trinidad Fernández), as well as the setting of these novels within specific institutions of social control (such as the insane asylum, prisons, factories, and convents), it is not surprising that novels like La desheredada (1881) and Fortunata y Jacinta (1886–7) have elicited Foucauldian analyses (Castillo; T. Fuentes, Visions 58–86; Labanyi, Gender; Tsuchiya). Debra Castillo, in her analysis of La desheredada, shows how the novel itself becomes a metaphor for the discipline-machine that keeps delinquency in check by transforming it into discourse. Labanyi, for her part, focuses her attention on the social regulation of marginal subjects – particularly the delinquent (Mariano) and the prostitute (Isidora) – by a state that has excluded them from citizenship (Gender 103–26). I myself have approached this novel, elsewhere, as representing an attempt to impose discipline and surveillance on the female protagonist’s body from the viewpoint of the male narrator and characters, thus downplaying implicitly the ambiguity in the narrator’s discourse (Tsuchiya). Similarly, Teresa Fuentes analyses, through the panoptical analogy, the disciplinary techniques imposed on working-class women in Fortunata y Jacinta to attempt to ‘reform’ them based on bourgeois domestic values (Visions 58–86). While I am in agreement with the insights of these critics, who have focused on the techniques of power applied to the deviant (female, for the most part) subject, my own discussion of the workings of disciplinary mechanisms in Galdós’s work will centre on the strategies of resistance mobilized by these deviant subjects to open up new spaces of subjectivity that defy the norm. This is not to assume automatically, or in a simplistic sense, a resistive agency on the part of the deviant subject that can be translated into radical transformations either of social

30

Marginal Subjects

norms or of the position of the deviant vis-à-vis these norms. I would, however, like to argue for a greater emphasis on the physical and symbolic spaces that the deviant woman creates for herself through the deployment of her body to resist the institutions and techniques of power. Furthermore, I will demonstrate how the complex and ambiguous discursive strategies of Galdós’s text reflect the deviant female subject’s constant process of negotiation of subjectivity. The setting of the opening chapter of La desheredada in the insane asylum is significant for a variety of reasons. First, the narrator, albeit ironically, describes the workings of a disciplinary institution, echoing contemporary discourses on mental illness and the criminal justice system. The nineteenth century was precisely the moment in which the practitioners of the ‘new psychiatry,’ among them José Esquerdo and Ángel Pulido Fernández, began to elaborate a medical model of criminality, with the goal of justifying the existence of psychiatry as a separate discipline (Campos Marín et al. 53–112). In Spain, public debates on the distinction between the ‘mentally ill’ and the ‘criminal’ reached their height at the end of the nineteenth century – a period during which a number of high-profile crimes, such as that of the priest Galeote (1886) and of the calle de Fuencarral (1888), received widespread press coverage – and spilled over into the literary terrain, as exemplified in the publication of Giné y Partagás’s Misterios de la locura (1890). The narrator of La desheredada establishes, through the medicalization of Tomás Rufete’s ‘monomanía’ (revealed in his ‘abnormal’ physiognomy [15]), a potential hereditary link between the father’s mental degeneration and his daughter’s eventual ‘madness,’ which becomes manifested as bodily disorders: her ‘neuralgias de cabeza’ (neuralgia headaches; 59), ‘gran excitación cerebral’ (great cerebral excitement; 258), and her ‘nervios’ (nerves; 258).1 The narrator describes these bodily disorders, significantly, as a ‘violación de los órdenes de la Naturaleza’ (violation of the laws of Nature; 258), where ‘Nature’ implies the social norm of femininity, thus echoing ironically contemporary medical texts that pathologized deviant female behaviour. The insane asylum, portrayed as both ‘hospital y presidio’ (hospital and prison; 15) founded under the combined tutelage of the Church and the State, serves the function of both ‘carcelero-enfermo […] una máquina muscular que ha de constreñir en sus brazos de hierro al rebelde y al furioso’ (jailer and nurse … a muscular machine which has to constrain the rebel and the furious maniac in arms of iron; 16). For example, the scene of Rufete’s forced hydrotherapy, a practice common at the time, comes to mind as a

Galdós’s La desheredada

31

particularly violent way of subjecting individuals to the disciplinemachine, ‘la maquinaria’ (machinery; 21), in the character’s own words. As the novel progresses, this image of exceptional discipline within a concrete institution of social control soon gives way to a panoptical model of power where surveillance is generalized and omnipresent (Foucault, Discipline). The opening scene in the insane asylum thus becomes a metaphor for a disciplinary machine that seeks to confine and to regulate its citizens. (In this context, the narrator’s commentary later in the novel that likens Madrid to a ‘manicomio suelto’ [mad house let loose; 190] is quite appropriate.) Second, the peripheral location of the insane asylum, both physically (outside of the capital) and symbolically (outside of the society of ‘normal’ people) is significant in that the novel establishes an apparent dichotomy between the ‘normal’ and the ‘deviant’ through the use of spatial metaphors, only to deconstruct this dichotomy in the end.2 The insane asylum is located outside of the urban centre, on the margins of ‘civilization’; and its inhabitants, portrayed as ‘primitive’ and subhuman (15), are enclosed in a controlled space that keeps them at a remove from ‘normal’ citizens. When Isidora first arrives in Leganés, she appears to be an outsider to the world of the insane asylum; however, her place within the madness-sanity opposition is soon rendered uncertain, given not only her inability to distinguish between the ‘sane’ and the ‘mad’ but her growing sense of affinity with the madman whom she takes to be the clerk of the insane asylum. In addition, owing to the narrative’s focalization through Isidora, the reader, too, undergoes a disconcerting jolt, undermining his or her ability to determine who is normal and who is not, when Canencia, the supposed ‘scribe,’ reveals his true mental condition. Canencia’s diagnosis of ‘monomania’ is in itself interesting, since this term was coined in the early nineteenth century by the French psychiatrist Esquirol to refer to a form of ‘madness’ which was particularly difficult to detect and to diagnose by the lay medical person, since patients with this affliction were typically seen to be ‘normal’ (intelligent and reasonable) people who, nevertheless, suffered episodes of sudden irrational behaviour (Campos Marín et al. 58). Thus, by calling attention to the instability of the boundary between the ‘normal’ and the ‘deviant,’ Galdós’s narrator reveals, from the opening scene of the novel, the potential fissures in the disciplinary machine from which resistance may be mobilized. Finally, it is precisely in the insane asylum, a space on the margins of society, that we have our first glimpse into the subjective space of

32

Marginal Subjects

Isidora’s desires. The driving force of the narrative is the female protagonist’s desire to transcend her class origins, a desire kindled by her reading of popular novels which the (patriarchal) cultural establishment considered to be frivolous, at best, and dangerous, at worst, for women.3 It is in the setting of Leganés in the opening scene in which Isidora reveals to us, in her own words, the nature of the fantasy that she has fabricated in her imagination. What ‘reasonable’ society considers the protagonist’s delusions is compared to her father’s madness, also a consequence, in Isidora’s own words, of the fact that ‘[Rufete] nunca se contentaba con su suerte, sino que aspiraba a más, a más’ (He was never content with his fate, but always yearned for more and more; 26). Desire and deviant behaviour (a manifestation of ‘madness’ in society’s eyes) are, therefore, linked from the very first chapter of the novel. The connection between desire and deviance becomes particularly pronounced in two emblematic, yet contrasting, chapters of the novel, chapters 4 and 7, both of which focus on Isidora’s deambulations through the streets of Madrid. In her first stroll through the urban space, in chapter 4, the medical student Augusto Miquis, whose disciplinary role vis-à-vis the protagonist becomes increasingly important as the novel progresses, accompanies her. In this walk, Miquis maps out their itinerary through urban space, from her abode in the calle de Hernán Cortés in the centre of the old city, through the Retiro Park, and, finally, to the more spacious Castellana and the bourgeois residential district of the Salamanca neighbourhood. This is also the first moment in which the narrator links Isidora’s own desire for consumption to her body as a potential object of consumption: she stops in front of the shop windows to ‘admire’ commodities that are beyond her reach and to indulge in her ‘deseo oculto de mirarse en los cristales’ (hidden desire to look at herself in the glass; 62) to scrutinize the image of her body for its appeal to others’ eyes. The implicit connection between the consuming subject (even if she is only consuming symbolically at this point) and her obsession with her body image is significant, given Isidora’s decision later on to prostitute herself, rejecting the possibility of an orderly bourgeois life within conventional marriage. Throughout their ‘paseo’ (stroll), Isidora’s uncontrolled desire and fantasy, her ‘instintos de independencia y de candoroso salvajismo’ (instincts of freedom and innocent savagery; 63), are checked by Miquis’s disciplinary hand that guides her on this itinerary and forces her confrontation with the norms of the social world around her. (Significantly, he too proposes marriage, which she rejects categorically.) When the

Galdós’s La desheredada

33

two arrive at the Retiro, Isidora suddenly realizes that the park itself, which she had associated with the freedom of Nature, is a miniature city, ‘un campo urbano […] una ingeniosa adaptación de la Naturaleza a la cultura’ (urban country … Nature ingeniously adapted to culture; 63).4 Soon afterward, Isidora finds herself in the Casa de Fieras, where Miquis leads her ‘jaula por jaula’ (cage by cage), producing in her a feeling of pity and repugnance toward ‘los infelices bichos privados de libertad’ (unfortunate beasts deprived of liberty; 70). What she had imagined to be a ‘tour,’ indicator of potential spatial itineraries, to adopt de Certeau’s term, turns out to be a totalizing ‘map’ already drawn up by Miquis, representing ‘proper places in which to exhibit the products of [masculine] knowledge’ (de Certeau 121). These places of knowledge established by Miquis seem to close in symbolically on the space of subjectivity opened up by Isidora’s desire. The stroll of the two characters culminates in the Salamanca district, where Isidora’s delight in the luxurious carriages, which sets her imagination afire, is curbed by Miquis’s reasoned caution against the cursilería represented by such a show of display. As Isidora continues to be enraptured by the vision of luxury and the fantasy of upward mobility, Miquis bring her back to reality, quite literally, ‘desviándola de los paseos para subir hacia el Saladero y acortar camino’ (diverting her from the line of evening strollers to climb up toward the Saladero and so shorten the route; 81). Through the control of her spatial trajectory, Miquis symbolically restricts the space of her subjectivity, thus anticipating his more explicitly disciplinary function later on in the novel as one who undertakes the protagonist’s social and moral reform. Isidora’s stroll through Madrid under Miquis’s guiding hand, in chapter 4, is set in contrast with the protagonist’s unencumbered trajectory alone through the urban space in chapter 7. In this chapter, appropriately entitled ‘Tomando posesión de Madrid’ (Taking possession of Madrid), Isidora wanders through the commercial zone of central Madrid, simply for the pleasure of being out amid the crowds in the public space of the city: ‘había salido por salir, por ver aquel Madrid tan bullicioso’ (she had come out for the sake of it, in order to see noisy, bustling Madrid; 115). She comes to embody the archetype of the flâneur, traditionally identified with the masculine subject who takes possession of the urban spectacle through his gaze. At the same time Elizabeth Wilson, in response to Benjamin and Baudelaire’s masculinist commentaries on the flâneur, seizes on the connection between female flânerie and prostitution (after all, the prostitute is the ‘public woman’

34

Marginal Subjects

par excellence) to argue that prostitution, while serving as a metaphor for the ‘new regime of nineteenth-century urbanism,’ did not have to relegate women to a victim status (‘Invisible’ 105; The Sphinx 55). The prostitute who, in Wilson’s view, came to symbolize commodification and mass production in an emergent consumer culture (‘Invisible’ 105) also became a site for the potential redefinition of traditional gender categories. In Galdós’s novel Isidora, a female version of the flâneur, revels in her freedom to abandon herself to the consumption of extravagant commodities, most of which are for the adornment of her body. As shown by many nineteenth-century novels, from Galdós’s La de Bringas to Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames, woman’s desire for consumption is intricately intertwined with erotic desire. Metaphors suggestive of sexual appetite, arousal, and seduction abound as the narrator describes Isidora’s desire for consumption: ‘ver escaparates […] era su delicia mayor cuando a la calle salía, y origen de vivísimos apetitos […] dándole juntamente ardiente gozo y punzante martirio […] devoraba con sus ojos las infinitas variedades y formas del lujo y de la moda’ (to look at shop windows … was her greatest delight when she was out in the street, and the origin of very lively appetites … giving her ardent pleasure and acute suffering at the same time … her eyes devoured the infinite varieties and shapes of luxury and fashion; 117, emphasis mine). The scene of uncontrolled consumption that follows anticipates Isidora’s eventual prostitution by echoing the identification between luxury items and transgressive female sexual desire, commonly made in the dominant discourses of the nineteenth century (Aldaraca, El ángel 88–117; Jagoe, Ambiguous 86–95). For social commentators of the period, luxury emblematized the dangers of the new marketplace, which made it difficult to control an individual’s spending so that it was commensurate with his or her social standing (Aldaraca, El ángel 92).5 That is, the consumption of ‘un lujo no correspondiente á su clase’ (luxury not corresponding to one’s class) could potentially lead to the confusion of social classes (Sereñana y Partagás 138). In Galdós’s novel, Isidora’s love of luxury is clearly linked to her desire to transcend her class origins and to embrace the fiction of her noble birth, a desire that ultimately leads to her sexual deviance. While contemporary commentators condemned the ravages of female consumerism, with prostitution as its ultimate consequence, we might examine, from a different perspective, how consumerism might open up a potential space of resistance and agency for the female subject. This is not to deny altogether the pitfalls and dangers of uncon-

Galdós’s La desheredada

35

trolled consumption, especially for women without real buying power, nor to romanticize prostitution in any way. Yet if we accept Rita Felski’s premise that ‘the discourse of consumerism is to a large extent the discourse of female desire’ (65), it is possible to argue, as she has, that the consuming subject can potentially engage in a negotiation of the meaning of the act of consumption, even when it is taken to its ultimate consequences: prostitution. Luis Fernández Cifuentes rightfully notes the importance of the female protagonist’s initial steps in the city as marking the ‘new identification of Isidora’s beauty with the beauty of luxury commodities,’ that is, her transformation into ‘the most expensive commodity in the city of Galdós’ (‘Signs’ 308–9). And it is she herself who confers value on her own body, preparing to deploy this body in order to fulfil her desire, that is, to transform into reality the fiction of her noble birth. In addition to indulging in what the narrator condemningly calls her ‘desordenado apetito de compras’ (uncontrolled appetite for buying things; 127), she spends her time adorning herself with these luxury items and admiring the beauty of her own body: ‘¡Qué hermosa soy!’ she exclaims, ‘Tengo un cuerpo precioso’ (How beautiful I am! I have a gorgeous body; 165). She asserts the superiority her own body and image to those of other common beauties, believing this image to reflect her true class origins. This image becomes so convincing that even the Marchioness of Aransis, at one point, discerns nobility and honour in her physiognomy (Fernández Cifuentes, ‘Signs’ 301). Joaquín, too, is immediately seduced by her image: ‘Joaquín la visitó; encontróla guapa el primer día; el segundo, muy guapa, y el tercero, deliciosísima, con lo que la disputó por suya’ (Joaquín visited her; he found her attractive on the first day; very attractive on the second, and delicious on the third, so he claimed her as his own; 181). Although both Isidora and her soonto-be lover Joaquín consciously construct sexualized images of their bodies to seduce the gaze of the observer, what distinguishes Isidora from Joaquín – and from all of the cursis around her – is her faith in the authenticity of the image that she has constructed for herself. That is, she seeks to open up a space of subjective desire by manoeuvring the seductive appeal of her own image, for the sake of social mobility and economic profit, with a belief in the correspondence between ‘external’ image and ‘internal’ identity. In this context, the ‘non-recognition’ scene with the Marchioness of Aransis in chapter 16 of the novel is key to defining the protagonist’s trajectory as a desiring subject who seeks to open up new spaces of sub-

36

Marginal Subjects

jectivity through the deployment of her own body. Isidora’s words and actions before, during, and after this scene of ‘anagnórisis’ suggest her faith in her beauty as a sign of her nobility – to adopt, once again, Fernández Cifuentes’s metaphor – that is, a sign that corresponds presumably to the ‘truth’ of her noble character (‘Signs’). The anxious attention that Isidora pays to her dress and appearance (she scrutinizes obsessively her image in the mirror) before her trip to the Marchioness’s palace is, therefore, noteworthy, since behind the image of her adorned body, she seeks the ‘truth’ of herself and identity: ‘su dignidad, su hermosura, su derecho mismo’ (her dignity, beauty, and the very justice of her claim; 215). To translate the subjective space of desire into the ‘real’ is difficult in a new society of consumer capitalism – in a ‘society of the spectacle,’ where identity becomes reduced to its representation (Sieburth, Inventing 37): the very notion of a representational system capable of positing a stable identity has been questioned. After her rejection by the Marchioness, Isidora heads, once again, for the centre of the city, where she joins a turbulent crowd outfitted for the upcoming Carnival celebration. It is no coincidence that Isidora’s ‘nonrecognition’ by the Marchioness of Aransis, the first blow to her faith in the sign, occurs at a moment of political turbulence and disorder. Isidora’s assimilation into the crowd in chapter 17 (entitled, ironically, ‘Igualdad. Suicidio de Isidora’ [Equality. Isidora’s Suicide]) emblematizes the confusion between classes and identities, making the distinction between the true and the false, the real and the artificial, difficult to discern, and recalling the narrator’s commentary on the cursilería of the petty bourgeoisie as ‘La confusión de clases en la moneda falsa de la igualdad’ (The confusion of classes is the counterfeit coin of equality; 136). The abdication of King Amadeo, rather than bringing a democratic and egalitarian Republic, only produces its simulacrum; the Republic is no more than an empty sign to fill the void left by the failure of the ancien régime (‘La República entraba para cubirir la vacante del Trono [The Republic was coming in to take over the vacant throne; 231]). However, in spite of the apparent loss of Isidora’s identity, or her ‘suicide,’ most of the chapter is focalized through the protagonist’s perspective, as her subjectivity transfigures the urban space that she traverses: ‘¡qué manera tan rara de ver el mundo’ (And what a strange way to see the world!), she reflects to herself as she wanders aimlessly through the city: ‘Cambio general. El mundo era de otro modo […] La gente y las casas también se habían transformado; y para que la mudanza fuera completa, ella misma era punto menos que otra persona’

Galdós’s La desheredada

37

(Total transformation. The world was quite different … People and houses too had been changed; and so that the transformation might be complete, she herself was no less than another person; 225). Deborah Parsons, in her discussion of the relationship of Galdós’s female characters to the city, observes that Isidora, like Fortunata, is presented as ‘placeless, or rather out of place, in the city. Neither finds a permanent home and both move residence constantly, their changing abodes reflecting their changing fortunes’ (54).6 In Galdós’s narrative in general I find interesting the repeated use of the word ‘mudanza,’ both literally (as physical movement from one place to another) and in all of its symbolic connotations (social instability, fluctuations of the market, moral inconstancy, etc.), particularly in reference to the female characters. At the beginning of Tormento, for example, the readers are introduced to Rosalía de Bringas when her family is amid a ‘mudanza’ (19), heralding their downward move on the social ladder. Later at the conclusion of La de Bringas, we find the family once again on ‘el día de la mudanza’ (moving day), a metaphor that captures not only the social and political turbulence of the Revolution and the change in the family’s circumstances, but also Rosalía’s fall to adultery and ‘prostitution,’ that is, what the narrator refers to as her ‘mudanza moral’ (moral inconstancy; 305). Likewise in Tristana, the protagonist’s mother Josefina Solís is afflicted by a ‘manía de las mudanzas’ (obsession for moving; 51), considered to have precipitated her own financial ruin and her daughter’s dishonour. When used in reference to women, this metaphor of ‘movement,’ of displacement from one’s ‘proper place’ as defined by social norms, often connotes sexual deviation, thus highlighting, again, the link between female deviance and the body. Like these other female characters who are in a state of constant movement, Isidora’s place cannot be fixed; by rejecting any ‘place’ ruled by the law of the ‘proper’ (de Certeau 117), she defies the norms of bourgeois order and stability, and poses a threat to both class and gender boundaries. Her deviant trajectory exemplifies Elena Delgado’s observation that, in the realist novel in general, the characters’ identities are inextricably linked to their spatial and discursive locations.7 Isidora’s aimless act of walking through the crowd following her rejection by the Marchioness allows her to transform ‘places into spaces’ (de Certeau 118), as she actualizes, according to her own subjective vision, the ensemble of topological possibilities that offer themselves to her as she penetrates into the interior of the city; familiar places become defamiliarized in her subjectivity, and the city becomes a space of pleasure

38

Marginal Subjects

and the transgression of limits. (To discuss the significance of the Carnival setting in this context would be to point out the obvious.) Again, the focalization through the protagonist’s perspective, through the use of free indirect style, is crucial to providing the reader access to her subjectivity. Isidora imagines that the bustling streets ‘convidan a los placeres y a intentar gratas aventuras […] El vagar de esta hora tiene todos los atractivos del paseo y las seducciones del viaje de aventuras’ (invite people to taste pleasures and embark on delightful adventures … Wandering about at this hour has all the attractions of a stroll and the seductions of a journey into the unknown; 229); at this moment, she senses a reawakening of ‘aquel apetito de comprar todo […] de conocer las infinitas variedades del sabor fisiológico y dar satisfacción a cuantos anhelos conmovieran el cuerpo vigoroso y el alma soñadora’ (that desire of hers to buy everything … to experience the infinite variety of natural pleasures and to give satisfaction to all the desires conceived by a vigorous body and a dreaming soul; 229–30), recalling the scene in chapter 7 when she was ‘taking possession of Madrid.’ Desire, consumption, and the female body/sexuality become linked once again. The narrator of the novel eroticizes Isidora’s contact with the masses, portraying it literally as a communion of bodies that evokes in her a sensation of pleasure: ‘aquel fluido magnético conductor de misteriosos apetitos, que se comunicaba de cuerpo a cuerpo por el roce de hombros y brazos’ (that fluid magnetic conductor of mysterious desires which flow from one body to another as shoulders and arms rub against each other; 231). Elizabeth Wilson, in response to the writings of androcentric (and politically reactionary) crowd theorists, examines how the crowd, since the nineteenth century, became ‘increasingly invested with female characteristics, while retaining its association with criminals and minorities’ (The Sphinx 7). Again, the gendered embodiment of ‘deviance’ (as well as its inflection by race and class) becomes clear, particularly in the identification between women and disruptive sexuality, exemplified in the figure of the flâneur/prostitute. In her analysis, Wilson refers to the work of the right-wing crowd theorist Gustave Le Bon, who evokes the image of a devouring female monster, the Sphinx at the centre of the city, as a metaphor for the disruption that characterized nineteenthcentury urban life. That is, in his view, women have become an ‘irruption in the city’ that threatened the bourgeois patriarchal order (Wilson, The Sphinx 7–9). In La desheredada, Isidora is just such an irruption; she represents the female flâneur par excellence, for whom the crowd of-

Galdós’s La desheredada

39

fers a space of ‘pleasure, deviation, disruption’ (Wilson, The Sphinx 7). By disappearing into the crowd with her lover, Joaquín Pez, at the end of the first part of the novel, exchanging her body for a fantasy life that she has fabricated for herself, she evades discipline and stakes out her own space of subjectivity and desire. Significantly, the narrative thread breaks off precisely at the moment when Isidora melts into the crowd, escaping the gaze and the authority of the masculine narrator. It is worthy of note that while the narrator maintains an uneasy distance from the protagonist, appearing, at times, to condemn the desire that leads to her disorderly life, at others, he seems unable to conceal his voyeuristic investment in the female desiring subject. In spite of what might seem to be Isidora’s moral suicide from society’s perspective, her decision to flee with Joaquín is a conscious tactic to recover her agency as a subject, exchanging her body for the fantasy life that she has fabricated for herself. This act of social and sexual transgression also represents a first step in her self-commodification by choosing the life of a ‘kept woman,’ rather than that of the ‘domestic angel’ or the docile worker; by transforming herself into a commodity she negotiates, to a certain extent, her own place within the culture of consumption. When the narrative of Isidora’s trajectory resumes two years later in the second part of the novel, she has given birth to a macrocephalic child, to whose monstrous and deformed head the narrator constantly calls attention.8 Echoing degenerationist discourses that attributed many forms of ‘disease’ (both physiological and social) to hereditary factors, the physician Miquis predicts that Isidora’s ‘delirante ambición y su vicio mental’ (delusional ambition and mental vice) will generate descendants of ‘cabezudos raquíticos’ (oversized, stunted heads; 246). For those who embraced degenerationist theory, which became widespread during Restoration Spain, all forms of deviance or criminality that represented a threat to bourgeois society – including madness, alcoholism, prostitution, and homosexuality – were ‘diseases’ considered to be both the cause and symptoms of racial and national degeneration (Campos Marín et al. 162–4).9 From a slightly different perspective Noël Valis shows how the female body, in naturalist discourse, ‘becomes the allegorized conduit, a kind of birth channel for the larval, the monstrous, the inchoate’ (‘On Monstrous’ 206). Isidora’s son, Riquín, exemplifies the monstrous offspring generated by ‘a monstrous female creature and her uncontrollable sexuality’ (Valis, ‘On Monstrous’ 199). It is thus significant that it is Miquis, the mas-

40

Marginal Subjects

culine voice of science and bourgeois discipline, who associates this ‘monstrous birth’ directly with female sexual deviance. Furthermore, the physician’s perspective as interior narrator of Isidora’s story is crucial, in that it allows the narrator, after a chance encounter with the physician in the first chapter of the second part of the novel, to believe that he has regained narrative authority, as well as the power of discipline and surveillance over the female desiring subject. In terms of the novel’s historical allegory, it is hardly a coincidence that Alfonso XII is restored to the throne at this very moment. As we know, however, the Restoration brings no solution to national disorder, nor to Isidora’s disorderly life; and in spite of the narrator’s renewed surveillance, the protagonist continues to resist his control and his gaze, through her uncontrolled desire and consumption. A metaphorical extension of Isidora’s deviant body, Riquín’s deformed head takes on increasingly monstrous proportions as the discord and disturbances in his mother’s life grow. The unruly household that she sets up in the Calle de la Hortaleza is antithetical to the narrator’s image of the ‘verdadero hogar doméstico’ (real home; 247) and represents a defiance of bourgeois social order: the house is characterized by its ‘gran falta de orden y simetría’ (total lack of order and symmetry; 247); objects of value obtained from liquidation sales are mixed and confused with cheap imitations to the point that the ‘real’ and the ‘simulacrum’ become indistinguishable, reflecting once again the confusion wrought by consumer capitalism. Isidora’s inability to distinguish the world of her subjective desires from the reality of her social and economic situation becomes increasingly disturbing to the narrator, who admonishes her for her disorderly life by addressing her directly in the chapter entitled ‘Liquidación’ (Bankruptcy). Being forced to pawn all of her possessions upon the dissolution of her relationship with Joaquín Pez and finding herself economically destitute, Isidora temporarily accepts the life of ‘orden, economía y trabajo’ (order, economy, and hard work; 269), which Relimpio urges her to embrace as a way of saving her honour. Ultimately, however, she rejects the life he proposes to her, which is tied both literally and symbolically to the machine: to labour in front of the sewing machine, as his daughters are doing, is to submit oneself to the capitalist machinery of production, exchanging honourable labour for capital. She, however, redoubles her struggle to elude ‘the gaze, the interventions, and the control’ of a bourgeois disciplinary machine that seeks to regulate her desire and to transform her into a docile body (Martin 14). She rejects the idea of her

Galdós’s La desheredada

41

subjection to the machine, opting instead to purchase freedom with the only capital she has left: her body. Isidora transforms herself into a commodity, but, again, to return to Fernández Cifuentes’s point, she is no ordinary commodity, but a luxury, a fetish (‘Signs’). Her beauty, to which the narrator calls attention constantly (many times, by identifying with Isidora’s own viewpoint through the use of free indirect style), becomes a form of art. As Sieburth has pointed out, Isidora is a ‘high art object,’ whose distinction, uniqueness, and superiority become increasingly emphasized in the second part of the novel (Inventing 53). In the house where Isidora lived as Joaquín’s ‘kept woman,’ there is a portrait of Isidora, which the narrator describes as ‘obra admirable por la perfección de la fotografía y la belleza de la figura. Parecía una duquesa, y ella misma admiraba allí, en ratos de soledad, su continente noble, su hermosura melancólica, su mirada serena, su grave y natural postura’ (an admirable work by dint of the perfection of the photography and the beauty of her face. She looked like a duchess, and in moments of solitude, she admired her own noble poise, her melancholy beauty, and her serene gaze, her grave and natural posture; 249). This portrayal of Isidora, highlighting her superior beauty and nobility, corresponds to the self-image that she has constructed in the subjective space of her fantasy and reinforces her awareness of her potential value as a luxury commodity, a fetish. For traditional Marxists, (commodity) fetishism, which characterizes the capitalist marketplace, privileges exchange value (over use value), thus mystifying social relations and alienating the subject from his or her labour – the work of the body. Jean Baudrillard, for his part, questions the existence of a ‘non-alienated consciousness of an object in some “true,” objective state: its use value’ (89), and maintains that the fascination for fetish objects is driven by the ‘passion for the code,’ that is by a ‘totally arbitrary code of differences’ (91–2, emphasis in original). In applying his analysis of the fetishistic logic of the commodity to the body and beauty, Baudrillard suggests that ‘beauty,’ which becomes the object of desire, is always already an artefact, a system of signs that ‘perfect[s] the body into an object in which none of its real work (the work of the unconscious or psychic and social labor) can show through’ (94). In Isidora’s case, it is her faith in the ‘sign’ – that is, in the correspondence between the constructed beauty and the ‘true’ value of her body – that allows her agency in defining her own place in the culture of consumption. As a fetish, she exercises fascination precisely because she is a sign of beauty that tries to be ‘sufficient unto itself’ (Baudril-

42

Marginal Subjects

lard 94). José Relimpio contemplates her beauty ‘con fanatismo, como el salvaje contempla el fetiche’ (with fanaticism, like a savage gazes at a fetish; 300); Joaquín perceives her as a ‘signo de elevación sobre el nivel común’ (sign of superiority over what is common; 304); even the ‘rationalist’ Miquis cannot help being seduced by the aura that surrounds her. Throughout the second part of the novel, this fetishized beauty becomes the object of desire of a series of masculine characters who compete for her control. Isidora chooses consciously to offer up her body in exchange for the ‘protection’ of these men who are willing to provide her, at least temporarily, not only with basic sustenance, but also with luxury goods with which to enhance her beauty further. All of these men, in spite of differences in their social rank, economic means, and even in their personal attitude toward the protagonist, have been seduced by the mystique of the fetish; yet, paradoxically, they all have in common a desire to demystify her through discipline, whether this takes the form of physical control and punishment, subjection to surveillance, or an insistence on work and regimentation. Yet Isidora resists discipline and continues to negotiate her value in the marketplace, aware that, as a desired commodity, her body ‘can be sold over and over again’ (Labanyi, Gender 117). The millionaire Sánchez Botín, who becomes the first in a series of men to take Isidora in as his mistress, literally embodies the male gaze, representing but one manifestation of the mechanisms of generalized surveillance operative in a bourgeois disciplinary society. When he first makes his appearance in chapter 21, the narrator makes reference to Botín not by his name, but as ‘el señor mirón’ (Mr Peeping Tom; 277), who seeks to overcome her with his insistent gaze. Once Isidora becomes his lover, he confines her in his home and places her under his constant vigilance. At first, the sexual dynamic of the gaze between the two characters appears to follow the traditional pattern, calling attention to Botín’s power as the controller of the look and Isidora’s position as the object of the male gaze. He denies her the status of gazing subject, preventing her from drawing the gaze actively to herself. This is emblematized in the theatre scene, where she observes: ‘le veo atisbándome desde las butacas y observando si miro o no miro […] Si me ve asomada al balcón, ya se le figura no sé qué’ (I see him spying on me from the seats and observing whether or not I’m watching … If he sees me out on the balcony he imagines Heaven knows what; 311). Furthermore, Botín seeks to become the exclusive owner of the fetish object, adorning her body with beautiful clothing for only his eyes to

Galdós’s La desheredada

43

see: ‘Quiere que me ponga guapa para él solo’ (He wants me to look pretty for him alone; 311). In spite of Botín’s efforts to submit her to his gaze, Isidora refuses to remain a passive object of masculine sexual pleasure and contemplation. Taking advantage of Botín’s capital (though in his view, she is his capital), she delights in her self-transformation into a fetish, through the adornment of her beautiful body: ‘No le faltaba nada, ni el mantón de Manila, ni el pañuelo de seda en la cabeza […] ni el vestido negro de gran cola […] ni los ricos anillos’ (She was not missing anything, not the Manila shawl, nor the silk scarf on the head … nor the black dress with the long train. . . nor the beautiful rings; 318). Fully aware of the value of her body in the marketplace, she contemplates her image obsessively in the closet mirror to find herself ‘prendada de sí misma’ (in love with herself): ‘se miró absorta y se embebeció mirándose, ¡tan atrozmente guapa estaba!’ (she gazed at herself and became absorbed, so outrageously pretty did she appear! 318). As Sieburth has argued so cogently, Isidora’s task as an artist, as one who fashions her own subjectivity and destiny, is ‘to create conditions in which she can remain an objet d’art’ (Inventing 54). That is, in spite of the ‘contamination’ of the marketplace and her self-transformation into commodity, she maintains a belief in the correspondence between the signs of beauty and the nobility that defines her ‘true’ value. When Isidora, defying Botín’s control, emerges on the balcony of his house and displays her beautifully adorned body to the public, she believes herself to be endowed with the power to convince the spectator of her nobility: ‘Nadie que la viese, sin saber quién era, podría dudar que pertenecía a la clase más elevada de la sociedad’ (Nobody who saw her, and who did not know who she was, could doubt that she belonged to the highest level of society; 300). That is, she continues to forge new spaces of subjectivity for herself in accordance with her fantasy. She further evades Botín’s surveillance, not only by continuing her affair with Joaquín, but also by escaping physical enclosure in his home. Like Asís in Pardo Bazán’s Insolación, whose outing with Pacheco to the campo de San Isidro on the city’s peripheries heralds her affirmation as a desiring subject, Isidora’s escape to the pradera de San Isidro without Botín’s knowledge represents an assertion of her desire to be ‘dueña de sí misma’ (to be mistress of herself; 317). Finally, when Botín confronts her with her transgression, she defends her freedom to exchange the money and jewellery that he has given her for other luxury items to be used for her self-embellishment. Aware of the desire that her beauty

44

Marginal Subjects

continues to awaken in him, in spite of his anger, she raises the price of her body so that it is beyond his reach: ‘Su dinero de usted no basta a pagarme’ (All of your money is not enough to pay me), she exclaims in response to his anger, ‘Valgo yo infinitamente más’ (I am worth infinitely more; 322). As she strips her body, piece by piece, of the luxurious clothing with which it has been adorned, she leaves Botín face to face not only with the seductive lure of her ‘depojada imagen’ (undressed image; 323), but also with a feeling of lack that he can no longer disavow with the ownership of a fetish object. Unable to overcome his desire for her fetishized body, it is he who, in the end, begs his mistress to return to him. Botín is not unique in gazing upon Isidora as a fetish object to be worshipped, rather than as an ordinary sexual commodity to be purchased and owned. After her rupture with Botín, when she finds herself in the streets with nowhere to go, she prepares herself, once again, to put her body into circulation in the marketplace. While the protagonist is unable to transcend the real (social and economic) limits that bourgeois patriarchal society has imposed on her, she continues to mark out a subjective space of desire in which social mobility and empowerment are still potentially realizable. In chapter 26, when Isidora takes temporary residence in the Relimpio home in the working-class neighbourhood to the south of the Puerta del Sol, she is struck by the contrast between the subjective space of her desires, representing her aspiration to ‘nobility,’ and that of the ‘real’ social space that circumscribes her. As she strolls through the neighbourhoods close to ‘la calle del Mesón de Paredes, del Rastro y calle de Toledo’ where she lives, she feels repugnance and immediately heads north to the commercial centre near the Puerta del Sol, ‘“para respirar un poco de civilización”’ (to catch a breath of civilization; 338), recalling for the reader the protagonist’s pleasurable stroll through the same shopping district earlier in the novel. Although, this time, she can do no more than to gaze despairingly on the luxury items in the shop windows that she is unable to afford, her desire, rather than reality, continues to define her itinerary through both urban and narrative space. It is at this juncture that José Relimpio’s son Melchor, enraptured by Isidora’s beauty, offers his economic ‘assistance’ in exchange for the ownership of her body and her image. By adorning her body with elegant clothing, Melchor, like the other masculine figures in the novel, transforms her into an emblematic sign of beauty: ‘Volvió a ver lucir su belleza dentro de un marco de percales finos, de cintas de seda, de

Galdós’s La desheredada

45

flores contrahechas, de menudos velos, y a recrearse con su hermosa imagen delante del espejo’ (She saw her beauty blossom once more, framed in fine percale, silk ribbons, artificial flowers and tiny veils, and she delighted again in her beautiful reflection in the mirror; 339). As she does with Botín, Isidora deploys her sexuality to enhance her beauty and, thus, to increase the value of her body. One cannot help but be struck by Isidora’s obsession with her own image. While, on the one hand, the insistence on the image serves to expose its nature as a simulacrum, a representation, it is also true that the pleasure, perhaps even auto-eroticism, that she derives from her beautiful image is foundational to her self-creation as a desiring subject. As Freud himself has suggested in his essay on ‘Narcissism,’ narcissistic behaviour reflects ‘a sense of the self as powerful, able to have an influence on external reality.’ This investment in the self is crucial to the construction of a discourse of female desire in the novel. When Melchor goes bankrupt and moves to Barcelona, leaving behind Isidora and her godfather, we are faced once again – as when she had abandoned Botín – with the image of her bare body, stripped completely of her luxurious clothing (341). Yet, she is never without men to worship and to purchase her body; and, ironically, even as her actual economic situation deteriorates, she defends ever more zealously her faith in the value (both economic and aesthetic) of her body. The petty bourgeois lithographer Juan Bou, eager to take on the role of Isidora’s next protector after she is abandoned by Melchor, proposes marriage – and its concomitant life of bourgeois order and respectability – to her; yet, it is clear that he sees the institution of marriage only as a way of legitimizing socially his control and ownership of her beautiful body. Isidora refuses to grant him this power, rejecting Bou’s offer of marriage and affirming to herself, as she did when she abandoned Botín, that ‘ella valía infinitamente más que él, ella era noble’ (she was worth infinitely more than he, she was of the nobility; 351). Her tactic is to maintain an economic relationship of a sort with Bou, deploying her body to this end, while resisting any attempts to restrict her freedom in the marketplace. As she has done, and will continue to do, even with other men far less ‘respectable’ than Bou, she offers her body – and the image of beauty that comes with it – for circulation in the marketplace, yet she refuses to grant exclusive ownership of this commodity to those who believe they have purchased it. The figure of the Catalan lithographer, though a parody on one level, represents the model of bourgeois order and respectability achieved

46

Marginal Subjects

through hard work – a model that the narrator contrasts with Isidora’s disorderly habits of excessive consumption and sexual promiscuity. In an exchange with Mariano after his sister’s imprisonment in the Cárcel Modelo, Bou’s diatribe against Isidora – which reflects nineteenthcentury discourses on female domesticity that set the bourgeois domestic ideal of the ‘ángel del hogar’ (Angel of the House) against its opposite, the ‘fallen woman’ – is driven, precisely, by a constant fear of the potential for slippage between these apparently antithetical terms. As his words to Mariano reveal, Bou envisions her at first as an ‘angel’ capable of being domesticated in the bourgeois home, but he soon discovers to his dismay that she is ‘una liquidadora’ (spendthrift; 419), a voracious consumer who threatens to devour his capital. Interestingly, the narrator compares Isidora to Bou’s first wife, whom he characterized earlier in the novel as a vampire, ‘una sanguijuela del país’ (leech on society; 282), responsible for the lithographer’s financial ruin. The novel thus gives expression to the cultural unease about uncontrolled female desire and its potential threat to masculine capital and, by extension, to the economy of the nation as a whole (Jagoe, Ambiguous 90). Moreover, despite his rhetoric to the contrary, Bou forms an integral piece of the capitalist machinery of production, of which his printing shop is emblematic: his shop virtually becomes a prison for the child delinquent Mariano, who is subjected to the monotonous task of mechanical reproduction. Under Bou’s ‘ojo rotatorio’ (revolving eye; 288), which evokes the eye of the panopticon and, by extension, the disciplinary society it represents, Mariano is reduced to a mere cog in a machine: ‘se suponía también compuesto de piezas de hierro que marchaban a su objeto con la precisión fatal de la Mecánica’ (he felt that he too was made of pieces of metal that marched toward their objective with the fatal precision of Mechanization; 286). Mariano’s trajectory as a ‘delinquent’ who moves in and out of the disciplinary institutions of bourgeois society – the factory, the school, the jail, and the hospital – only to escape social surveillance, in the end, parallels, in some ways, Isidora’s own trajectory. However, while the novel presents Mariano’s deviance as an anomaly that can be exorcized from the social body through the public spectacle of his execution – clearly, a symbolic act of scapegoating for collective catharsis – Isidora’s deviance is far more complex, in that it is constitutive of her desire and, therefore, cannot be as easily submitted to discipline. The space of desire that Isidora has staked out for herself takes on a life of its own, seducing all those around her, including the narrator of the novel, who come to have a

Galdós’s La desheredada

47

voyeuristic investment in the deviant female body. The metaphor of prostitution becomes increasingly apt, as she continues to ‘take possession of Madrid,’ seducing those around her with her deviant desire. In this context, the resumption of Miquis’s disciplinary function in the second part of the novel is significant.10 As we have seen in the first part, the physician constantly attempts to impose his vigilance and control on Isidora. When she seeks his help in a state of hunger and desperation after rejecting Bou’s marriage proposal, Miquis adopts the role of the physician-scientist who seeks to cure her of her disease, ‘su enfermedad, ya extendida y profunda’ (her already deep and drawn out illness, 357), calling to mind nineteenth-century medical discourses that pathologized female desire (Aldaraca, El ángel 100–8). He characterizes Isidora’s fantasy as ‘un desorden fisiológico’ (physiological disorder), a ‘cáncer’ (cancer; 359) that needs to be extirpated. In an attempt to contain the spread of Isidora’s ‘disease’ that has wreaked disorder and havoc on her life, the physician prescribes her subjection, first, to the machine (the same sewing machine that has enslaved Relimpio’s daughters for life) and, subsequently, to the institution of bourgeois marriage. Fearing the contagion of her ‘diseased’ and deviant body, he summons the detached objectivity and authority of the physician-scientist, yet he finds himself unable to control his unease in the presence of her seductive body and her uncontrolled desire: ‘miraba a Isidora con expresión entremezclada de asombro y miedo’ (he looked at Isidora with an expression of mingled wonder and fear; 361). The mystique of Isidora’s beauty supplants the scientific image of the human skeleton, which Miquis has placed in his office to ‘estar contemplando a todas horas la miseria humana’ (study human misery all the time; 362) in all its bareness. Miquis’s function as Isidora’s ‘physician’ and moral reformer recalls the role of the naturalist writer as defined by Émile Zola and his Spanish followers. According to Zola, the goal of the naturalist writer, like that of the physician-scientist, is to master, direct, and ‘reduce … to a condition of subservient machinery’ all human and social phenomena, that is, to submit them to control and regulation (Experimental 25–6). What needed to be contained and regulated ‘scientifically’ in the naturalist novel, as Valis has pointed out, was whatever was perceived to be threatening to the bourgeois order: ‘uncontrolled sexuality, crime and madness, disease and filth, working class rebellion’ (‘On Monstrous’ 203). In particular, the metaphor of disease, prevalent in the discourses of the period, recurs repeatedly in the writings of the ‘radical natural-

48

Marginal Subjects

ists’ of the 1880s. The narrator of López Bago’s La prostituta series, for example, explicitly compares the naturalist novelist, who studies social miasma ‘como un operador que á veces tiene que remover sustancias corrosivas, aspirar miasmas, arriesgar su vida en los peligros de la intoxicación ó de la asfixia, y arriesgarla para producir una enseñanza ó un beneficio’ (a surgeon who sometimes needs to remove corrosive substances, aspirate miasmas, risk his life to dangers of poisoning or asphyxiation, and risk it to produce a beneficial lesson), to the physician who studies pestilent diseases – ’las llagas, los sudores, las tristezas fétidas de la carne’ (wounds, perspiration, and fetid woes of the flesh; La Pálida 32–3) – in order to find a cure for them. López Bago reiterates these ideas in his appendix to La buscona, entitled ‘La moral del naturalismo’ (The moral of naturalism). Here he invokes Zola’s own words to defend himself against the charge of offending public morality with the publication of the first two novels of the La prostituta series, maintaining that his study of the ‘llaga social’ (social ulcer; 243) through the application of the ‘experimental method’ has no other purpose than the suppression of the social disease.11 Like the naturalist writer’s mission – as ‘experimental moralist[s]’ (Zola, Experimental 31) – to find a cure for social disease, Miquis’s prescription for curing Isidora of her disease is tied undeniably to questions of power, control, and morality. Miquis, who, under the guise of reason, sets out to teach the protagonist a moral lesson about the dangers of uncontrolled imagination, strives to transform her into an obedient and well-disciplined body-machine, into a productive member of patriarchal bourgeois society. Yet, in the end, Isidora’s discourse of desire, as well as Miquis’s own investment in her fate – and, more specifically, in the fate of her beautiful body – undermine the scientific discourse through which he seeks her discipline. Faced with Isidora’s refusal of bourgeois marriage, and of her subjection to any form of discipline, he contemplates, against his best judgment, giving in to her seductive lure. As Stephanie Sieburth has argued so cogently, by asserting his power of control over the fate of her dishonoured body, Miquis seeks to ‘actively produce’ her state of degradation that would make her end up in an institution of social control, the hospital (for syphilitics) (‘Enlightenment’ 38). In the end, the physician, who stands before the deviant woman with ‘asombro y miedo’ (wonder and fear; 361), is unable to divorce himself from the object of his desire, proving himself to be no different than the self-deluded Magistral in La Regenta, who, under the guise of serving as the female protagonist’s ‘médico del alma’ (physician of the soul; 2: 66) falls vic-

Galdós’s La desheredada

49

tim to his own irrepressible desire for the woman whose spiritual (and physical) illness he seeks to ‘cure’ in the confessional. The contradiction between scientific detachment and desire, embodied in the figure (and metaphor) of the physician, finds reflection not only in the ambivalence that the narrator of La desheredada shows toward his protagonist, but also in the tension between discipline and desire characteristic of many of the naturalist works of the period. Ultimately, Isidora resists society’s disciplinary function, disobeying Miquis’s order and opting instead to pursue the course of desire. What bourgeois society condemns as disease and deviance comes to represent for her the expansion of her subjective space of desire, which, in her view, is connected to the value of her body. Aware of the seductive power that her body exercises on Miquis, she asserts that his fiancée ‘no vale nada’ (is worthless; 361), implying, by comparison, the superior value of her own body. Not only does she set her eroticized body in contrast with the presumably asexual ‘Angel of the House’ to whom Miquis is engaged to marry (his own words and actions make it clear that it is a marriage not of passion, but of convenience), but she asserts her agency by deploying her body to arouse masculine desire. It is significant that precisely when she renounces the possibility of an honourable life – represented, respectively, by marriage and hard work (on the sewing machine) – she begins to frequent Madame Eponina’s dress shop, seduced by ‘visiones de trapos y faralaes’ (visions of clothes and adornments; 367), as when she was ‘taking possession of Madrid’ earlier in the novel.12 Dressing herself in an expensive evening gown and contemplating her image admiringly in the mirror, she not only experiences autoerotic gratification with her own beauty, but also imagines herself transformed into a spectacle for others’ viewing pleasure: ‘Contemplóse en el gran espejo, embelesada de su hermosura […] Isidora encontraba mundos de poesía en aquella reproducción de sí misma. ¡Qué diría la sociedad si pudiera gozar de tal imagen! ¡Cómo la admirarían, y con qué entusiasmo habían de celebrarla las lenguas de la fama! ¡Qué hombros, qué cuello, qué … todo!’ (She looked at herself in the long mirror, enraptured by her own beauty … Isidora found whole worlds of poetry in that reflection of herself. What would people in society say if they could enjoy such an image! How they would admire her, and with what enthusiasm public opinion would applaud her! What shoulders, what neck, what … everything! 369).13 Moreover, she becomes more convinced than ever in her conviction that the signs of beauty correspond to what she believes to be her intrinsic value as a member of

50

Marginal Subjects

the nobility: ‘Ella era noble por su nacimiento, y si no lo fuera, bastaría a darle la ejecutoria su gran belleza, su figura, sus gustos delicados, sus simpatías por toda cosa elegante y superior’ (She was an aristocrat by birth, and if she were not, her great beauty, her appearance, her refined tastes and her sympathetic response to everything elegant and superior, would be enough to grant her the pedigree; 369). It is apparent that she maintains her faith in the value of her body, on which she continues to place a high price. Miquis, who walks into the dressmaker’s shop as Isidora gazes on her image in the mirror, becomes enraptured, and nearly seduced, by the beautifully adorned body that she offers up for society’s gaze and potential consumption. It is with great effort that he resists the mystique of the luxury commodity – the fetish – reminding himself of his role as physician and the disciplinary regimen to which he must submit Isidora’s deviant body: ‘El médico, el médico es el que habla ahora’ (It’s the doctor, the doctor speaking now; 370). When, in an open act of defiance, Isidora rejects his ‘cure’ and offers to sell her body to him instead, she threatens to break down Miquis’s role as disciplining hand, overcoming him with the contagion of desire. In spite of the increasingly dire economic circumstances in which she finds herself, she continues to view her body not as ordinary merchandise to be handed over to the male consumer, but as a luxury commodity worth the price of her lover’s honour. Soon afterward, when she rejoins the now destitute Joaquín Pez, she reasserts her special distinction, choosing a life of deviance over that of ordinariness: ‘seré … mala si se quiere; pero ordinaria, jamás’ (I may be wicked, if you like, but common, never; 389). Even as she remains constant in her love for Joaquín, selling her body to save his honour, she refuses to submit to marriage: ‘viviré soltera, riéndome del mundo’ (I’ll live as a single woman and laugh at the whole world; 390). His irony notwithstanding, the naturalist narrator appears, on some level, to identify with the physician figure, who, in his disciplinary role, seeks a moral cure for the protagonist. As Isidora continues to evade discipline, the narrator’s discourse pathologizes her increasingly; referring to her at one point as ‘nuestra enferma’ (our patient; 369), he mirrors Miquis’s attitude toward the protagonist. And, shortly after abandoning Miquis’s prescription for cure, she ends up in the Modelo prison, which exemplifies Restoration society’s panoptical disciplinemachine.14 Isidora’s imprisonment, then, is clearly a metaphor for enclosure in a disciplinary society in which the exercise of power has

Galdós’s La desheredada

51

become virtually automatic. It is Miquis who gives the metaphor expression: ‘La vida toda es cárcel, sólo que en unas partes hay rejas y en otras no’ (The whole of life is a prison, except that there are bars in some places and not in others; 405). In prison Isidora suffers a ‘nervous disorder,’ whose bodily symptoms suggest those of hysteria, as defined by medical discourses of the period: she fluctuates between a manic state and that of somnambulism (401), her sense of identity becomes increasingly precarious, and, later, when she is forced to confront the failure of her lawsuit, she is overcome by a fit of delirium characterized by incoherent speech and exaggerated screaming. As Bridget Aldaraca has shown, prior to the nineteenth century, explanations for female hysteria were based predominantly on the uterine theory, placing ‘female desire at the source of the disturbance in the female organism’ (‘The Medical’ 405). As the nineteenth century progressed, however, this link between hysteria and female anatomy became ‘increasingly figurative’ (Beizer 35); that is, hysteria was no longer seen literally as a uterine disease, but as an exaggeration of what was considered to be woman’s natural sensibility (Aldaraca, ‘The Medical’ 404; Beizer 42). The hysteric, thus, in the popular nineteenth-century imagination lent herself to various metaphoric uses to suggest ‘disorder, duplicity, and alterity’; she was seen as a performer, a ‘forger of fictions and a lover of lies’ (Beizer 19). Galdós’s narrator, through his (albeit ironic) identification with the male characters, presents Isidora precisely in this way: there are mocking references to her self-transformation into a ‘tipo novelesco’ (a character out of a novel; 403), to her theatricality, to her penchant for acting out a ‘comedia funesta’ (ill-fated drama; 439). Isidora’s nervous illness is, therefore, identified with her refusal to give up her desire and the fiction that it has begotten. Disputing society’s judgment, she reaffirms, in a fit of delirium, her fiction of noble birth: ‘No me quitaréis mi nobleza, porque es mi esencia, y yo no puedo ser sin ella’ (You’ll not take away my nobility, because it is my very essence, I cannot exist without it; 440). While the rest of society struggles to ‘fix’ her elusive subjectivity without success, the identity she constructs for herself through a faith in her ‘true essence,’ continues to have a performative force within her own discourse of desire. The spatial metaphor is central to the discussion of hysteria, which is precisely about displacement and instability, about the lack of a fixed centre (Beizer 50): in Michel de Certeau’s terms, these unstable subjects constantly defy location within their proper place (117). If hysteria has been represented metaphorically as women who are mobile and resist-

52

Marginal Subjects

ant to circumscription (Beizer 17n3), the function of the (masculine) physician-novelist is to impose order on these intractable subjects and to contain them, that is, to ‘normalize’ the abnormal, to fix the deviant. Galdós’s narrator, along with the male characters in the novel – including Miquis, Bou, and the notary Muñoz y Nones – take on just such a role: they seek to impose discipline on the female protagonist by reforming her socially and morally. Yet Isidora continues to affirm her own discourse of desire, refusing to be reduced to a docile body in spite of the violence done to it. After Isidora leaves the Modelo prison she becomes, out of desperation, the mistress of the gambler Gaitica. Those who come into contact with her during her three months with him are quick to note her descent from an elegantly dressed woman to one who suffers from visible physical disintegration: she is pallid, showing signs of disease and physical abuse, her voice has become hoarse, and her clothes are now in tatters (462–3). Miquis, apprised of her condition, is quick to pronounce judgment on the protagonist by attributing her physical decline to her moral disorder; implicitly, he compares her moral degeneration to her brother’s delinquency.15 The narrator himself characterizes Isidora as a deviant, ‘una mala mujer’ (a fallen woman; 461), echoing Miquis’s – and society’s – attitude toward her. When the physician visits her for the last time, he sees a body that has suffered devaluation through its use and abuse; it has lost its beauty and mystique: ‘No sólo había perdido grandemente en el aspecto general de su persona, en su aire distinguido y decoroso, sino que su misma hermosura había padecido bastante a causa del decaimiento general, y más aún del chirlo que tenía en la mandíbula inferior’ (Not only had she lost a great deal in her general appearance, in her air of distinction and modesty, but her very beauty had suffered considerably from the general deterioration, and even more from the scar on her lower jaw; 465). In particular, the disfiguring scar that Gaitica’s knife has inflicted on her face becomes an ineffaceable sign of her deviancy – a deviancy that, in society’s view, is tied inescapably to her body.16 Thus marked, her body loses its value as a commodity with which the female protagonist can bargain for a life of luxury. Yet, to the very end, Isidora continues to maintain the fiction generated by her subjective desires, negating the identity that society has imposed on her. Her declarations, ‘yo no existo’ (I don’t exist; 465) and ‘Ya no soy Isidora’ (I’m not Isidora any more; 477) reveal her defiance

Galdós’s La desheredada

53

of society’s attempts to fix her name and identity. To Miquis’s amazement, she reaffirms the myth of her noble origin: ‘todavía hay algo de nobleza’ (there’s still some nobility there; 466), she claims, refusing for the last time his attempt to convince her to adopt ‘una vida arreglada’ (an orderly life; 468). It is noteworthy that the moment in which she ‘dies’ for society coincides with the execution of her brother Mariano for his crime against society (468). The institutions of bourgeois disciplinary society, having been unsuccessful in transforming Mariano into a docile and useful body, must, in the end, eliminate him from the social body as a dangerous criminal, a degenerate ‘other.’17 Isidora, for her part, is a deviant body, the ‘female offender’ (Lombroso) par excellence, with which society needs to contend, having failed to subject her to discipline. Her disordered body, together with her inscrutable silence, ultimately resist circumscription into social discourse. In this context, silence itself is an important discursive tactic, a strategy of resistance mobilized by the deviant female body. When Miquis visits Isidora for the last time in the penultimate chapter of the novel, he finds her not only in physical disarray, but also in a state of absolute silence that baffles his medical expertise and makes further surveillance of the female protagonist impossible. Not unlike Tristana’s withdrawal from society – and her silence – at the end of the homonymous novel, Isidora’s silence, I would venture to suggest, could be interpreted not only as an act of resistance to bourgeois society and its disciplinary discourses, but also as a continued affirmation of herself as a desiring subject. As Relimpio observes, the only time she breaks her silence is to speak to the woman who brings her ‘muestras de vestidos’ (samples of clothes; 474). Isidora, therefore, continues to exercise her agency as a desiring subject through a symbolic act of consumption, in spite of her utter destitution. In an emblematic scene at the conclusion of the novel, Isidora, for the last time, scrutinizes the image of her body in the mirror. She finds in her reflection not a ‘vana imagen’ (vain image), but a beautiful body in whose value she continues to have faith: Todavía soy guapa … y cuando me reponga seré guapísima. Valgo mucho, y valdré muchísimo más’ (I’m still pretty … and when I’m better again, I’ll be very pretty. I’m worth a lot, and I’ll be worth a lot more; 475). What we might see as a remystification of – and an alienation from – her own body, through its reinsertion into a network of capitalist value relations, constitutes, from her perspective, an affirmation of its essential beauty and endless

54

Marginal Subjects

value as a commodity. It is significant, then, that immediately after this final scene of self-contemplation she asserts her autonomy by going out into the streets to become an anonymous prostitute. Isidora’s disappearance into ‘el voraginoso laberinto de las calles’ (whirling labyrinth of the streets; 480) at the conclusion of La desherhedada mirrors the end of the first part of the novel when she vanished into the crowd with Joaquín Pez, having chosen to pursue the course of desire. As in the first scene, she is, in the end, swallowed up by the crowd: ‘La presa fue devorada, y poco después, en la superficie social, todo estaba tranquilo’ (The prey was devoured, and shortly afterward, on the surface of society, everything was calm; 480). We cannot help but notice the profound irony in the narrator’s words, given not only the way in which Isidora resolutely abandons herself to the life of the streetwalker, ready to devour the crowd as much as being devoured by it, but also the disquiet that she has left behind with her final decision. Miquis’s determination to ‘hacer algo decisivo’ (do something decisive; 474), to forcefully impose discipline on her once and for all, is foiled, undermining his masculine scientific authority. She indirectly causes the death of her godfather, who has served as a paternal figure for her, and Emilia must grapple with the fate of the ‘monster’ child whom Isidora has left behind. The image of the labyrinth recalls Elizabeth Wilson’s analysis of this recurrent metaphor in modern urban literature as one that suggests the ‘indeterminacy’ and the ‘uncenteredness’ of the city, holding the potential to emancipate women from the constraints of bourgeois discipline and domesticity, and to permit them to gain certain freedoms (The Sphinx 7). In relation to the denouement of Galdós’s novel, we cannot assume naively that the life of the prostitute will free Isidora from social surveillance in any absolute sense, or that a brighter future necessarily awaits her beyond the final pages of the novel. At the same time, the protagonist’s own words reveal that she actively chooses her path, believing that the life of a street prostitute would allow a woman in her circumstances relative freedom and anonymity: ‘deseo ser libre y hacer lo que se me antoje […] quiero concluir, ser anónima, llamarme con el nombre que se me antoje, no dar cuenta a nadie de mis acciones’ (I want to be free to do what I want … I want to finish with Isidora, be anonymous, call myself whatever name I like, and not be accountable to anybody for my actions; 476–7). This time she becomes, quite literally, a ‘woman of the streets,’ or a ‘public woman,’ terms identified with sexual promiscuity and the lack of boundaries (Wilson, The Sphinx 41).

Galdós’s La desheredada

55

(The literal definition of the term promiscuity is, precisely, the ‘indiscriminate mixture or mingling of persons or things.’) Isidora’s loss in the crowd underscores the erasure of her social identity and, by extension, her lack of place within bourgeois social norms. Her subjectivity can no longer be circumscribed by social discourse: ‘Ya no soy Isidora. No vuelva usted a pronunciar este nombre’ (I’m not Isidora any more. Never pronounce that name again; 477), she exclaims, before she goes out into the streets.18 As Linda Willem has observed: ‘Isidora has the “final word” on who she is’ (59).19 Notwithstanding the heavy-handed (and, admittedly, highly ironic) moralizing in the final chapter of La desheredada, the narrator’s position vis-à-vis the protagonist remains sufficiently ambiguous throughout the novel so as to elude any form of straightforward ideological closure.20 On the one hand, the novel’s interiorization techniques – especially the use of interior monologue and free indirect style – as a way of focalizing the narration through the protagonist’s perspective suggest a certain degree of sympathy, if not complete identification, on the part of the narrator with Isidora’s discourse of desire.21 On the other, his direct (albeit ironic) condemnation of Isidora’s desire in some crucial passages of the novel, most notably in the final chapter, together with his apparent complicity with the male characters (in particular, with Miquis who is the realist novelist’s spokesperson of a sort) who seek to subject her to discipline, reveal the narrator’s anxiety about female desire. The instability of the narrator’s voice and identifications reflects his ambivalent attitude toward deviant female desire, as his disciplinary function comes into conflict with his voyeuristic investment in the female desiring subject. In the end, by deviating from the path set for her by bourgeois masculine discourse, Isidora generates her own ending to the story, quite literally, with her deviant body. Although at the conclusion of the novel Isidora has (wilfully) lost her place and social identity within the existing bourgeois order, what remains with us is the image of the female desiring subject who, through her ‘deviant’ narrative trajectory, has struggled to transcend this order in the discursive terrain. Isidora, like many of Galdós’s other female characters, has ventured outside of the limits of the ‘real,’ circumscribed by social norms, thus opening up the possibility of its resignification for marginal subjects, particularly women. As Michel de Certeau, citing Lotman, has remarked, narrative activity is in itself a ‘“culturally creative act,”’ invested with a performative force and the capacity to found new spaces of subjectivity (123).

56

Marginal Subjects

Through her narrative trajectory, Isidora has traversed boundaries, transgressed the limits imposed on her. In this sense, Galdós’s novel is not only transgressive, but also foundational. If his female subjects fail to realize their desire within the limits of the world constructed as the real, Galdós forces us to question the very limits of realism by allowing us to imagine, through the physical and symbolic trajectories of his characters, new spaces of subjectivity that lie beyond the norm.

2 ‘Las Micaelas por fuera y por dentro’: Discipline and Resistance in Fortunata y Jacinta

In Galdós’s La desheredada, we have observed how the deviant female subject has mobilized resistance to bourgeois discipline, both inside and outside of specific institutions of social control, through the deployment of her body. While the male delinquent Mariano, who cannot be transformed into a ‘useful’ body, is eliminated from society in the end, the disordered body of the female deviant ultimately escapes social control. The perceived threat of the deviant woman lies not only in her resistance to circumscription within social norms, but also in her potential to seduce and to contaminate the entire social body with her desire. In Fortunata y Jacinta, as in many other novels by Galdós, the resistive force of the deviant female body is set against the institutions and mechanisms of a disciplinary society that seek to subject it to constant and generalized surveillance. Michel Foucault’s insights on panopticism will be fundamental to our analysis of the disciplinary mechanisms to which deviant women, particularly Galdós’s female protagonist Fortunata and her friend Mauricia la Dura, are subjected in the Micaelas convent in Fortunata y Jacinta. Our scrutiny of the Micaelas scene will, in turn, serve as a point of departure for a discussion of the panoptical strategies at work in the novel as a whole, particularly in relation to Fortunata, who, as concubine, adulteress, and prostitute, embodies deviant female sexuality and resists discipline through the deployment of her body. Foucault evokes the architectural figure of Bentham’s panopticon to exemplify a modality of power in which its application is homogeneous and automatic: ‘Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surface, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals

58

Marginal Subjects

are caught up … The Panopticon is a marvellous machine which … produces homogeneous effects of power’ (Discipline 202). He further links the panoptic schema of generalized surveillance to the gradual extension, beginning in the Enlightenment era, of disciplinary mechanisms throughout the entire social body. While this process often took the form of an increase in the number of disciplinary establishments – which certainly was the case in nineteenth-century Spain, when many insane asylums, hospices, jails, penitentiaries, and other institutions of social control were constructed – measures of social control also became increasingly ‘de-institutionalized,’ as they became localized into ‘centres of observation disseminated throughout society’ (Foucault, Discipline 211–12). In addition to the numerous disciplinary mechanisms established during the Restoration period in particular, the Dirección General de Seguridad was created in 1886 – coinciding, significantly, with the publication of the first volume of Fortunata y Jacinta – to facilitate the control of the nation’s citizens through the dissemination of numerous ‘centers of observation’ in every sphere of public and private life.1 The Micaelas convent is one such local centre of power that represents a microcosm of the ‘generalizable mechanism of “panopticism”’ operative in the social body as a whole (Discipline 216). The sequence of chapters 5 and 6 of part two of Fortunata – whose titles are, respectively, ‘Las Micaelas por fuera’ (The Micaelas, from Without) and ‘Las Micaelas por dentro’ (The Micaelas, from Within) – highlights the continuous nature of power within the enclosed institution as without.2 In nineteenth-century Spain, medical and penal institutions, such as hospitals and penitentiaries, aimed at curing and correcting ‘mujeres de mala vida’ (women of the streets) existed side by side with ‘casas de reclusión’ (reformatories) founded between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and affiliated more directly with the religious orders (Rivière Gómez, Caídas 98).3 While both forms of establishment served to control and to regulate female deviance, the latter, as Rivière Gómez has observed, was more closely linked to the old juridical regime in its identification of ‘sin and crime’ (98). In Spanish Restoration society female subjects targeted for disciplinary intervention in these ‘casas de reclusión’ emerged at the juncture of two apparently antithetical, yet analogous, forms of discourse: religious discourse, on the one hand, with its notion of the ‘sinner’ (whose acts demanded expiation, often through the denial or punishment of the body) and, on the other, the new juridical-medical discourse that established the modern concept of the ‘delinquent.’

Discipline and Resistance in Fortunata y Jacinta

59

Galdós’s fictional convent represents the intersection of both forms of discourse, showing that the transition from a predominantly religious model to a more strictly juridical-medical one to regulate deviant bodies – evinced in more ‘modern’ societies such as France – was as of yet incomplete and fraught with difficulties in late nineteenth-century Spain. Moreover, while the name of Galdós’s convent evokes an association with Doña Micaela Desmaisières’s Las Adoratrices, an institution established in 1861 with the idea of curing the ‘enfermedades morales’ (moral illnesses) of young women, rather than to punish them as criminals, actual disciplinary practices in the Micaelas resemble those of the older convento de las Recogidas, Santa María Magdalena, to which were admitted ‘mujeres criminales ó indóciles, sujetas á la correccion por parte de los padres ó maridos, y bajo la accion judicial ó gubernativa’ (criminal or disobedient women, subjected to correction by their fathers and husbands under judicial or governmental action; Fuente 5, 10).4 Thus, religious (and moral) correction, on the one hand, and the social control of the diseased body through modern techniques of discipline, on the other, are complicit and interchangeable in the Micaelas convent. Fortunata’s discipline in the Micaelas convent is but an extension of the generalized surveillance and control to which she is subjected through other ‘local centres’ of power, for example, through family relations or those of the penitent and confessor (Foucault, History 98). Galdós’s novels show how the family, as the ‘site of social responsibility’ (Foucault, Madness 254), and the Church, as that of moral and spiritual control, unite forces to reform the ‘wayward woman’ before she enters into the marriage contract with the bourgeois family. It is not surprising that Doña Lupe and Nicolás Rubín (the mother-in-law and brother-in-law of the female protagonist, respectively) – the latter, a representative of both the bourgeois family and the Church – show a great investment in seeing through Fortunata’s transformation from a prostitute, the deviant woman par excellence, into a respectable bourgeois wife ‘después de una larga cuarentena religiosa’ (after a long religious quarantine; 1: 585). As a representative of the Church, Nicolás Rubín’s role in Fortunata’s ‘correction’ is particularly crucial. It is the priest’s idea to send her to the Micaelas to be reformed before she is to wed his brother. He originally pays her a visit with the purpose of convincing her to break off her engagement with Maxi, to keep the ‘mujer de mala vida’ (woman of the streets; 1: 522) away from (and out of) the respectable bourgeois family. However, upon learning that, in the absence of marriage, she would have no choice but to return to a life of

60

Marginal Subjects

prostitution, the priest must find a way to reconcile his religious and familial obligations. Fortunata’s reform in the Micaelas, then, occurs to him not only as the only practical solution to his problem, but also as an opportunity to boast of his personal victory as her spiritual saviour. If the deviant subject cannot be kept away from the bourgeois family, she must be transformed through discipline so that she may be incorporated into the social order. Fortunata is admitted into the Micaelas convent precisely to have ‘the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations’ subjected to discipline (Foucault, Discipline 16). Applying Bentham’s principles, the establishment serves a multiple function: to quarantine, to instruct, to correct, to put to work, to produce ‘useful’ individuals.5 In Nicolás Rubín’s words, this religious institution ‘tiene por objeto recoger a las muchachas extraviadas y convertirlas a la verdad por medio de la oración, del trabajo y del recogimiento’ (has the function of taking in girls who have gone astray and converting them to the truth through prayers, work, and a cloistered life; 1: 568). Like many other institutions of social control, the convent serves simultaneously as prison, school, reformatory, asylum, factory, and hospital. The narrator’s comparison of the nuns to ‘médicos que no se espantan ya de ningún horror patológico que vean entrar en las clínicas’ (doctors who are no longer shocked by the pathological horrors they see in the clinic; 1: 604) brings to mind, once again, the prevailing image of prostitution (and female sexual deviance, in general) in the discourses of the period as a physical, social, and moral disease that needs to be cured and contained – and, ultimately, extirpated from the social body. The connection between deviant female desire and disease, as we have seen in Miquis’s attempts to ‘cure’ Isidora of her illness, is one that recurs not only in medical discourse, but also in many literary works of the period. As in the case of La desheredada or La Regenta, men most typically assume the roles of the physician/confessor who takes on the task of ‘curing’ the female patient of the disease of desire. When Maxi himself resolves to undertake Fortunata’s reform shortly after meeting her, the narrator portrays him as ‘el buen médico que le pide al enfermo las noticias más insignificantes del mal que padece y de su historia para saber cómo ha de curarle’ (a good doctor who asks his patient about the most insignificant details related to the illness she or he is suffering and wants a complete history so as to know how to cure him or her; 1: 484). Within the Micaelas convent, the classification of its inhabitants into two categories of women: the Filomenas (‘fallen’ women, like Fortunata,

Discipline and Resistance in Fortunata y Jacinta

61

subjected to correction) and the Josefinas (young girls, many abandoned by their families, brought to the convent to receive a religious education) puts one of Bentham’s panoptical principles to work, showing ‘the importance of classification as a surveillance method’ (Labanyi, Gender 195). Central to Bentham’s panoptical model, of course, is the principle of constant and permanent vigilance, represented by the watchful eyes of the nuns who control and regulate the women’s every thought and movement, even their relationship with the other internees. The institution controls rigorously the distribution of their time, as well as their movement through space, in their daily lives, thus allowing for a greater efficiency in the exercise of discipline. Finally, within the panoptical schema of the convent, labour is a central technique in the discipline and correction of its inhabitants: the women must adhere to a daily regimen of cooking, cleaning, and work in a ‘taller de costura’ (sewing workshop). In spite of the occasional use of ‘exceptional’ discipline to punish insubordination (the example of Mauricia’s solitary confinement comes immediately to mind), the general principle of power at work in the religious institution is a productive rather than a strictly punitive one. The introduction of deviant female bodies into the machinery of labour aims not only to neutralize their danger to the bourgeois social order, but actually to increase their potential utility to this order (Foucault, Discipline 210). As in Bentham’s prison, the ultimate goal is to ‘return its inhabitants into the world instructed’ (Mack 199), so that they are able to serve a useful function in society as a whole. In his description of the Micaelas, the narrator of the novel identifies the convent with two objects, the wall and the windmill, both of which come to symbolize the panoptical function of the institution (Goldman 76). Interestingly, in the chapter entitled ‘Las Micaelas por fuera’ it is through Maxi’s subjectivity that the narrator presents the vision of the wall of the half-constructed church that, each day, comes closer to separating him from Fortunata, the object of his desire. That the institution’s function is to contain desire and sexuality is reinforced through Maxi’s choice of metaphor in comparing each new layer of bricks about to cover up the interior of the convent to ‘la ropa que se extiende para velar las carnes descubiertas’ (clothes being spread out to cover bare flesh; 1: 601). For the women inside the convent, the wall that closes in upon them not only confines them physically, but also threatens to limit their field of vision, thus allowing for their complete submission to panoptical surveillance. The absence of mirrors inside the convent suggests that the internee is denied an image even of her own body,

62

Marginal Subjects

the source of desire and the site of potential resistance to discipline. The physical construction of the convent wall around its inhabitants thus becomes an apt metaphor for their moral and religious edification, which goes hand in hand with the discipline of their bodies. The double connotation of the word ‘edificación’ (1: 566), referring both to Fortunata’s moral education and the physical construction of the convent, is significant in this context, although Fortunata only understands the latter meaning. The narrator’s references to the windmill, for their part, evoke its machine-like quality: ‘el crujir del mecanismo’ (the creaking of the mechanism; 1: 602), ‘la máquina’ (the machine; 1: 602), ‘el aparato’ (the apparatus; 1: 632). Through Maxi’s perspective, the narrator calls attention to the windmill’s pump disk that, like a vigilant eye, looms visibly over the rooftop of the convent and of the surrounding houses. Later, after Fortunata leaves the convent, Maxi’s subjectivity transforms the disk literally into an ‘eye,’ as he sees in it ‘el ojo de un bufón testigo,’ a witness to his wife’s infidelity (the witnessing eye of a jester; 1: 705). The windmill, through its constant identification with the machine and with the act of surveillance, acquires a metonymic function vis-à-vis the convent, which stands adjacent to it. Fortunata’s discipline in the convent is but a continuation of the process of improvement which Maxi, Nicolás, and Doña Lupe have imposed on her within the institution of the family. To transform her from a prostitute into a ‘mujer honrada’ (honourable woman) requires, first and foremost, the containment of her desire through the discipline of her body. Once admitted into the Micaelas, she must stifle the narrative of her deviant desire, the story of her ‘old’ life, and is able to articulate it surreptitiously to Manola and to Mauricia only when the watchful eyes of the mother superiors waver momentarily. While her discipline in the convent never extinguishes her illicit desire for Juanito, it does teach her the convenience of assimilating herself into the bourgeois order, at least in appearance: ‘la conveniencia de casarse para ocupar un lugar honroso en el mundo’ (the suitability of marriage to secure an honourable position in the world; 1: 626). Despite Mauricia’s efforts to tempt her back to her old ways, she reiterates, echoing the discourse of the bourgeoisie, her intention to remain ‘honrada’ once she is married. Even as Fortunata recognizes her inability to love the man she is to wed, a strange impulse drives her toward her ‘redeemer,’ and she resigns herself to ‘no aspirar a la realización cumplida y total de nuestros deseos’ (not aspire to completely satisfy our desires; 1: 634). At the end of five

Discipline and Resistance in Fortunata y Jacinta

63

months, she leaves the convent with a sense of ‘paz, orden y regularidad doméstica’ (peace, order, and domestic regularity) and with the happy prospect of acquiring all of the markings of bourgeois respectability: ‘casa, nombre y decoro’ (a home, a name, and respectability; 1: 659). Doña Lupe, for her part, eagerly awaits Fortunata’s return so that she can resume, under her own direction, the ‘edification’ of her future niece by teaching her the language and comportment of the bourgeoisie. We can see how the individuals who have a stake in reforming her, the family unit, and the religious institution, all form a part of a complex and efficient network of power that seeks the transformation of the deviant subject into a docile body.6 Where there is power, however, there is also resistance. Within the Micaelas convent, the figure of Mauricia la Dura represents perhaps the most obvious locus of resistance to power, given the violent, spontaneous nature of her rebellion (Foucault, History 95–6). She has fits of madness, during which she disrupts the disciplinary apparatus by refusing to perform work, rejecting her religious indoctrination, uttering ‘palabras soeces’ (vulgar words; 1: 612), and engaging in disorderly (not to mention deliberately ‘unfeminine’) conduct such as smoking and excessive drinking. As Teresa Fuentes has shown, alcoholism was often linked in the bourgeois mentality of the times not only to ‘“irregular” or socially unacceptable sexual behavior’ but also to the potential dangers of working-class rebellion (Visions 102). In short, Mauricia refuses to be reduced to a docile body, a notion that is clearly gendered in this context: the female body that resists the regulation of desire and sexuality becomes a disordered body.7 Her bodily disorder manifests itself in her gender ambiguity, with the narrator calling attention constantly to her ‘masculine’ qualities. He first introduces her as a ‘mujer singularísima, bella y varonil’ (singular woman, beautiful, and manly; 1: 607); her voice is ‘bronca, más de hombre que de mujer’ (harsh, more a man’s than a woman’s; 1: 608); and he insists on her warrior-like quality and her resemblance to Napoleon. During these moments of paroxysm she is likened to ‘una amazona’ (an Amazon woman; 1: 652), and her demeanour appears ‘más arrogante, varonil y napoleónica que nunca’ (more arrogant, manly, and Napoleonic than ever; 1: 653); her body transgresses gender boundaries, undermining the bourgeois norms of femininity implicit in the notion of the disciplined, ordered, useful – in short, docile – body.8 From society’s perspective, on the other hand, Mauricia’s ‘accesos de indisciplina y procacidad’ (fits of madness and insolence; 1: 611)

64

Marginal Subjects

are bodily disorders symptomatic of madness and delinquency. As we have seen in La desheredada, both madness and delinquency were typically linked in the discourses of the period to hereditary degeneration, as were sexual indeterminism and ambiguity. The narrator’s pathologization of Mauricia through references to her ‘naturaleza desordenada’ (chaotic personality; 1: 608) and her ‘desorden mental’ (mental disorder; 1: 654), calling to mind a similar characterization of Isidora Rufete in La desheredada, exemplifies the intersection of penal and psychiatric discourse, which led to the emergence of the ‘dangerous individual’ as a target of disciplinary intervention (Foucault, Discipline 252). Mauricia’s temporary outbursts of ‘insanity’ during which she is reduced to a state resembling imbecility (she can do no more than to articulate ‘monosílabos guturales’ [guttural monosyllables; 1: 613] in an incoherent and uncontrollable fashion) recalls Mariano’s mental state prior to committing his act of terrorism in La desheredada. That nineteenth-century medicine/psychiatry established a link between such a state of ‘moral or intellectual imbecility’ and hereditary degeneration is significant, as the latter was perceived to be a form of epidemic disease that had an impact on the health of the nation (Esquerdo, qtd in Gordon 71; Pick 131). The narrator of Fortunata, applying this medical metaphor, presents Mauricia’s madness as a disease whose sufferer must be quarantined in order to prevent contagion. The nuns, in effect, respond to her attack of madness by ordering her solitary confinement in the convent’s ‘prison,’ where she must ‘cumplir una condena’ (serve a sentence; 1: 618). Penal and medical discourses thus become conflated. Despite her temporary return to docility after her episodes of ‘madness’ and her consequent confinement, Mauricia continues to resist discipline through the deployment of her disordered body. She commits the ultimate act of sacrilege by stealing the host, an act that exemplifies her final rebellion against the coercive religious institution and its disciplinary mechanisms, and, in her final day in the convent, she is found in a state of uncontrollable mental and physical disorder: drunk, and in a violent rage, she begins to hurl bricks at the nuns and the other internees. The image of the bricks, previously identified with the construction of the convent and now cast away by Mauricia, quite clearly symbolizes the destruction of the foundations of this disciplinary institution. It is significant that following this episode, the nuns expel her from the convent, having exhausted all disciplinary measures to ‘correct’ the renegade. As Teresa Fuentes has observed, rubbish, or ‘residuum,’ is an apt metaphor for characterizing Mauricia as human

Discipline and Resistance in Fortunata y Jacinta

65

‘waste matter’ to be swept away and eliminated from the social body (Visions 73). Shortly before her expulsion from the convent she is, in fact, found sitting on the manure pile in the garden, which, as one of the nuns remarks, ‘es su sitio’ (just where she belongs; 1: 649). As Fuentes goes on to show, ‘social refuse’ was linked, in the cultural imaginary of the times, to vagrancy and prostitution (Visions 73–4). This connection becomes more explicit as Mauricia happily embraces the freedom that the street offers after her confinement in the institution. ‘¡Ay, mi querida calle de mi alma!’ (Oh, dear street of my soul! 1: 655), she exclaims, as the nuns throw out her disordered body, barefoot and half-exposed, into the street: ‘Tenía un pecho medio descubierto, el cuerpo del vestido hecho jirones’ (One of her breasts was half-exposed, the bodice of her dress was tattered; 1: 652). The deviant female body is necessarily sexualized, as her body is compared to that of a prostitute in the street. Significantly, it is the priest León Pintado, a masculine representative of the religious institution, who resorts to physical violence to subjugate the disordered female body. When Mauricia is expelled from the convent, she is returned to society as ‘residual matter,’ to reiterate Fuentes’s point (Visions 73). As a female subject who is in constant movement in the public space (she, significantly, returns to her former job as ‘corredora de prendas’ [peddler of clothing; 1: 663]), she defies bourgeois society’s attempts to discipline her by fixing her place, physically and socially. Although she has evaded discipline in the Micaelas convent, she continues her struggle to resist the disciplinary mechanisms of society as a whole, which seeks to impose order onto her disordered body. The first occasion on which we hear of Mauricia’s fate after her expulsion from the Micaelas convent is through the perspective of her sister Severiana, who recounts to Jacinta Mauricia’s return to her old vice, drinking. Unable to find a way to bring her sister back to respectable bourgeois life, Severiana plans to seek Guillermina’s help in finding another disciplinary institution in which to confine her, ‘en cualquier parte donde la sujetaran […] bien la podrían poner, si a mano viene, en un hospicio, o casa de orates, al menos para que no diera malos ejemplos’ (someplace where they would be able to control her … if it’s convenient, they could even put her in an orphanage, or a madhouse; at least she wouldn’t be able to set a bad example; 2: 67–8).9 The next scene in which Mauricia appears, she has made a spectacle out of herself in the street outside of Doña Lupe’s home: the police are taking away to the hospital the ‘cuerpo inerte’ (lifeless body; 2: 164) of

66

Marginal Subjects

the drunken Mauricia, bleeding from a split skull, in full sight of the public. The public gaze and discourse produce her as a ‘delinquent’ who needs to be isolated and confined. As a body that refuses to be disciplined, she is also the constant object of gossip, a social discourse that maintains her marginality as a subject. It is not Mauricia herself who gives voice to her narrative; instead, her story, narrated secondhand by Maxi, adopts the perspectives of those who participated directly in her subjection: the Protestant pastor, Guillermina Pacheco and the deputy mayor Aparisi. According to this account, Mauricia is taken into a Protestant mission (quite literally, picked up from the streets), and after she throws another fit of violence as in the Micaelas convent, she is thrown back out into the streets. Guillermina, who intervenes in an attempt to ‘save’ her, resorts to the use of force, ‘le echa un cordel al pescuezo y se la lleva’ (slings a rope around her neck and takes her away; 2: 167), as if Mauricia were a delinquent being led to the gallows. The techniques of power applied to discipline Mauricia’s body thus become increasingly violent and coercive, yet she continues to resist bourgeois society’s attempts to subordinate her. After her expulsion from the Protestant establishment, she is taken to her sister’s home to be placed under the surveillance of her family, yet, according to Maxi, ‘allá tampoco la pueden sujetar’ (they can’t hold her down there either; 2: 167). Until the moment of her death, bourgeois society persists in its efforts to reduce Mauricia’s disordered body to discipline. Even on her deathbed she is placed under constant surveillance lest she fly out of control during her paroxysms; during these moments, in Guillermina’s words: ‘cuesta Dios y ayuda sujetarla’ (it takes God and more to hold her down; 2: 178). Those who surround Mauricia during her final illness reiterate the necessity, and difficulty, of her subjection through the repeated use of the verb ‘sujetar.’ Bourgeois society, once again, conflates physical disease and moral degeneration under the sign of ‘madness,’ which, as such, is deemed to justify social intervention – whether in the form of religion or medicine – to prevent its spread through the social body. Mauricia, as a diseased and disordered body, is physically confined to her bed, medically controlled by injections of morphine, and morally obliged to accept the Christian doctrine that Guillermina and others try to impose on her.10 And, again, Mauricia’s diseased body becomes linked to her gender ambiguity, as Fortunata remarks on the latter’s masculine semblance, showing that interpretations of bodily disorder are always inflected by gender.

Discipline and Resistance in Fortunata y Jacinta

67

Mauricia’s mental disorder is a form of resistance to discipline, to the literal subjection of her body. When Fortunata goes to visit her friend on her deathbed, she finds the latter in a state of delirium, emitting what she describes as ‘rugidos de fiera sujeta y acorralada’ (roars of a cornered beast; 2: 197). What bourgeois society considers Mauricia’s ‘enfermedad del cuerpo’ (sick body) – and, by extension, ‘sickness of the soul’ – represents her final rebellion against the disciplinary machine that seeks to transform her into a docile body (2: 184). Doña Lupe, having spent a night in vigil of Mauricia, evokes vividly the image of her patient’s disordered body: ‘en un puro delirio hasta que Dios amaneció […] ya se revolvía, echaba las piernazas fuera de la cama, y los brazos como aspas de molino’ (she was delirious right up to dawn … she tossed around, flung those big legs out of bed and waved her arms like windmill sails; 2: 201).11 Later, Lupe describes Mauricia’s condition in her final moments of life as that of complete physical and moral breakdown: ‘De repente, se descompuso’ (Suddenly, she fell apart), she reports to Fortunata, ‘se quedó amoratada, empezó a dar manotazos y a echar por aquella boca unas flores, unas berzas’ (she turned livid and started to wave her arms around and spout all sorts of terrible words; 2: 224). Sandra Bartky, noting the crucial role that gender plays in the production of the ‘docile body,’ argues that women’s bodies are more restricted than those of men ‘in their manner of movement and in their spatiality’ (66). That is, bourgeois social norms delineate implicitly the spatial field within which the positioning and movement of the female body are allowed. Bartky goes on to show how society defines the ‘loose woman’ as one who violates these norms, her looseness becoming manifest ‘not only in her morals, but in her manner of speech and quite literally in the free and easy way she moves’ (66). Mauricia, whose physical and moral disorder finds expression both in her lack of verbal restraint and in her uncontrolled physical movement, thus exemplifies, from society’s perspective, the ‘loose woman’ in every sense of the word. Indifferent to religion and to society, she dies in defiance of the bourgeois codes that seek to render her body docile once and for all. In the larger context of the novel, Mauricia plays a decisive role in the evolution of Fortunata’s subjectivity, by inciting her desire and kindling her rebellion against bourgeois discipline. Having lived most of her life without a place, on the margins of society, Fortunata’s enclosure in the Micaelas convent to prepare for her entry into bourgeois life represents a turning point in her subjective trajectory. We have seen the ways in

68

Marginal Subjects

which the bourgeois family and the religious institution have tried to mould her subjectivity, through the discipline of her deviant body. Although the degree of their success or failure in transforming the deviant woman into a ‘burguesa honrada’ (honourable middle-class woman) might be debated, the female body, as in Isidora Rufete’s case, becomes the site of conflict and negotiation between the forces of discipline, on the one hand, and subjective desire, on the other. In this context, Mauricia’s influence as the force of resistance is crucial: by inducing her friend to pursue the course of desire, she undermines the disciplinary apparatus of bourgeois society that has sought to reduce her to a docile, desexualized body. The first time Mauricia approaches Fortunata in the Micaelas, she does so to (re)awaken her friend’s illicit desire for Juanito Santa Cruz, thus preparing the ground for Fortunata’s adultery. After the two women leave the convent, they seem, at first, to follow divergent paths: while both were ‘deviant’ women who entered the convent to have their body and will submitted to discipline, Mauricia, who refuses to accept her subjection, is thrown out, quite literally, into the streets, whereas Fortunata emerges from the convent apparently reformed, ready to become incorporated into the bourgeois order. Yet Mauricia maintains a powerful influence on Fortunata as a symbol of resistance to power. When Mauricia seeks out Fortunata at Doña Lupe’s residence, the narrator describes the former’s influence on the latter with the following words: ‘Mauricia le infundía miedo y al propio tiempo una simpatía irresistible y misteriosa, cual si le sugiriera la idea de cosas reprobables y al mismo tiempo gratas a su corazón’ (Mauricia inspired fear, yet at the same time an irresistible and mysterious sympathy, as if she were stirring up ideas that were at once reprehensible and pleasing to Fortunata’s heart; 1: 663). Mauricia represents the antithesis of the social identity that the bourgeois institution has thrust upon Fortunata: as a prostitute and a ‘corredora de prendas’ (peddler of clothing), occupations which are identified, significantly, with the public space, Mauricia is free to roam the streets, in contrast to Fortunata, who is about to begin a life of confinement in the domestic space of the bourgeois home. Subsequent to Fortunata’s departure from the convent, Mauricia’s appearance coincides with those key moments in which the protagonist is on the verge of becoming reincorporated into the bourgeois order. The public spectacle of Mauricia’s drunkenness outside of Doña Lupe’s window occurs shortly after the uncertain restoration of Fortunata’s marriage to Maxi. Previously, Mauricia appeared on Doña Lupe’s door-

Discipline and Resistance in Fortunata y Jacinta

69

step on the eve of Fortunata’s wedding, unleashing in the protagonist a desire that poses a threat to her marriage and, effectively, undermining the discipline she has received in the convent: ‘las ideas tan trabajosamente construidas en las Micaelas, se desquiciaron de repente’ (the ideas that had been so laboriously constructed at the Micaelas suddenly became undone; 1: 667). Fortunata’s renewed contact with Mauricia after leaving the convent marks a turning point in her trajectory: from this point on, Fortunata (re)affirms her desire, choosing, once again, the path of deviance, abandoning the orderly life of marriage no sooner than she enters it. In her efforts to mobilize her friend’s resistance to power, what Mauricia tries to teach Fortunata is not the art of the revolution, but that of the ‘tactic,’ to borrow de Certeau’s term; the tactic ‘must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into “opportunities”’ (de Certeau xix). She urges Fortunata not to reject marriage, but to use the bourgeois institution to her advantage to pursue the course of desire: ‘Casadita, puedes hacer lo que quieras, guardando el aparato de la comenencia’ (Once you’re a nice little married lady, you can do as you please, keeping the benefits that go with properness; 1: 666). That is, Mauricia teaches her friend to turn the apparatus of discipline to her own ends. It is perhaps paradoxical that, for both Mauricia and the members of Fortunata’s bourgeois family-to-be, marriage is the means to her salvation (1: 667). While Lupe and her family consider marriage as yet another apparatus of discipline to consolidate Fortunata’s place within the bourgeois order, Mauricia perceives it as a tactic of ‘antidiscipline’ to facilitate the consummation of deviant desires. Influenced, thus, by her friend’s perverse logic, Fortunata goes through with the marriage in spite of her misgivings, drawing out for herself an ‘errant’ trajectory obeying its own logic (de Certeau xviii). As in the case of Isidora Rufete, Fortunata’s spatial and subjective itineraries are linked closely. If we trace Fortunata’s narrative and subjective trajectory, she, like Isidora, begins as a subject who is in constant movement, ‘placeless in the city,’ without a permanent residence, to return to Deborah Parsons’s observation about the protagonists of the two novels (54). From the moment of her abandonment by Juanito until she enters the Micaelas convent, Fortunata’s place is the public space of the streets: she leads the errant life of the prostitute, moving from place to place with various men who are willing to ‘keep’ her in exchange for her body. As Maxi describes it, one of these men ‘te llevó de pueblo en pueblo como los trastos de una feria’ (took you around from town to

70

Marginal Subjects

town like a circus; 1: 485). When Juanito searches for his former lover all over the city, he is able to gather no more information than that Fortunata ‘andaba por Madrid’ (was wandering around somewhere in Madrid; 1: 440). Although we might question the degree of choice she is able to exercise in drawing out her errant trajectory, given her circumstances, I would depart from Parsons’s predominantly negative view of Fortunata’s ‘shifts of location’ as evidence of the character’s ‘having no agency over her place within the city’ (Parsons 54).12 Instead, Fortunata’s unwillingness to settle into one place and, later, into the stability of bourgeois marriage, represents a form of resistance (conscious or otherwise) to bourgeois disciplinary society, whose aim is to ‘fix’ the place of social subjects according to its norms. If discipline, to evoke Foucault’s words, ‘fixes … arrests or regulates movements … clears up confusion’ (Discipline 219), Fortunata, with her constant movement, resists the normalizing function of bourgeois society. Only after a few days of marriage to Maxi, Fortunata goes out into the streets in an emblematic scene that recalls Isidora Rufete’s pleasurable stroll through the commercial centre of Madrid. Like Isidora, she marks out her own trajectory – and the space of her desire – in the open space of the city, thus experiencing anew a freedom of movement which has been denied her since she began her initiation into bourgeois society: No tenía prisa y se fue a dar un paseíto […] Siguiendo luego su vagabundo camino, saboreaba el placer íntimo de la libertad, de estar sola y suelta siquiera poco tiempo. La idea de poder ir a donde gustase la excitaba […] Y anda que andarás, vino a hacerse la consideración de que no sentía malditas ganas de meterse en su casa. ¿Qué iba ella a hacer en su casa? Nada […] Bastante esclavitud había tenido dentro de las Micaelas. ¡Qué gusto poder coger de punta a punta una calle tan larga como la de Santa Engracia! El principal goce del paseo era ir solita, libre. Ni Maxi ni doña Lupe ni Patricia ni nadie podían contarle los pasos, ni vigilarla ni detenerla. (1: 685; emphasis mine) She wasn’t in a hurry, so she decided to go for a walk … And continuing on her wandering way, she savoured the intimate pleasure of liberty, of being alone and free, even for a short time. The idea of being able to go wherever she wanted excited her … As she walked along, it occurred to her that she didn’t have the slightest desire to go home. What would she do at home? Nothing … She had had enough slavery in the Micaelas. What a pleasure it was, to go from one end clear to the other, of a street as long as Santa Engracia! The main pleasure of her walk was being alone, free. Not Maxi, nor

Discipline and Resistance in Fortunata y Jacinta

71

Doña Lupe, nor Patricia was there to count her steps, to watch over her or stop her.

In societies in the wake of industrialization the image of vagabondism, associated generally with the threat of the uncontrollable working classes, when pertaining specifically to women, was linked more directly to prostitution. Female freedom in the city streets was seen as deviant and, therefore, dangerous. The pleasures of wandering are imbued clearly with sexual connotations: the double meaning of the Spanish verb ‘errar’ connotes that to wander is to ‘err,’ to stray from the norm of appropriate female sexual conduct. Fortunata’s deambulations through the city anticipate her return to her deviant life, as that same night, she gives in to her desire, entering into an adulterous relationship with her former lover. The sexual symbolism of her dream during the previous night, in which she visualizes vividly locks that are unbolted and doors that are opened, is too obvious to merit commentary. If the walls closed in around the protagonist in the Micaelas convent, reducing the space of her subjectivity, desire now infiltrates into her subjective space through the walls, literally ‘filtrándose por las paredes’ (passing through the walls; 1:681) in the form of Juanito Santa Cruz. The adulterous act having been committed, the narrator refers to Fortunata not only as ‘la pecadora’ (sinner; 1: 691), but also as ‘la delincuente’ (delinquent; 1: 701) and ‘la criminal’ (criminal; 1: 703), reflecting society’s attitude toward female adultery. Soon afterwards, she abandons Maxi for her lover, overturning bourgeois discipline to assert her deviant desire, to the shock of both Nicolás Rubín and Doña Lupe, who had believed her to be ‘radicalmente reformada’ (radically reformed; 1: 711). Tony Tanner, in Adultery in the Novel, emphasizes the close relationship between the nineteenth-century novel and the family, noting that despite the novel’s apparent complicity with the traditional values of the family, such as the authority of the Father, its true interest lies in ‘the possible fissures, the breaches, and breakdowns’ within the family institution (371). That is, while the realist novel, like the family itself, might appear to uphold bourgeois norms as its ‘centre,’ it is driven simultaneously by a contrary and, perhaps, even more powerful, impulse toward the disruption of (and deviation from) these norms (368– 9). In this light (female) adultery, as a specific type of deviant sexual act, as well as a metaphor for societal anxieties about gender deviance in general, came to be a central concern in the nineteenth-century novel.

72

Marginal Subjects

According to Tanner, adultery represents an act of crossing a forbidden boundary, from some form of social identity and definition toward an indistinctness identified with nature (313).13 In Galdós’s novel, Fortunata exemplifies just such a case: a ‘mujer del pueblo’ (woman of the common people) identified initially with Nature, she acquires a new social identity as a ‘mujer honrada’ for the first time when she enters into the bourgeois marriage contract. Her re-formation in the Micaelas convent prior to her marriage thus represents the first step in her transition from ‘nature’ to ‘society’: that is, the ‘savage’ receives initiation into the respectable life of the bourgeoisie. In Doña Lupe’s words, she is quite literally ‘una salvaje que necesita que la domestiquen’ (a savage that needs to be tamed; 1: 583). Yet, Lupe’s and her family’s attempts to domesticate Fortunata are, ultimately, to no avail, as she continues to vacillate on the border between Nature and society; the subjective, as well as physical, space that she occupies through most of the novel is that of liminality, of indeterminacy. When Fortunata commits adultery, more disturbing for her bourgeois family than the act of adultery in itself is the ‘confusion’ that she has created with this act, leaving uncertain not only her own place within the matrimonial contract, but also the very distinction between marriage and adultery. Her adultery, in Nicolás Rubín’s words, has left them ‘en la mayor confusión’ (in a major state of confusion; 1: 715). This confusion of the natural and the social, the illegitimate and the legitimate, the public and the private, is tantamount to the dissolution of the very boundaries that make social definition possible: (female) adultery, literally and symbolically, mixes things that should be kept separate: ‘An adulteress is a wife, who is not a wife, a prostitute who is not a prostitute’ (Tanner 375). Labanyi elaborates on Tanner’s point to show that what is particularly disturbing about the adulteress is that she, unlike the prostitute, moves equally in both private and public spheres (‘Adultery’ 101, 105). Fortunata, as an adulteress, creates confusion by eluding categories of social definition: she is simultaneously inside and outside of marriage, occupying the liminal space between the private and the public. Although Tanner does not explicitly address the problem of gender in relation to adultery, it is female, rather than male, adultery that is perceived generally to threaten the social order with the dissolution of boundaries. In Fortunata, for example, Juanito, unlike Fortunata, never considers abandoning his place within the institution of marriage, nor does he ever confuse what is legitimate with the illegitimate. He

Discipline and Resistance in Fortunata y Jacinta

73

maintains an absolute separation between the sanctity of his marriage to Jacinta, which he considers incapable of being adulterated, and his relationship with Fortunata, made impure through the crossing of a forbidden boundary. His words to Fortunata, ‘deja a mi mujer en su casa’ (leave my wife at home; 1: 694) – that is, in her ‘proper’ place – highlights, by contrast, the protagonist’s transgression of physical and socio-symbolic limits established by bourgeois norms. Significantly, the moment in which Fortunata threatens the separation between the legitimate and the illegitimate, questioning the faithfulness of Juanito’s wife, he decides to abandon his lover definitively. Fortunata’s ability, as an adulterous wife, to move between the private and the public domains gives her a measure of autonomy within the exchange economy (Labanyi, ‘Adultery’ 105) and, I would add, a certain degree of agency to stake out her own space of subjectivity and desire. When she finds herself out in the streets and placeless, once again, after having left her husband and being abandoned by her lover, Fortunata is taken under the wings of her ‘mentor’ Feijoo, who teaches her the tactic of negotiating her place within bourgeois society without necessitating the acceptance of its norms. Paradoxically, even as he limits her space to ‘un cuartito modesto en un barrio apartado’ (a modest little room in an out-of-the-way neighbourhood) and delineates ‘certain ground rules that determine Fortunata’s movements’ (Kronik, ‘Galdosian’ 302), he claims to leave her in ‘absoluta libertad’ (complete freedom; 2: 101), thus signalling the fine line between freedom and confinement that she must manoeuvre. Feijoo’s lesson in ‘practical philosophy’ allows her to maintain economic solvency and the appearance of respectability, even as she continues to move in and out of marriage, and of her adulterous relationship with Juanito (and, briefly, with Feijoo himself). The confusion between private and public, the legitimate and the illegitimate, ultimately becomes difficult to sustain, given bourgeois society’s need to normalize the deviant, to set straight subjects who have gone astray. While society’s impulse is to counter the threat of indistinctness with discipline, the figure of the adulteress, like narrative itself, privileges liminal spaces, with their ‘logic of ambiguity’ (de Certeau 128). It would be possible to interpret Fortunata’s second fall into adultery as unleashing a series of events that lead to her final destruction and death, symbolizing society’s punishment of her deviant desire. Yet her progressive disintegration in the fourth and final part of the novel can be seen as her continued resistance to bourgeois discipline, which seeks to impose order onto her deviant and disordered

74

Marginal Subjects

body. Her uncontrolled attack on Aurora with her fingernails after discovering the latter’s affair with Juanito recalls the image of Mauricia in her most violent moments of paroxysm. The narrator and the other characters that witness this scene describe Fortunata as a ‘fiera’ (beast; 2: 480) and a ‘salvaje’ (savage; 2: 481) who, like Mauricia, needs to be subjected physically. Maxi refers to Fortunata’s fit of rage with the verb ‘descomponerse’ (to have a breakdown; 2: 495), significantly, the same term used by Doña Lupe to describe Mauricia’s breakdown in the final moments of her life. As Geoffrey Ribbans has noted, the scene of Fortunata’s death is not unlike that of the tragic end that Mauricia has met earlier in the novel (721). In both cases, the disordered female body comes to represent a form of resistance to power. The conclusion of the novel does not resolve fully the question of Fortunata’s position in relation to power and discipline at the end of her life. Despite Carlos Blanco Aguinaga’s unequivocal assertion that ‘everything returns to order and calm’ and that ‘she has joined the flock’ of the bourgeoisie (32), Fortunata’s complex and circuitous trajectory complicates such a claim: she can never be restored to her ‘proper place,’ because she does not have a stable place. In spite of all of the attempts at discipline, she ultimately goes where her deviant path leads her, mapping out the space of her own desires. In the end, she rejects the bourgeois institutions of marriage and the family, as well as that of religion; even as she faces imminent death, she refuses to accept Christian penitence, claiming that she is an ‘angel.’ And, as Labanyi has observed, Fortunata’s final act is to ‘dictate a will: that is, to make a contract, the ultimate liberal definition of freedom’ (‘Adultery’ 105). While this contract will confer legitimacy onto the product of her illegitimate alliance, the child will also live on as the incarnation of Fortunata’s deviant desire, as an affirmation of her fantasy that, as the mother of Juanito’s child, she is his true wife. In fact, it is in a gesture of defiance that she gives her child the names, not of her lawful husband, but of her lovers and lover-to-be: Juan Evaristo Segismundo. Furthermore, by making a contract with another woman, giving Jacinta the freedom, and the power of choice, to separate from her husband, she effectively introduces a fissure in the foundation of the patriarchal institution of marriage. Notwithstanding the irony that Jacinta’s separation occurs after her rival’s death, rather than during the course of her husband’s affair, her choice to ‘discard’ her husband is no small act of agency for a bourgeois woman who has lived her entire life in conformity with social norms.

Discipline and Resistance in Fortunata y Jacinta

75

The pharmacist Ballester, through whose perspective the ‘post-script’ of Fortunata’s story is focalized in the two final chapters of the novel, represents a role that parallels, in some ways, that of Miquis in La desheredada. He speaks as the scientific voice of discipline, yet one whose own desires are invested in the deviant female subject. He attributes Fortunata’s final breakdown from her physical and mental disorder to the failure of the disciplinary machine, blaming her sad fate on ‘falta de asistencia, de vigilancia, y de una autoridad que se le hubiera impuesto’ (lack of someone to care and watch over her, and an authority who would have imposed himself; 2: 529). Yet, as we have seen, the female protagonist’s relationship to power is not so simple. While we cannot see her as the ‘single locus of great Refusal … soul of revolt, source of all rebellions’ (Foucault, History 95–6), neither can she be reduced to an inert and passive target of power, to a ‘docile body.’ At the conclusion of the novel, it is not the deviant woman, but her legitimate husband who ends up in an institution, driven to madness, presumably as a consequence of his wife’s deviance. The bourgeois patriarchal order has not emerged intact, uncontaminated by the ‘disorder’ brought onto it by a woman of the working class. In the final analysis, Fortunata’s subjectivity, like the textual field itself, represents a site of struggle and negotiation between the forces of discipline and resistance. Regardless of how we might interpret the novel’s dénouement, it is impossible to deny that what is ‘narratable’ in the novel, as Peter Brooks would say (155), is the deviant, which Galdós’s female protagonist exemplifies. And it is her deviant desire, which gives rise to her ‘errant trajectories’ through novelistic and urban space, that propels the narrative forward.14 Such trajectories, in De Certeauian terms, form a part of ‘everyday practices’ through which the female character mobilizes her tactics of resistance (xviii–xx). Ultimately, Fortunata, like Isidora Rufete, generates a narrative of desire that defies all attempts to discipline her body and to ‘fix’ her subjectivity.

3 Consuming Subjects: Female Reading and Deviant Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Spain

Female Reader as Trope: Woman, Deviant Desire, and Consumption in Nineteenth-Century Spain In Galdós’s La desheredada we have seen that deviant female desire and consumption are intimately linked in the cultural imagination of the late nineteenth century, a period coinciding with the emergence of a new consumer society in Spain. In many literary and visual representations, the figure of the female reader exemplifies this link. It was during the last decades of the nineteenth century when the preoccupation with woman’s reading became increasingly acute, reflecting general anxieties about women’s education, literacy, and potential for self-sufficiency and autonomy. The second half of the nineteenth century in Spain witnessed a significant rise in women’s literacy, particularly in the urban areas, where women were presumed to constitute between 40 and 50 per cent of the total readership; by the end of the century, almost 50 per cent of the women in the nation’s capital were considered to be literate (Botrel 103, 153n; Martínez Martín 58; Simón Palmer 745).1 Although estimations of literacy rates are not infallible, more telling are the cultural developments that could only have occurred with the exponential growth in women’s literacy between the middle and the end of the century: these include the creation of a market for popular magazines published by women for women and the increasing professionalization of women writers belonging to the economic and cultural elite. In response to the increasing feminization of the reading public in Spain – as was also the case in England and France – ecclesiastical, as well as medical-scientific, authorities made concerted efforts to regulate women’s reading.2 Of particular importance in this regard were

Female Reading and Deviant Sexuality

77

texts classified as ‘medical-social’ or ‘clinical-social’ studies, which served as conduct manuals for women (many were, in fact, marriage or sex manuals). For example, the famed gynaecologist Angel Pulido Fernández, in his Bosquejos médico-sociales para la mujer (Medical-Social Sketches for the Woman, 1876), includes an entire chapter on women’s reading, which he refers to as an ‘espada de doble filo’ (double-edged sword). While, on the one hand, he acknowledges that reading could be a useful tool for the moral instruction of women and for the promotion of ‘buena higiene’ (good hygiene; 51), he also outlines its pernicious effects, especially of novel reading, on women, whose physiological system, he claims, is more prone to nervous and sexual excitement than men’s. In his words, ‘la lectura lanza en el delirio de los placeres avivando el fermento de los deseos’ (reading provokes the delirium of pleasures arousing the ferment of desires; 63), leading potentially to the solitary vice and to the consequent state of mental enervation.3 Another prominent physician and public hygienist Prudencio Sereñana y Partagás, in his ‘clinical-social’ study entitled La prostitución en la ciudad de Barcelona (Prostitution in the City of Barcelona, 1881), attributes to ‘la lectura de novelas inmorales’ (reading of immoral novels; 133) his female subjects’ fall to prostitution. He highlights the case of a young woman who apparently confessed to him that ‘la lectura de novelas obscenas fué la única causa de que ella y tres compañeras más se entregaran en brazos del libertinaje’ (the reading of obscene novels was the only reason she and her three friends surrendered themselves to licentiousness; 133), and, yet another, named Julia, whose reading of French novels awakened her ‘imaginacion exaltada’ (exalted imagination; 171) and erotic desires, leading her eventually to prostitute herself. Julia, referring to her own situation and that of her fellow prostitutes, concludes her testimony with the statement that ‘la instruccion fué la causa primordial de nuestra perdicion’ (education was the principal cause of our downfall; 172).4 The identification between female reading and sexual transgression reflected anxieties not only about women’s education, social progress, and increasing visibility in the public sphere, but also about their potential agency in a new consumer society. The case of Isidora Rufete in La desheredada exemplified how female reading became a metaphor for female consumption and desire. However, as Rita Felski has noted, the rise of consumerism had contradictory effects on women. On the one hand, they were given access to new pleasures, to the potential enjoyment of material goods, through their power of negotiation in the

78

Marginal Subjects

marketplace even when their actual purchasing power was often limited. On the other, consumer culture also subjected them to new forms of social control and self-surveillance to monitor their new-found freedom (90). We have seen how Isidora’s body in La desheredada, while representing a form of capital through which the protagonist gains a certain degree of agency as a desiring subject, also became the target of disciplinary intervention by the power network of bourgeois patriarchal society. The emergence of consumer culture in late nineteenth-century Spain coincided with the Restoration period, which, as we have seen, was a time of social and political instability, when familiar boundaries, including those of gender, were being eroded. The cultural anxieties provoked by such confusion of boundaries led, in turn, to efforts on the part of the social and political establishment to ‘[normalize] deviant behaviour’ through a variety of discourses, including medical texts, hygiene manuals, and even literary fiction (Labanyi, Gender 55). These literary and ‘scientific’ texts of the Restoration period preoccupied with identifying and isolating deviants targeted both men and women, especially those who occupied marginal positions in society; however, it is important to reiterate that the production of the deviant, both in general and as it relates specifically to reading practices, was not genderneutral. In fact, the identification between sexual deviance and female reading in particular exemplifies the role of gender as a key trope in defining deviant subjectivities. The link between sexual deviance and female reading is hardly unique to the situation of Spain. In her study of prostitution and hysteria in nineteenth-century France, Jann Matlock observes that texts, especially the novel, gained their reputation as being dangerous precisely at a time when the debates about marginals were at their height and that gender became a central category in the attempt to monitor these ‘dangerous’ readings (9). Likewise, Jacqueline Pearson, in a study of women’s reading in Britain during an earlier period (1750–1835), shows that texts that criticized the dangers of novel reading in general – that is, for both sexes – typically slipped into an attack on women’s reading in particular (18). As Kate Flint has noted in her commentary on the images of the female reader in the Victorian period, while reading is represented as an ‘essentially private activity,’ it cannot be separated from its social and cultural implications (3).5 Thus the condemnation of female reading, in addition to reflecting obvious anxieties about the potential for women’s empowerment through education and literacy,

Female Reading and Deviant Sexuality

79

reveals the fear that such an intensely solitary activity, in which the female imagination is allowed to run free, might awaken dangerous desires that could escape masculine social surveillance and control. As Pulido Fernández’s earlier admonition to his female readers suggests, masculine anxiety over women’s reading results from its potential to become, quite literally, a ‘solitary vice’ generated by a female desire from which men are completely excluded (63). Visual Representations of the Female Reader The images that follow, from late nineteenth-century Spanish periodicals, represent women in the act of reading and are intended to illustrate the important place that the female reader occupied in the cultural imaginary of the period. These images come from high-end illustrated magazines, such as the Madrid weekly Ilustración Española y Americana (1869–1921) and the Barcelona weekly La Ilustración Artística (1882– 1916), aimed at a readership of both men and women.6 Significantly, the artists are more often than not foreigners, rather than native Spaniards; the female figures are fair-skinned, clearly upper-class, and many convey a vague hint of foreignness/otherness. What most of these images have in common is the woman’s total absorption in her reading or, in some cases, in the after-effects of her reading, seemingly oblivious to the gaze of the artist or of the implicitly male spectator for whom the images appear to be constructed. In the explanatory texts – what Charnon-Deutsch calls ‘linguistic anchors’ (Fictions 6) – that accompany these images, the commentator frequently associates women’s reading with erotic pleasure.7 In ‘Una lectora impresionable’ (‘An Impressionable Reader,’ fig. 1) the female figure, having presumably read a passage from Goethe’s Faust, which she holds in her hand, is exposed to us in a state of sexual arousal. The commentator calls attention, in a most explicit way, to the desire that the book awakens in her ‘exaltada mente’ (exalted mind): ‘su blando seno se levanta con el ardiente anhelo del deseo’ (her soft bosom rises up with a yearning for desire; La Ilustración Española y Americana 58–9). Her languid and eroticized look transforms her into the object of the gaze of the implicitly male spectator, although she is clearly oblivious to it and to the world outside of the intoxicating book. Again, reading becomes, metaphorically, a solitary vice, invested with female desire. In ‘La vida moderna’ (‘Modern Life,’ fig. 2) the image of the lavishly adorned and eroticized female body, spread out voluptu-

Fig. 1. ‘Una lectora impresionable’ [‘An Impressionable Reader’] by Conrado Kiesel Source: La Ilustración Española y Americana Año 28, Núm. 4 (30 enero 1884): 64. Reclina su hermosa cabeza en el respaldo de ancho sitial: sus ojos, húmedos, brillantes, fijos, contemplan deleitosas visiones; sus labios se entreabren con dulce sonrisa; su blando seno se levanta con el ardiente anhelo del deseo … Acaba de leer el pasaje más vivo del Faust, y vagan en tropel por su exaltada mente (58–9) She reclines her beautiful head on the back of the broad chair: her moist, shining, fixed eyes contemplate delightful visions; her lips are half open with a sweet smile; her soft bosom rises with the ardent yearning of desire … She has just read the liveliest passage of Faust, and through her exalted mind there wander in a mad rush ‘deceptive dreams, frivolous like pleasure.’

Fig. 2. ‘La vida moderna’ [‘Modern Life’] by Lorenzo Casanova Source: Ilustración Artística, Año 3, Núm. 109 (28 enero 1884): 37. Es […] esta composicion una bien concebida alegoría de la sensualidad que caracteriza á nuestra época. Esa jóven, voluptuosamente tendida, saturada de aromas, que en su indolencia, en su pereza mejor dicho, prodiga sus caricias á un animal importuno y feo; esa jóven es, realmente, la vida moderna, consagrada al placer material, aspirando los deletéreos aromas de la adulación, prodigando sus afectos á los séres más indignos de ellos, y alimentando la inteligencia con la lectura de periódicos en que la literatura está representada por las novelas de Zola y el arte por las caricaturas de Grevin. (34) This composition is a well-conceived allegory of the sensuality that characterizes our epoch. This young woman, voluptuously stretched out, saturated with aromas, who in her indolence, or rather, in her laziness, lavishes her caresses on an annoying and ugly animal; that young woman is really modern life, dedicated to material pleasures, inhaling the deleterious aromas of adulation, lavishing her affections on the beings most unworthy of them, and nourishing her intelligence by reading periodicals in which literature is represented by the novels of Zola and art by the caricatures of Grevin.

84

Marginal Subjects

ously on her bed with reading materials scattered over it, is, according to the commentator, ‘una bien concebida alegoría de la sensualidad que caracteriza á nuestra época’ (a well-conceived allegory of the sensuality that characterizes our epoch; Ilustración Artística 3.109 [28 Jan. 1884]: 34). The artist identifies the woman with the image of the dog that lies in a similar posture on her bosom and that virtually blends into her figure. By animalizing her in this fashion, the artist signals her decadence, which the commentator attributes to the woman’s addiction to the material pleasures of modern life – and, in particular, to the consumption of French novels: ‘la lectura de periódicos en que la literatura está representada por las novelas de Zola’ (the reading of newspapers in which literature is represented by Zola’s novels; Ilustración Artística 3.109 [28 Jan. 1884]: 34).8 As is characteristic in both visual and literary representations of the period, the female body comes to represent a projection of the cultural anxieties surrounding both gender and modernization: the narcissistic, even perverse, nature of women’s reading becomes an allegory of ‘modern life.’ Feminist analyses of the female reader – and consumer in general – have focused traditionally on her status as object, as a victim of the ideology of consumerism (Felski 63), or as a site of convergence of male cultural anxieties about female reading and consumption in general. The questions posed by these critics generally had to do more with deciphering the meaning of these female representations from the perspective of the male gaze, rather than with the subjectivization of female desire itself. Kate Flint, in scrutinizing visual representations of the woman reader in the Victorian and Edwardian contexts, speculates on the potential questions that such images might raise for the male spectator, who presumably projects his own fascinations and anxieties onto these female figures whose thought processes elude him. According to Flint, these questions may include: ‘What is she reading about? What are her fantasies? What relation might he hold to such a fantasy? Furthermore … what moral, sexual, religious, ideological dangers may lie in a woman’s being absorbed by so preoccupying a pursuit?’ (4). The textual commentaries that accompany images of the female reader in Spanish illustrated periodicals pose the same types of questions. On the one hand, many of these representations invite a voyeuristic male gaze to revel in the sight of eroticized female bodies sent into rapture by their readings. At the same time, these images also prompt reflections on the potential dangers of what remains inaccessible to the male gaze: that is, female desire and subjectivity. For example, in ‘La

Female Reading and Deviant Sexuality

85

primera novela’ (‘The First Novel,’ fig. 3), in which a pensive, young woman is seated on the bench, in natural surroundings, with a book in her hand, the commentator seeks to penetrate into the young reader’s subjectivity through speculations on the sentiments and desires awakened in her by what is presumably her first novel. His implicit attitude of condescension toward the female reader, whom he assumes will not understand the text, betrays his fear of what remains hidden from his gaze: ¿Qué querrán decir estos pasajes que no comprende? ¿Qué clase de afecto es aquel que describe el libro y que no es el afecto de la hija hácia el padre ni de la hermana hácia el hermano? ¿Qué lucha de sentimientos es esa que ya la daña ántes de que se entable en su propio corazon? Esto tiene pensativa, preocupada, sériamente cavilosa á nuestra heroína […] Su corazon late de una manera extraña, y algunas veces sonrie con inefable felicidad, y otras veces necesita el desahogo de una lágrima. (Ilustración Artística 1.11 [12 Mar. 1882]: 83) What could be the meaning of these passages that she does not comprehend? What type of affection does the book describe that is not the affection of a daughter for her father, nor that of the sister toward her brother? What struggle with feelings damages her already before it comes into her own heart? This has our heroine pensive, worried, and seriously suspicious … Her heart beats in a strange way and, at times, it smiles with ineffable happiness, at others, it needs the relief of a tear.

Concluding his speculations on the female reader’s subjectivity with the exclamation ‘¡Dichosa novela!’ (cursed novel), he decries fiction’s potential to awaken dangerous desires in the young and impressionable mind: ‘El genio maléfico que se complace en la prematura intranquilidad de las jóvenes, puso aquel funesto libro al alcance de las manos de nuestra hermosa adolescente’ (The evil genie who delights in the premature restlessness of young women put that fatal book within reach of our beautiful adolescent’s hands; Ilustración Artística 1.11 [12 Mar. 1882]: 83). In ‘Una historia de amor’ (‘Love Story,’ fig. 4), a scrutiny of the young female reader, whose facial expression betrays her emotional identification with the novel that she is reading, yields the conclusion that its theme must be erotic desire: ‘No de otra cosa que de una historia de amor puede tratar el libro que con tanto interés lee la joven’ (The book

Fig. 3. ‘La primera novela’ [‘The First Novel’] by J. Raffel Source: Ilustración Artística, Año 1, Núm. 11 (12 marzo 1882): 85. Cualquiera que conciba el efecto que debió causar á los compañeros de Colon el primer aspecto del Nuevo Mundo, ó mejor el que se ponga en el caso del ciego que repentinamente recobra la vista, puede explicarse lo que está pasando en el ánimo de esa niña que abre los ojos por primera vez á la luz del alma; por esa adolescente que en el viaje de la vida explora unos horizontes ignotos, una tierra no soñada, una region de la cual no tenía ni el presentimiento. Y todo, efecto de la lectura de la primera novela. ¿Qué querrán decir estos pasajes que no comprende? ¿Qué clase de afecto es aquel que describe el libro y que no es el afecto de la hija hácia el padre ni de la hermana hácia el hermano? ¿Qué lucha de sentimientos es esa que ya la daña ántes de que se entable en su propio corazon? Esto tiene pensativa, preocupada, sériamente cavilosa á nuestra heroína. Nuevos paisajes aparecen á su mente, pero de tan vaga manera que no acierta á descubrir si en ellos reina la calma ó la borrasca, si en ellos el ambiente vivifica ó asfixia, si en ellos reina la vida ó la muerte. Su corazon late de una manera extraña, y algunas veces sonrie con inefable felicidad, y otras veces necesita el desahogo de una lágrima. Tiene miedo de estar sola, y se sentiría contrariada con la presencia de sus mejores amigas … ¡Dichosa novela! … El genio maléfico que se complace en la prematura intranquilidad de las jóvenes, puso aquel funesto libro al alcance de las manos de nuestra hermosa adolescente. (83) Whoever conceives of the effect that the first appearance of the New World might have caused on Columbus’s companions or, better yet, he who puts himself in the position of the blind man who suddenly recovers his sight, can explain what is happening in the mind of that girl who opens her eyes for the first time to the light of her soul; through that adolescent who in the voyage of life explores unknown horizons, an unimagined land, a region about which she had not even a premonition. And all this is the effect of reading her first novel. What could be the meaning of these passages that she does not comprehend? What type of affection does the book describe that is not the affection of a daughter for her father, nor that of the sister toward her brother? What struggle with feelings damages her before it comes into her own heart? This has our heroine pensive, worried, and seriously suspicious. New landscapes appear in her mind, but in such a vague way that she doesn’t succeed in discovering if, in them, calm weather or a squall reigns, if the air refreshes or asphyxiates, if life or death reigns. Her heart beats in a strange way and, at times, it smiles with ineffable happiness, at others, it needs the relief of a tear. She is afraid of being alone, and she would feel upset at the presence of her best friends … Cursed novel! The evil genie who delights in the premature restlessness of young women put that fatal book within reach of our beautiful adolescent’s hands.

Fig. 4. ‘Una historia de amor’ [‘A Love Story’] by A. Johnson Source: Ilustración Artistica, Año 12, Núm. 606 (7 agosto 1893): 512. No de otra cosa que de una historia de amor puede tratar el libro que con tanto interés lee la joven del notable cuadro de Johnson: véase la atención que presta á la lectura, estúdiese la expresión de su rostro, y tratándose como se trata de una muchacha en la edad de las ilusiones, cuando sus oídos apenas están acostumbrados á esas frases que tan dulcemente suenan en boca del rendido amante y cuando quizás sus labios no han pronunciado todavía una palabra de amorosa correspondencia que el rubor mantiene en el corazón aprisionada, se comprenderá que aquella atención y la expresión aquella sólo pueden obedecer á una causa, á la identificación de su lectora con el asunto del libro leído, y esa identificación en el presente caso y por lo que dejamos dicho únicamente se explica tratándose de la historia de unos amores. (514) The book that the young woman in Johnson’s remarkable picture is reading with so much interest cannot be anything other than a love story: look at the attention that she pays to the reading, study the expression on her face, and since the girl is at an age when she starts to have dreams, when her ears are scarcely accustomed to those phrases that sound so sweetly in the mouth of the surrendered lover and when perhaps her lips have not yet pronounced a word of affectionate correspondence that her shyness keeps imprisoned in her heart, it will be understood that such attention and expression can only arise from one cause, from the reader’s identification with the subject matter of the book being read, and that identification in the present case and by what we have said can only be explained by the fact that it is a love story.

90

Marginal Subjects

that the young woman is reading with so much interest cannot be anything other than a love story; Ilustración Artística 12.606 [7 Aug. 1893]: 514). This commentator, like that of ‘La primera novela,’ engages in speculations about the woman’s subjectivity, to which he does not have direct access. He can only assume that the young reader is reading as a typical woman might do – that is, based on gendered stereotypes of women’s reading – responding to emotional desires through her ‘identificación […] con el asunto del libro leído’ (identification … with the subject matter of the book being read; Ilustración Artística 12.606 [7 Aug. 1893]: 514). Once again, the novel’s effects are deemed to be all the more deleterious because of its capacity to awaken the innocent mind to the uncharted territory of desire. The subjectivity of the female reader, similarly absorbed in her book in ‘El recreo’ (‘Entertainment,’ fig. 5), holds secrets unfathomable to the commentator’s gaze and thus becomes the object of his conjectures: ‘¡Quién sabe si la expresión de contento y la sonrisa que juguetea en su rostro dependen del acto en que el artista la representa ó es efecto de otras causas más recónditas!’ (Who knows if the expression of contentment and the playful smile on her face depend on the act in which the artist represents her or if it is the effect of other more hidden causes! La Ilustración de la Mujer 118). Finally, ‘Lectura alegre’ (‘Happy Reading,’ fig. 6), with the smiling image of one young woman reading while the other leans on her, partaking discernibly in her pleasure, highlights the sense of bonding and intimacy between the two women. One might even sense a hint of homoeroticism in this bonding, or at least a sense of female solidarity and self-sufficiency that diminishes their accessibility to the male gaze. The commentator for this image, interestingly, makes no attempt to guide the spectator in his or her interpretation of the artwork, limiting himself to celebrating the artist’s techniques. Literary Representations of the Female Reader These images form part of a wide array of representations (visual and linguistic, literary and scientific) of the late nineteenth century that portray the dangers of uncontrolled reading by women. One need only think of Galdós’s Isidora Rufete, the subject of chapter 1, and Clarín’s Ana Ozores to find literary equivalents of these visual renderings of the female reader, whose potentially disruptive desires, awakened by her readings, threaten the patriarchal social order.9 In these works, women readers, such as Isidora and Ana, who elude the controlling masculine

Female Reading and Deviant Sexuality

91

gaze, end up by embracing a life of deviance, quite typically as adulteresses, prostitutes, or unwed mothers. It is revealing that the prototype of the female reader turned sexual deviant also abounds in many popular novels of the period, particularly those of the ‘radical naturalists’ writing in the 1880s. One such example of the link between female reading and sexual deviance can be found in the La Pálida (1884), the second novel of the La Prostituta tetralogy by the ‘radical naturalist’ Eduardo López Bago. A work written to denounce legalized prostitution, La Pálida recounts the lives of two women, Estrella and Rosita, who, in addition to prostituting themselves, engage in other forms of sexual deviance. At one point in the novel, the economically destitute Rosita, seduced by Estrella’s luxurious lifestyle, prostitutes herself with the latter, in exchange for money. For the narrator, Rosita’s literary education, which she received ‘devorando los folletines de La Correspondencia de España’ (devouring the serial novels of the Correspondence of Spain; La Pálida 95), is to blame for her sexual perversion.10 The narrator’s pathologization of Rosita as a nymphomaniac, stricken by symptoms of hysteria, echoes the writings of contemporary physicians, such as Pulido Fernández, who attributed women’s mental perturbations, particularly those leading to sexual deviance, to their reading the wrong kind of literature in the wrong way. Likewise, in La Venus granadina (Venus of Granada, 1888), by Remigio Vega Armentero, yet another popular writer whose works shared López Bago’s ‘radical naturalist’ tendencies, the female protagonist suffers from ‘una excitación nerviosa terrible’ (a terrible nervous excitement) after becoming addicted to ‘la lectura de libros que podían hablarla á sus emociones’ (the reading of books that could speak to her emotions; 34).11 Predictably, such readings lead the protagonist to deviant sexuality – fornication, lesbianism, and prostitution – and her pathologization by the medical authorities as ‘una histérica incorregible’ (incorrigible hysteric; Vega Armentero 239). Representations of the female reader follow a similar pattern in the works of nineteenth-century male writers across a wide spectrum of aesthetic and ideological tendencies. Such is the case even in the works of the more conservative authors, such as Armando Palacio Valdés, who, unlike the ‘radical naturalists,’ has been considered generally to be a supporter of bourgeois values and Catholic morality.12 In his Marta y María (1883), female desire is channelled ultimately into socially acceptable form, since the co-protagonist María ends up in a convent; nevertheless, her reading is presented as an activity that has the

Fig. 5. ‘El recreo’ [‘Entertainment’] by Jass Source: La Ilustración de la Mujer, Año 2, Núm. 15 (1º enero 1884): n/p. Después […] se pasa su media hora con sus favoritos de la inteligencia. No en balde están marcados en su rostro los signos de actividad, penetración y viveza de inteligencia. ¡Quién sabe si la expresión de contento y la sonrisa que juguetea en su rostro dependen del acto en que el artista la representa ó es efecto de otras causas más recónditas! (118) Afterwards, she spends half an hour with the favourites of her intelligence. Not in vain are the signs of activity, penetration, and liveliness of mind marked on her face. Who knows if the expression of contentment and the playful smile on her face depend on the act in which the artist represents her or if it is the effect of other more hidden causes!

94

Marginal Subjects

Fig. 6. ‘Lectura alegre’ [‘Happy Reading’] by F. Andreotti. Source: Ilustración Artística, Año 13, Núm. 636 (5 marzo 1894): 152.

Female Reading and Deviant Sexuality

95

potential to disrupt the social order by inciting an excess of sexuality. María abandons herself to reading mostly romantic, as well as mystic, novels in the family library in the proverbial Gothic tower, to which she escapes to engage in her favourite pastime. Already prone to nervous excitement and ‘profunda melancolía’ (profound melancholy; 42), she seeks in these novels ‘pasiones irresistibles y lacrimosas’ (irresistible and tearful passions) that leave a profound impression on her ‘juvenil espíritu’ (youthful spirit; 45). Later in the novel, her devotional readings lead her exalted imagination to imitate the life of Santa Isabel through acts of (self-)flagellation, recalling a similar episode involving Ana Ozores in Clarín’s La Regenta. As Cristina Patiño-Eirín notes (194– 5), María derives obvious erotic pleasure from this act of masochism, begging her maid Genoveva to participate in the act of mortifying her naked flesh:13 Tenía pintado en el rostro el goce irritado y ansioso del capricho que va a ser satisfecho. Sus pupilas brillaban con luz inusitada, dejando adivinar vivos y misteriosos placeres […] Respiraba agitadamente por las narices, más abiertas que de ordinario. Sus manos pálidas y aristocráticas […] soltaban con extraña velocidad los botones de la bata. Con rápido movimiento despojóse de ella […] Detúvose un instante, echó una mirada al instrumento que Genoveva tenía en la mano y corrió por el cuerpo un estremecimiento de frío, de placer. (91–2) Painted on her face was a nervous and anxious pleasure of a caprice about to be satisfied. Her pupils shone with a rare light, predicting live and mysterious pleasures … She breathed agitatedly through her nostrils, which were more widely open than usual. Her pale and aristocratic hands … undid the buttons of her robe with unusual speed. With quick movement she threw it off … She stopped an instant, glanced at the instrument that Genoveva held in her hands, and a shiver of cold pleasure ran through her body.

The connection between female reading and perverse sexuality cannot be more clear. In her study of La Regenta, Catherine Jaffe has shown that cultural anxieties about women’s reading were reflected in the gendering of reading practices; that is, a reading that responded to emotional desires as opposed to intellectual reason was considered to be ‘feminine’ (9). What becomes evident on perusing nineteenth-century commentaries

96

Marginal Subjects

on women’s reading is the importance given not only to what the woman reads, but to how she reads these texts. For literature professor Francisco de Paula Canalejas, who participated in the Sunday lecture series at the University of Madrid on women’s education, a tendency toward imaginative exaltation, ‘un contínuo sentir y un fantasear constante’ (a constant feeling and fantasizing; 7), characterized women’s reading. In his Tercera conferencia sobre la educación literaria de la mujer (Third Lecture on Women’s Literary Education, 1869), he stressed the need to educate women to read in a way that would allow them to channel ‘la sensibilidad y la fantasía’ (feelings and fantasy; 12) in socially useful ways, so as to prevent them from deviating from their family obligations. That is, the danger lay in a purely emotional reading, perceived to be lacking in intellectual discipline and serving only to unleash nervous excitement and subjective desires (Canalejas 23). Female readers, such as Ana Ozores and Isidora Rufete, in spite of differences in their social positions, exemplify women whose uncontrolled (both in quantity and in the type of literature read) reading result in their moral and social downfall. As Jaffe has suggested, in Ana Ozores’s case it is not so much the reading of the ‘wrong’ type of literature that is seen to lead to Ana’s downfall – after all, she reads mostly devotional texts, as women were expected to do – but rather, the uncontrolled and undisciplined nature of her reading (16–17). In essence, Clarín’s protagonist represents the prototype of the female reader for whom reading is no more than an act of narcissistic consumption ‘to stimulate sentimental and erotic fantasies’ (Felski 83). Significantly, Felski characterizes precisely in this way the readings of Emma Bovary, on whom some have considered Clarín’s protagonist to be modelled. Such a view of women’s reading in Clarín’s work translates into a commentary on women’s writing as well, as Clarín’s famous attack on ‘las literatas’ (‘Women of Letters,’ 1879) demonstrates: La mujer, que es el sentimiento, cuando se empeña en cultivar las letras, si aspira a la originalidad, a ser espontánea, a tener un fondo propio, recurre, sin vacilar, al tesoro de sus propios sentimientos; alimenta, como el ave de la fábula a sus hijos, sus obras, desgarrándose el pecho, dejando en ellas la propia sustancia, el misterio de sus amores, la (sic) santas vaguedades de sus deseos y de sus visiones […] y allí empiezan el amaneramiento, la abstracción, las exageraciones. (233) Woman, who is feeling, when she insists on cultivating letters, if she as-

Female Reading and Deviant Sexuality

97

pires to originality, to being spontaneous, to having her own depth, without hesitating, falls back on the treasure of her own feelings; she feeds, like the bird in the fable does its offspring, her works, ripping out her own bosom, leaving in them her own substance, the mystery of her loves, the sacrosanct vagueness of her desire and her visions … and, from there, affectation, abstractions and exaggerations result.

The misogynist author goes on to add that women, as ‘autores de segundo orden […] no aciertan a dar a sus propios sentimientos ese sello de universalidad que adquieren, haciéndose inmortales, los de Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, etc.’ (second-class authors … do not manage to give their own feelings the stamp of universality that those of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, etc. acquire, gaining immortality; ‘Las literatas’ 234).14 The protagonist of La Regenta conforms precisely to such paradigms of female reading and writing. Ana loses distance from the text that she is reading, leading to her complete and total identification with St Theresa’s mystical experience (which, as in the case of María in Palacio Valdés’s novel, is clearly charged with eroticism); as a consequence, she is unable to ‘read’ her seducer’s intentions correctly. As we have already seen, Isidora Rufete, for her part, has been identified with mass culture, and with the naive and uncritical consumption such genres are deemed to promote, especially in women (Jagoe, ‘Disinheriting’); in her case, her uncritical over-identification with the ‘wrong’ type of literature presumably leads to her depraved lifestyle. The fates of both characters exemplify Jacqueline Pearson’s observation that, when it came to perceptions of women’s reading, there was a constant elision of sexuality and textuality and that ‘bad reading is metaphorically “seducing” and can lead to actual seduction’ (87).15 In both novels, what the female protagonist reads, as well as how she reads it, are crucial to the construction of her subjectivity. Desire and Deviance in the New Consumer Society: Pardo Bazán and the Female Reader Given Emilia Pardo Bazán’s life-long crusade on behalf of women’s right to an education, it is not surprising to see women’s reading as a central problem in her early naturalist novel, La Tribuna (1883). In fact, Cristina Patiño-Eirín shows how Pardo Bazán concerns herself with the problem of female reading, beginning with her earliest known work,

98

Marginal Subjects

Aficiones peligrosas (Dangerous Pastimes), published as a novela de folletín in 1866.16 Juan Paredes Núñez, for his part, characterizes Aficiones as ‘a thesis novel about the significance of the novel and the role it plays in education and reading’ (26), identifying the novel’s female protagonist, to a certain extent, with Pardo Bazán herself, based on the latter’s ‘Apuntes autobiográficos’ (‘Autobiographical Sketches’). While to interpret any character’s words as a direct transcription of the author’s own ideas might be problematic, the parallels between the author’s selfcharacterization in her memoirs as a young and voracious reader, and a similar description of the female protagonist Armanda in Aficiones (Paredes Núnez 26–7), can shed some light on the evolution of Pardo Bazán’s thoughts on the female reader, a recurrent figure in her works. Pardo Bazán begins the first chapter of the folletín by addressing her readers with the following words: ‘Estas van dirigidas principalmente á la juventud que toma entre sus manos las novelas con ese afan, ese entusiasmo que constituye uno de sus mas encantadores defectos’ (These [words] are directed mainly to the youth who takes a novel into their hands with an eagerness, an enthusiasm, that constitutes one of their most enchanting defects; 41), suggesting, in the lines that follow, that her novel contains a moral lesson about the potential dangers of reading, particularly for women. The first reference to reading is made in a dialogue between the female protagonist’s father (Antonio) and his friend, in which the latter expresses his preoccupation over his son’s love for reading. When Don Antonio reassures him that ‘las novelas […] distraen mucho y hacen pasar un rato agradable’ (novels … distract and make you have a good time), his friend agrees that ‘una afición á la lectura’ (a love of reading) is unlikely to be detrimental to ‘las cabezas desarrolladas ya’ (minds that are already developed; 45). In contrast, to the ‘débil cabeza’ (weak mind) of Don Antonio’s own daughter, who has ‘una imaginacion exaltada’ (an exalted imagination; 51), reading poses a grave danger. In the second chapter, Antonio’s wife implores him, from her deathbed, to protect their daughter from ‘ese veneno disfrazado que se llama la lectura’ (that disguised poison called reading; 51). The third chapter finds Armanda with her nose buried in the books of her father’s library, devouring ‘con fiebre todas aquellas obras de la literatura moderna’ (feverishly all those works of modern literature), including works such as ‘Monte-Cristo y la Dama de las Camelias,’ which have ‘todo lo que seduce mas al corazon y al espirítu, y por consiguiente, lo que con mas facilidad puede estraviarlos [sic]’ (all that seduces the heart and the

Female Reading and Deviant Sexuality

99

spirit, and therefore, can lead them astray; 63). What the narrator most emphasizes, throughout the work, are the dangers of reading, especially of romantic novels, for ‘una persona de poca instruccion’ (a poorly educated person; 63). It is, of course, no mere coincidence that such a reader in Aficiones happens to be an adolescent girl, in whom ‘la lectura de aquellas obras causó […] el efecto de uno de esos narcóticos que antes de adormecer producen vértigo, y su alma juvenil, impregnándose de todas aquellas arrebatadoras teorías como de un perfume embriagador, las guardaba en su memoria como un gérmen de destruccion’ (the reading of those works caused … the effect of one of those narcotics that produce vertigo before drowsiness, and her youthful soul, impregnating itself with all those captivating ideas as with an intoxicating perfume, kept them in her memory like the seed of destruction; 64). The truncated ending of the novel prevents us from learning about Armanda’s fate; however, the concluding dialogue suggests that she will defy her father’s wishes for her marriage to a man chosen by him, deceiving this man with another. While its plot remains undeveloped and inconclusive, Aficiones, like many other literary and non-literary works of the same period preoccupied with women’s reading and intellectual activity in general, presents a disquisition on the pernicious effects of novel reading on the impressionable mind of the adolescent woman, and on its potential to lead her down the path of deviance. In tracing the evolution of Pardo Bazán’s ideas on the female reader, Cristina Patiño-Eirín’s argues that the author ‘sets herself up as a champion of a new way of reading,’ particularly as she moves toward the end of her literary trajectory (304). According to this critic, Pardo Bazán’s earlier novels often present the figure of the naive, Bovaryistic female reader whose sentiments, rather than intellect, govern her reading, while the later works tend to present images of ‘a precocious and curious reader’ who seeks edification and ‘meaning’ through reading (303). In this context Patiño-Eirín suggests that the female protagonist of La Tribuna, one of Pardo Bazán’s first works of critical significance, ‘fails in her sentimental and political idealism because she reads badly’ (299). However, as the ensuing analysis demonstrates, the representation of the female reader in this novel is far more complex, if we consider the literary strategies through which the author, via her narrator, manoeuvres her position in relation to her female protagonist. In La Tribuna Pardo Bazán explores, through the figure of her working-class protagonist, Amparo, the problem of reading and consumption as they relate to gender and class. As Rita Felski has suggested,

100

Marginal Subjects

within the context of an emergent consumer society, women’s reading – or, more precisely, a reading practice gendered as feminine – represents a form of consumption that has the potential to undermine masculine cultural authority (79–87). It is, therefore, natural that in Spain of the 1880s masculine anxieties about women’s role in the new consumer society find expression in the linkage between sexual deviance and female reading, or consumption in general. The fact that the reader figure in La Tribuna is a working-class woman, rather than the typical bourgeois, complicates this equation further, particularly given that Amparo’s subjectivity is focalized through the perspective of a narrator whose ideological position seems to reflect the classist attitudes of the biographical author. As Susan McKenna has shown, the ‘democratization of print culture’ (although one must exercise caution not to exaggerate the access of the ‘popular’ classes to print culture, particularly in nineteenth-century Spain) added to the anxieties of a very insecure and class-conscious bourgeoisie (559) – anxieties that undoubtedly found expression in the stance of the bourgeoisidentified narrator of the novel. Notwithstanding the problematic position – that is, from a class standpoint – of the author of La Tribuna, her use of the female protagonist to represent both a consumer figure and the object of consumption leads to interesting tensions in Pardo Bazán’s representation of the working-class woman. For the latter, reading is central to her revolutionary activity, in particular, and her deviation from the social status quo, in general. In fact, Amparo’s subjectivity, in all its contradictions, becomes a productive site for the exploration of the cultural anxieties surrounding the place of women’s reading, and particularly that of working-class women, in this new consumer society. In Pardo Bazán’s novel, the place of the consuming woman, as reflected in the figure of Amparo, is both ambiguous and contradictory. On the one hand, Amparo, like Galdós’s Isidora Rufete, might be seen as a product of the ideology of consumerism of a capitalist society that seeks to regulate women’s desires and comportment. On the other, Amparo attains a certain degree of agency as a consuming subject capable of engendering revolution through her act of reading/consumption. As Rita Felski has suggested, any simple dichotomy between subject and object, production and consumption, which devalues the activity of the consuming woman needs to be questioned, since the female subject can potentially engage in an active negotiation of meaning in the process of consumption (63). In La Tribuna, as in La desheredada, the female protagonist constructs a discourse of desire through the act

Female Reading and Deviant Sexuality

101

of reading/consumption, thus exercising a certain degree of agency in defining her own subjectivity. From the beginning of the novel, the narrator calls attention to the rudimentary nature of the protagonist’s education, noting that she attended school only in her early years, remaining, since that time, ‘sin más aprendizaje que la lectura […] y unos rudimentos de escritura’ (with little more learning than the ability to read … and the rudiments of writing; 69–70).17 In addition, she refuses to be domesticated (‘no había quien la sujetase a coser ni a otro género de tareas’ [nobody could make her do any sewing or other kinds of household chores; 68]), choosing, instead, to wander freely, and without aim, through the city streets, which, for her, come to represent the space of female desire.18 As the narrator observes: ‘Para Amparo la calle era la patria’ (For Amparo the street was her homeland; 93). Elizabeth Wilson has noted that, if in the discourses of the period, bourgeois women who ventured outside of the private sphere were considered to be a problem, the working-class woman, who had ‘no “private sphere” to be confined to’ and thus thronged the streets, represented a major threat to bourgeois order (‘The Invisible’ 104). As in the cases of Isidora and Mauricia la Dura, Amparo’s constant nomadism, her refusal to be fixed in place, to ‘quedarse metida entre cuatro paredes’ (be enclosed within those four walls; 69), anticipates her eventual act of sexual deviance. As a deviant working-class woman in the eyes of the bourgeois establishment, she, like the prostitute, comes to stand as a metaphor for the new urban regime based on ‘commodification, mass production and the rise of the masses’ (Wilson, ‘The Invisible’ 105). Like Isidora Rufete, who ‘takes possession of Madrid’ while windowshopping in the commercial centre of the city, Amparo embraces the life of the flâneur, allowing herself to get carried away by the seductive allure of consumerism while strolling through the streets of Marineda. As she passes by the display windows, she imagines possessing luxury items that are beyond her reach: ‘Nadie le impedía creer que eran suyos los lujosos escaparates de las tiendas, los tentadores de las confiterías, las redomas de color de las boticas’ (Nobody could prevent her from believing that the lavishly arranged display windows of the stores were all hers, as well as the temptations of the confectioneries, the colored flasks of the pharmacies; 93). For social commentators of the period, luxury emblematized the dangers of the new marketplace, which made it difficult to control an individual’s spending so that it was commensurate with his or her social standing (Aldaraca, El ángel

102

Marginal Subjects

92). Of course, this danger was much greater in the case of women, for whom luxury was considered to be her ‘tentacion mayor’ (greatest temptation; Sereñana y Partagás 137). To paraphrase Dr Sereñana y Partagás, luxury could potentially lead to the confusion of social classes by eliminating the distinction between productive and unproductive consumption, the latter being defined by Antonio María Segovia as ‘sostenido por mera ostentacion, ó desproporcionado á los recursos de quien le costea’ (sustained by mere ostentation, or disproportionate to the economic means of the one who pays for it; 7).19 As Sereñana y Partagás suggests, the addiction to luxury items, particularly to clothing and other objects of self-adornment, will inevitably lead women to pawn their honour, to prostitute themselves; the public woman, in fact, ‘vive por el lujo y para el lujo’ (lives through and for luxury; 139). If late nineteenth-century social commentators feared the democratization of the culture of consumption, its spread from the aristocracy to the lower classes, the female protagonist of La Tribuna exemplifies just such a fear. Amparo is among those who ‘sin haber nacido entre sábanas y holandas, presume y adivina las comodidades y deleites que jamás gozó’ (without being born amidst silk sheets and fine chambray, instinctively infer all those comforts and delights they never enjoyed; 69), and aspires to rub elbows with ‘la buena sociedad marinedina’ (the high society of Marineda; 73), whose elegant dress she admires, or with the ‘personaje[s] ilustre[s]’ (illustrious personages; 93) who occasionally make a stop in Marineda. Her desire for a better life intensifies upon Amparo’s first direct contact with the bourgeoisie, which occurs when she sets foot in the home of the Sobrado family as a member of the street chorus. ‘Sentíase como en su elemento’ (She felt she was in her own element; 87) is how the narrator describes her reaction, as she finds herself surrounded by lavish furnishings and luxury items for the first time in her life. Her fantasies, as in the case of Isidora, become a way for her to affirm her desires in the face of material circumstances that appear to be working against her. Her aspiration to luxury, like Isidora’s, reflects her desire to transcend not only the barriers of gender but also those of social class. The female subject’s struggle to transgress the limits of her social identity through the act of consumption is the driving force of both novels. Pardo Bazán’s novel establishes, from the very beginning, a close connection between Amparo’s reading and her desire as a consuming subject. Before she begins work in the factory, she holds a job reading progressive newspapers to the town barber, and as payment for

Female Reading and Deviant Sexuality

103

her work she asks him for ‘objetos de tocador’ (vanity items; 102) with which to adorn her body. Thus, the novel, from the first, links reading and consumption with desire and the potential agency of the female body. Moreover, from the moment in which she enters the tobacco factory, her reading becomes identified directly with social revolution. In a chapter entitled ‘La gloriosa,’ Amparo assumes the role of the factory leader who awakens revolutionary fervour in her fellow workers – sympathizers of the Federalist cause – by reading aloud to them newspaper articles in favour of the Republic. Public reading thus becomes a form of political mobilization and resistance. However, the way in which the narrator describes Amparo’s reading reflects the dominant culture’s view of women’s reading in the nineteenth century: Su alma impresionable, combustible, móvil y superficial, se teñía fácilmente del color del periódico que andaba en sus manos, y lo reflejaba con viveza y fidelidad extraordinarias […] La fe virgen con que creía en la Prensa era inquebrantable […] ¡La lectora, que entendía cómo sonaba aquello de ‘Tomamos la pluma trémulos de indignación,’ y lo otro de ‘La emoción ahoga nuestra voz, la vergüenza enrojece nuestra faz,’ y hasta lo de ‘Y si no bastan las palabras, corramos a las armas y derramemos la última gota de nuestra sangre!’ (105–6) Her impressionable, combustible, changeable and superficial spirit easily adapted itself to the tone of the newspaper she happened to be holding in her hands, and she reflected it with extraordinary vividness and fidelity … The virgin faith with which she believed in the Press was unfaltering … The reader took only too literally such high-sounding words as ‘We take up the pen as we tremble with indignation,’ and other words like ‘Emotion stifles our voice and shame makes our face blush,’ and even ‘If our words do not suffice, let us resort to arms and let us spill the last drop of our blood!’

That is, she reads without judgment and is susceptible to taking literally words that appear on the page; her emotional identification with her reading is absolute and complete. The narrator, furthermore, describes the periodical press consumed by Amparo as ‘antiliteraria’ (antiliterary; 106), suggesting a comparison with serial fiction targeted to a stereotypically naive female reader who devours literature uncritically. In this context, it is interesting that the course of Amparo’s own sen-

104

Marginal Subjects

timental life parodies self-consciously the folletín-like tale in which an upper-class man seduces and betrays a young woman of humble origins (Scanlon 137), showing, once again, that a female reader who is susceptible to textual seduction easily becomes a victim of sexual seduction. Throughout the novel, the narrator attributes Amparo’s patriotic fervour to her feminine sensibility, easily overexcited by her melodramatic readings: Sentíase sobreexcitada, febril […] Por todas partes fingía su calenturienta imaginación peligros, luchas, negras tramas urdidas para ahogar la libertad […] En medio de la vulgaridad e insulsez de su vida diaria y de la monotonía del trabajo siempre idéntico a sí mismo, tales azares revolucionarios eran poesía, novela, aventura, espacio azul por donde volar con alas de oro. Su fantasía inculta y briosa se apacentaba en ellos. (147) She felt overexcited and feverish … On every side, her wild imagination conceived dangers, struggles, and dark plots conspired to stifle freedom … Amidst the vulgarity and banality of her everyday life and the monotony of her work, always so repetitious, such revolutionary vicissitudes were poetry, fiction, and adventure to her, a blue space through which to fly on golden wings. Her uncultivated, spirited fantasy thrived on them.

Once again, gender and class become conflated in the narrator’s description of Amparo’s reading practice as reflecting her naive and uncultivated mind. Moreover, the narrator shows such a reading practice as spilling over into her female protagonist’s role as spectator of a theatrical representation. Toward the end of the novel, when she goes to the theatre after being abandoned by Baltasar, Amparo identifies completely with the sentimental plot of a revolutionary drama: ‘Era aquel drama el mismo que ella había soñado en otro tiempo […] de cuyos riesgos y aventuras tanto deseó ser partícipe’ (That drama was the same one she had dreamed of at another time … when she had so desired to participate in their risks and adventures; 254). The bourgeois Josefina García, in contrast, calls this play ‘un dramón muy populachero y muy cursi’ (a melodrama, very low-class and in very bad taste; 257). In the narrator’s view, Amparo confuses political action with her fantasy due to her incapacity to distance herself critically from her reading. Her revolutionary activity is, therefore, seen as a product of her uncultured mind, incapable of taming her imagination and sensibility.

Female Reading and Deviant Sexuality

105

Amparo’s revolution in the public (political) realm also finds reflection in her private life.20 As a consumer, not only of texts but also of luxury items, she desires to eliminate both social and aesthetic distinctions. After she enters into a relationship with Baltasar, Amparo, like Galdós’s Rosalía de Bringas, must live on credit to sustain her lavish spending on articles of clothing and jewellery with which to adorn herself. Like Rosalía and the many other cursi women who inhabit Galdós’s universe, Amparo is obsessed with the cult of appearances: ‘Superficial y vehemente, gustaba de apariencias y exterioridades; le lisonjeaba andar en lenguas y ser envidiada’ (Superficial and vehement, she enjoyed outward appearances; she was flattered to be the talk of the town and to be envied; 227). In her fantasy, to purchase these luxury items for herself with the hope that Baltasar will perceive her as his equal and to take her as his wife is inseparable from her political struggle, as the Tribune of the People, to eliminate class distinctions. Furthermore, her desire to confuse and collapse class distinctions is related to her inability to distinguish life from the literature she reads. Her sexual transgression, to a great extent, is a consequence of her modelling her life on the popular novels in which the problem of social difference is resolved happily at the end. In fact, Amparo’s emotional identification with her literary object of consumption is such that even Baltasar, who brings her novels to read out loud to her, ends up by censoring her readings: ‘Baltasar trajo a Amparo alguna novela para que se la leyese en voz alta; pero era tan fácil en llorar la pitillera así que los héroes se morían de amor o de otra enfermedad por el estilo, que, convencido el oficial de que se ponía tonta, suprimió los libros’ (Baltasar brought Amparo a novel so that he could read it aloud to her; but the cigarette maker burst into tears so easily as soon as the heroes died of love or some other malady of that sort, that the officer, convinced that she was becoming stupid, put an end to these books; 226). Amparo’s reading thus illustrates Rita Felski’s observation that a ‘feminized aesthetics of consumption’ based on female desire poses a threat to social and moral norms in that such a reading ‘collapses existing forms of cultural distinction and differentiation and hence negates the specificity and value of the aesthetic’ (86).21 It is no wonder, then, that a bourgeois male figure places an interdiction on woman’s use of literature as ‘a means to narcissistic gratification and loss of self’ (Felski 86). We can, therefore, see that reading, though an essentially private activity, has social and cultural implications with respect to the place of

106

Marginal Subjects

the female desiring subject in a new consumer society. But, we may ask, why this obsession with the female reader and, in this case, with the female, working-class reader? To answer this question, we need to consider the historical context of the novel, especially given the claims to its testimonial dimension. By her own account, Pardo Bazán visited the tobacco factory in La Coruña to be able to document her novel accurately in the naturalist style (‘Apuntes’ 725–6). The chronology of the novel coincides with the period in which the Federalist movements were brewing following the 1868 Revolution; moreover, in the specific context of La Coruña this was a key moment in the development of the tobacco industry, which was the first and only industry in nineteenthcentury Spain to have a labour force consisting exclusively of women (Capel Martínez 132). According to historian Rosa María Capel Martínez, the incorporation of working-class women into the labour force facilitated their economic autonomy, as well as giving rise to a collective consciousness that created conditions favourable to political militancy (132–3). Capel Martínez also indicates that one of the requirements for working in the tobacco factory was to be able to read and write; and in a nation where more than half of the female population was illiterate, women who were able to meet this requirement already occupied a distinctive status among those working in industry. Thus, in contrast to other professions open to women at the time, the tobacco industry offered motivated women workers the possibility of career development and advancement (Capel Martínez 136–7).22 Amparo in Pardo Bazán’s novel exemplifies such a figure, who achieves distinction through both her own work (she is quickly promoted from her position in the cigar factory to the more desirable taller de cigarrillos [cigarette workshop]) and her union activity. As her nickname suggests, she transcends her condition as an individual to become a symbol of the revolution.23 Historian Sarah White has shown how citizens traditionally excluded from the public sphere – women, in particular – served an allegorical function in discourses on the nation; in writings of democrats, the idea of political liberty, embodied in the Republic, was represented as a woman (244). The narrator of Pardo Bazán’s novel converts Amparo into the symbol of the Republic (‘parecíase a la república misma, la bella república de las grandes láminas cromolitográficas’ [she looked like the Republic herself, the beautiful republic in the large chromolithographic engravings; 125]), as does the patriarch of the Círculo Rojo, who notes on first setting eyes on la Tribuna: ‘“Esta chica parece la

Female Reading and Deviant Sexuality

107

Libertad”’ (‘This girl looks like Liberty’; 152). Furthermore, Amparo’s revolutionary image is inseparable from her public role as reader. In fact, at one point, the factory management punishes her political militancy through a general prohibition on ‘la lectura de diarios, manifiestos, proclamas y hojas sueltas’ (the reading of newspapers, manifestos, proclamations and handbills; 148), and her dismissal from her position. Women’s reading is perceived once again as a deviant act, insofar as it poses a threat to the social status quo – whether on the basis of gender or class. We have seen, both in literature and in the social commentaries of the period, that bourgeois women who engaged in uncontrolled consumption, either in the form of luxury goods or reading, were regarded as a danger to the health of the nation, as such activities could lead to sexual profligacy and even prostitution, capable of infecting the entire social body. For her part, the working-class woman, who personified the ‘uncontrollable body’ of the masses, was considered to be promiscuous by nature; political discourses of the revolutionary period cast the ‘masses’ as ‘ruled by physical passions,’ devouring the nation rather than giving life to it (White 247). Thus, in spite of the fact that the working-class woman was unable to consume in the same way as the bourgeois woman due to the lack of economic resources and, many times, literacy, the former always represented, in the cultural imaginary, the threat of the devouring masses, which had the potential to erase social distinctions. As such, the female protagonist of La Tribuna embodies the fear of the potential agency of a female consumer who, under the influence of her ‘bad’ reading, aspires to transcend her social position. (By ‘bad’ reading, I refer both to what and how she reads, based on bourgeois masculine criteria of the period.) It is fitting, then, that Baltasar seduces Amparo by deceiving her with the typical cliché of the popular novel that ‘para él no había categorías, distinciones ni vallas sociales, encontrándose el amor de por medio; que Amparo valía tanto como la más encopetada señorita’ (for him there were neither categories, nor distinctions, nor social barriers, which might serve as an obstacle to love; Amparo was worth as much as any distinguished and elegant young lady; 201). The identification between mass culture and the feminine, to which both Huyssen and Felski have signalled (Felski 79–90), becomes ever more clear, as the working-class protagonist seeks to erase the class difference that divides her and her bourgeois lover by appealing precisely to the discourse of popular literature. The connection between reading and the perception of ‘the cultural anarchy of mass society’ that Ann-Louise

108

Marginal Subjects

Shapiro has observed in the cultural imaginary of late nineteenthcentury France transcends this one national context: Spanish literary and cultural discourses of the same period suggest that reading presented the greatest danger for ‘the most impressionable segments of the population,’ a group that included not only women, but also the masses in general (26, 29). Novels such as La Tribuna and La desheredada show that the potential contagion of this vulnerable population by such ‘dangerous’ readings fuelled anxieties and became a cause of social concern. Some critics have considered Pardo Bazán’s protagonist to be a victim of such literary contagion, thus leading to her moral lapse and her politically subversive activity. Taking a position similar to that of PatiñoEirín we have seen earlier (299), Susan McKenna characterizes Amparo as a ‘failed reader’ who ‘is deceived by, or misinterprets the words of, both the republican press and a philandering lover’ (562). While it is true that Pardo Bazán’s protagonist is unable to read ‘correctly’ on both counts, to take the negative characterization of Amparo’s reading practices at face value would be to ignore the active role that the protagonist plays in negotiating her place in society through the act of reading. In the end, readers of Pardo Bazán’s novel are left with the question of whether, or to what extent, Amparo is granted agency as a desiring subject through her role as reader and consumer. The narrator presents the protagonist not only as a consumer, but also as an object of consumption, comparing her repeatedly to a cigar to be devoured and discarded. Within the economy of bourgeois transaction, Amparo is a poor investment for Baltasar, which is why he abandons her to seek a match with the bourgeois Josefina, who, with her family’s capital, will undoubtedly facilitate his social and economic advancement. Significantly, he justifies his actions to Amparo by using an explicitly commercial metaphor: ‘Las circunstancias le obligan a uno a mil transacciones’ (Circumstances oblige one to thousands of negotiations; 234). Critics have commented on the problematic nature of the ending of the novel, particularly from a class standpoint: that is, Amparo’s final ‘punishment’ for her sexual and political transgression.24 She fails not only to escape her social position in the end, but also to benefit economically, unlike Isidora Rufete, when she becomes an object of consumption. Rather than gaining agency over her body and her fate, she is deceived by a man of a social class to which she can no longer aspire. It is not surprising, then, that the birth of Amparo’s illegitimate son precisely on the day of the proclamation of the Republic might be interpreted as making a mockery of the revolutionary project, seen as

Female Reading and Deviant Sexuality

109

no more than a passing fantasy kindled by a working-class woman’s sentimental readings. Yet even the most virulent critics of Pardo Bazán’s class ideology have observed the contradictions and ambiguities in the text, especially when considering its full context (V. Fuentes 93–4; McKenna 562; Sánchez Reboredo 577). Whatever the author’s class ideology may be, what is more interesting are the contradictions she must negotiate through the representation of a reader figure who consciously carries the mark of her gender and class. The figure of Amparo, as reader, reflects the tensions within the authorial subject who seeks to position herself as a woman writing within/to a literary culture dominated by men.25 If we examine the rhetorical strategies employed by the author in her prologue to the first edition of the novel, we can see that she takes a defensive stance in a conscious attempt to address a reading public hostilely predisposed toward her naturalist project, given her female gender. We must remember that naturalism itself was gendered as a masculine genre (Scanlon 144).26 It is, therefore, understandable that Pardo Bazán adopts a rhetoric of apology in her prologue to the first edition of the novel by addressing herself to a ‘lector indulgente’ (indulgent reader; 57) – gendered masculine – excusing herself for stepping into the masculine literary terrain by writing in a naturalist style. Furthermore, as a defence for her literary transgression, she claims that ‘un propósito […] docente’ (instructive purpose) crept into the novel ‘casi a pesar mío’ (almost in spite of myself; 58) – that is, to expose the absurdity of a revolutionary project engendered by female desire. As we have seen, Amparo’s revolutionary ideals and her sentimental desire – both of which have everything to do with what and how she reads – are intimately intertwined. Thus, notwithstanding Pardo Bazán’s ostensibly reactionary stance in the prologue, which frames our reading of the novel, if we interpret the frame itself as a gendered response to the masculine anxieties about women’s reading and consumption, the message of the work is anything but unequivocal. Contemporary critics responded to Pardo Bazán’s novel by praising her ‘manly’ thinking and style. Clarín, in his review of La Tribuna, praises her writing with the following words: ‘Hay allí observaciones, pensamientos, rasgos, que sólo puede producir una mujer que por milagro de naturaleza, sin dejar de ser mujer, ni en un ápice, sea tan hombre como Emilia Pardo. Pocas escritoras hay que no sean ó afeminadas (como es natural) ó algo hombrunas. Emilia Pardo piensa como hombre

110

Marginal Subjects

y siente como mujer’ (There are observations, thoughts, and characteristics that a woman who is as much a man as Emilia Pardo can produce only through a miracle of nature, without ceasing to be a woman, even a bit. There are very few women writers who aren’t either effeminate [as is natural] or mannish. Emilia Pardo thinks like a man and feels like a woman; 118). In other words, to praise Pardo Bazán’s work, Clarín masculinizes her writing; at the same time, it is implied that she – as a woman writer – can never escape the mark of gender altogether.27 It is, therefore, crucial, when reading the prologue to La Tribuna, to consider the problematic positioning of Pardo Bazán’s rhetorical defence, which is inflected not only by gender but also by class. Beyond her efforts to assert her authority as a practitioner of the new and controversial aesthetic of naturalism, she seeks to establish a distinction between, on the one hand, an enlightened bourgeois reader whom she constructs in her own image, and is identified rhetorically with the ‘vigor analítico’ (analytic vigour; 57) of masculine style, and, on the other, an intellectually impressionable feminized reader represented by the working-class woman.28 Moreover, she adds that if ‘escritores de más talento que yo’ (writers with greater talent than I) could combat ‘este género de culto fetichista e idolátrico’ (this kind of fetishistic and idolatrous worship) exemplified in Amparo’s reading, ‘prestarían señalado servicio a la patria’ (they would lend outstanding service to the nation; 58). Thus, she explicitly links reading, as her contemporaries have done, not only to gender and class, but also to the future of the nation. Although the newly proclaimed Republic, allegorized by the birth of Amparo’s son, may not have brought a democratic, classless society, or the realization of the romance plot kindled by her readings, the collective cry of ‘“¡Viva la República federal!”’ (Long live the Federal Republic! 270), which closes the novel, conveys powerfully a protest against the present social order. These words also signal, beyond the final pages of the novel, the persistence of the revolutionary spirit, now incarnated in the collectivity of working-class women, in spite of Amparo’s own physical enclosure and prostration. The narrator makes note that the footsteps of the female factory workers who proclaim the republic are not those of women who take refuge in the domestic sphere at the end of the day, but ‘un andar caprichoso, apresurado, turbulento’ (a step that was capricious, hurried, and turbulent, 270), reminiscent of Amparo’s own ‘capricious’ movement through urban space, her refusal to be tied down to her place in society.

Female Reading and Deviant Sexuality

111

Thus, in La Tribuna Pardo Bazán links female reading with sexual deviance and the potential for revolution. The female reader/consumer becomes a trope that reflects an ambiguous response to the emergence of a potentially revolutionary female subject (and I use ‘revolutionary’ here in relation to both gender and class). While I do not wish to make distinctions of an essentialist nature between male and female authors in their representations of female reading, women writers, as the case of Pardo Bazán clearly demonstrates, have the burden of establishing their literary authority through a strategic response to dominant cultural assumptions and aesthetic conventions. Women’s writing was never accorded universality, or aesthetic neutrality, which could be assumed in men’s writing. In La Tribuna, the female reader becomes a point of convergence of cultural imaginings and anxieties about women, desire, and consumption. Like the figure of Isidora Rufete, whose readings empower her to negotiate new spaces of subjectivity, so, too, does Amparo seek to exercise her agency through her acts of reading. In both texts, the female reader becomes a space of negotiation for staking out woman’s place in a new consumer society that threatens to collapse social distinctions. It is not merely the fact of her gender or class origin that transforms the female reader into a deviant figure, but her identification with a particular form of reading – and, more generally, consumption – that has been gendered as feminine through its connection to female desire. The examples of Galdós and Pardo Bazán’s protagonists, among many others, show how female reading, consumption, and deviant sexuality were closely linked in the popular imagination of the late nineteenth century in their potential to undermine patriarchal authority and the cultural foundations represented by it (Felski 79–87).

4 Gender Trouble and the Crisis of Masculinity in the fin de siglo: Clarín’s Su único hijo and Pardo Bazán’s Memorias de un solterón

The end of the nineteenth century in Spain, as in the rest of Europe, was a critical moment for the redefinition of gender, in both the social and the cultural terrain. Elaine Showalter coined the term ‘sexual anarchy’ to capture the social and cultural confusion of the last decades of the nineteenth century in the Anglo-American world, during which established norms that governed ‘sexual identity and behavior’ appeared to be breaking down (Sexual 3). She goes on to note that it was during this period when ‘both the words “feminism” and “homosexuality” first came into use, as New Women and male aesthetes redefined the meanings of femininity and masculinity’ (Sexual 3).1 As in other industrialized Western European nations and the United States, threats of ‘sexual anarchy’ – that is, the perception that fin-de-siglo society as a whole was moving toward gender slippage and indifferentiation – generated a great deal of cultural anxiety in Spain. Changing women’s roles, the collapse of the opposition between the private and the public, and the potential for new spaces of female subjectivity and agency naturally led to anxieties about male subjectivity, as normative notions of bourgeois, heterosexual masculinity were being challenged by women who deviated from the norms of femininity.2 In her Gender of Modernity, Rita Felski shows how the crisis of masculinity during the European (English, French, and German) turn of the century found expression in new definitions of the aesthetic that challenged prevailing norms of representation and, hence, became coded as ‘feminine’ (90). In undermining established boundaries of gender and genre, Felski claims, the ‘feminized male’ became an ‘emblem of the contemporary crisis of values and the much proclaimed decadence of modern life. Masculinity, it seemed, could no longer be taken for

Gender Trouble and the Crisis of Masculinity

113

granted as a stable, unitary, and self-evident reality’ (92). Likewise, George Mosse notes that physical and mental disease, such as syphilis, tuberculosis, and hysteria, discussed widely and obsessively in the medical and psychological literature of the late nineteenth century, as well as the perception of an increase in the practice of vice – in particular, of sexually deviant acts – contributed to the threat to the ideal of masculinity (79). From the 1890s on, he continues, ‘such “degenerates” provided an ever more visible presence and … a continuous challenge to normative masculinity’ (86). It is, then, not surprising that the figure of the decadent or ‘degenerate’ male, later to be identified with the homosexual aesthete, was coming into being as a distinct social category – and a trope – in the cultural representations of the late nineteenth century, at around the same time the ‘woman question’ was becoming a burning issue for much of Western European society.3 In late nineteenth-century Spain, many literary works expose gender normativity to be no more than an ideal, a regulatory fiction impossible for real bodies and subjectivities to achieve. In previous chapters, we have focused on the figure of the deviant woman, such as the adulteress, the prostitute, the unmarried mother, and the seduced woman, who abound in the literary representations of the late nineteenth century. We have seen the scarcity, if not the total absence, in the nineteenth-century novel, of women who embody the bourgeois ideal of femininity. For their part, deviant male figures, who pose a challenge to the heterosexual ideal of masculinity – ‘effeminate’ or emasculated men, or those who embody otherwise conflictive and conflicted masculinities – represent the counterpart of deviant female subjectivity.4 While many are the representations of non-normative masculinities that populate the pages of these novels, two Spanish literary works published in the last decade of the nineteenth century – Clarín’s Su único hijo (1891) and Pardo Bazán’s Memorias de un solterón (1896) – feature deviant male characters whose aesthetic self-consciousness transforms them into particularly emblematic prototypes of the fin-de-siglo crisis of masculinity. The analysis that follows examines the response of these two authors – not only of different genders but of antithetical gender ideologies – to the crisis of masculinity in the Spanish fin de siglo through these male artist/aesthete figures. Clarín’s Su único hijo emblematizes the crisis of gender – and of masculinity, in particular – in the fin de siglo in a number of ways. First, as many critics have noted, Clarín’s novel defies classification and, in fact, gives expression to confusion of all forms, including that of gender,

114

Marginal Subjects

genre, spatial location, and temporality (Bauer, ‘Something Lost’ 100–1; Oleza 41; Valis, Decadent 107; Zamora Juárez 296–7). Reflecting the collapse of limits and boundaries at the end of the century, Su único hijo plays constantly and self-consciously with tropes of confusion (adultery and incest, in particular), inversion, and perversion. The novel thus exemplifies the link between the crisis of gender (masculinity) and that of representation, which is the subject of Rita Felski’s analysis (91-114), and which Andrés Zamora Juárez has characterized so aptly, in relation to Clarín’s own novel, as ‘aesthetic androgyny’ (299).5 My object is not so much to examine the gender role reversals of the novel’s characters, or the literary archetypes from which these roles are derived, as other critics have done already, but to focus on the trope of gender deviance in Su único hijo as a way of understanding the Clarinian narrator’s response to the crisis of gender. One of the central problems for the reader of Su único hijo is the focalization of the novel, that is, the question of how the narrator positions his gaze and his voice in constructing gender in the text. While most critics would agree that a large part of the narration is centred on and focalized through the male protagonist Bonis, what seems to be in question is the extent of the narrator’s own identification with the male protagonist’s anxious response to his emasculation and the concomitant masculinization of his wife Emma. In other words, does Clarín’s work open up potentially new – and more fluid – spaces of subjectivity through the transcendence of existing norms of gender and sexuality? Or, does the novel, on the contrary, end up by restoring normative ideals of gender in response to the sexual anarchy that threatens the social order, through the discursive control and containment of deviance? Some critics have interpreted the novel as heralding a ‘modern and liberating’ view of gender and sexuality (Mercer 44) – and, by extension, of art through its appropriations of the ‘feminine’ as a metaphor of creation (Rivkin 324–5; Valis, Decadent 173). My contention, however, is that Clarín’s project represents, on the contrary, the attempt to reinscribe gender norms and hierarchies, even as he recognizes that such a project is ultimately bound for failure. I concur with Rita Felski’s view that male identification with the feminine in fin-de-siglo culture, even as it enables the articulations of alternative constructions of gender and sexuality, is not ‘necessarily subversive of patriarchal privilege’ (93). At the same time the narrator’s irony and his shifting position vis-à-vis the novel’s characters, including Bonis, from whose perspective he most frequently speaks, makes it difficult to position him unambiguously

Gender Trouble and the Crisis of Masculinity

115

with respect to established gender norms. In fact, my analysis of gender constructions in Clarín’s novel, as elsewhere, will challenge the binary between conformity and subversion, and will insist on the potential ambiguities and contradictions of both dominant and contestatory discourses. Previous critics have commented extensively on the reversal/inversion/hybridism of traditional gender roles and typing in the novel, particularly with regard to the identities of the male and female protagonists, Bonis and Emma, respectively (Bauer, ‘Something Lost’ 100; Mercer; Valis, Decadent 136; Six 201; Zamora Juárez 296–319). Bonis represents ‘an expropriated man’ (43), to borrow Oleza’s words, both in the economic and the sexual sense: he is deprived not only of man’s proprietary rights guaranteed under nineteenth-century Spanish law, but also of his heterosexual masculinity. The narrator, through Bonis’s perspective, describes the emasculated male protagonist’s relationship to his wife in such demeaning terms as ‘infeliz esclavo de su mujer’ (his wife’s unfortunate slave; 214) and ‘un trapo de fregar en casa de su mujer’ (a dishrag in his wife’s house; 226), asserting that his lack of economic control over his own life, capital, and even body – his status as ‘marido de su mujer’ – represents ‘una aberración lamentable’ (his wife’s husband; a lamentable aberration; 200).6 Yet, at the same time, the narrator, ironically through Emma’s perspective, insists on Bonis’s masculinity, denying that he is a ‘hermaphrodite’ in spite of his feminine traits: ‘reconocía ella […] que […] su marido no era afeminado de figura ni de gestos; era suave, algo felino, podría decirse untuoso, pero todo en forma varonil’ (she realized … that … her husband was not in the least effeminate in his looks or gestures; he was gentle, somewhat feline, almost unctuous, but, nonetheless, in every way masculine; 186). Given that Clarín’s novel links the challenges to Bonis’s masculinity quite explicitly to Emma’s masculinization, it would be impossible to analyse the male protagonist’s crisis of masculinity without giving equal consideration to the implications of his wife’s deviance from gender norms. Emma is portrayed repeatedly as a tyrant, a despot, and a castrating figure responsible for the emasculation of her docile husband. As Noël Valis has noted, Clarín makes use of an entire series of misogynistic archetypes –fury (Eumenides), witch, vampire, femme fatale, the devouring mother, among others – to characterize the female protagonist (Decadent 150–3). Above all, Emma represents a caricature of the New Woman, which – albeit an image which came from abroad, originating in countries with an incipient feminist movement – was also

116

Marginal Subjects

beginning to circulate widely in the media and literary fiction of Spain in the final decade of the nineteenth century (Jagoe, Ambiguous 156–9). As Elaine Showalter has shown, the figure of the New Woman ciphers male anxieties about the ‘sexual anarchy’ of the fin de siècle, identified in medical and scientific discourses of the times with ‘sickness, freakishness, sterility, and racial degeneration’ (Sexual 39). Emma represents, precisely, a projection of such anxieties: she suffers from constant ‘achaques’ (little ailments; 182), which the male physician later diagnoses as hysteria, she is prone to ‘mal parto[s]’ (miscarriage; 171, 177), and the narrator suggests that her family forms part of a ‘degenerate’ race, ‘el atavismo de todo un linaje’ (their entire lineage regressed to a primitive state; 162, 176). For both the narrator and the male characters around her, she is a pathological case, an aberration of nature, who threatens the social order with her deviant behaviour and sexuality.7 Janet Beizer has argued that the medical establishment’s diagnosis of female hysteria represents precisely ‘an attempt to keep existing social boundaries in place’ and, in particular, to maintain gender distinctions (49). It was during a historical period of social change, mobility, and eroding categories when hysteria became an especially useful device for containing anxieties about gender slippage: medical discourses sought to contain subjectivities and bodies that defied categorization by pathologizing them. Although in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the view of hysteria as a biologically determined uterine disorder gave way to its classification as a neurological disturbance, discourses of the period continued to feminize the disease through its association with uncontrolled emotions, mobility, verbal excess, and incoherence (Beizer 1–12). Thus, as Jann Matlock has noted, ‘the discourse of hysteria attempted to contain the desire of the bourgeois woman,’ distinguishing the ‘normal’ woman from the deviant one who could not be ‘fixed’ or disciplined (3). In Clarín’s novel, the physician Don Basilio – a specialist, significantly, in ‘enfermedades de la matriz, y en histérico, flato y aprensiones’ (infirmities of the womb, hysteria, flatulence, and anxiety; 301) – diagnoses Emma’s illness as hysteria, based on her own description of symptoms from which she suffers: insomnia, melancholy, and the desire to escape the limits of the physical space that confines her. He therefore pathologizes her ‘nostalgia’ for a different world, her yearning to find new spaces of subjectivity outside of the norm. Bonis himself attributes his wife’s deviancy, her ex-centricity, to her ‘matriz estropeada’ (damaged womb; 302), her inability to bear children, thus echoing contemporary medical literature that continued to sustain fig-

Gender Trouble and the Crisis of Masculinity

117

uratively, if not literally, the traditional link between hysteria and the womb (Beizer 35–7). Emma’s representation as a deviant woman is circumscribed by the misogynistic discourse of the masculine narrator and focalized predominantly through the subjectivity of a male protagonist who is himself anxious about his own uncertain masculinity. The first bedroom scene, in which Emma ‘seduces’ Bonis, is key in this regard, as it exacerbates the masculine fear of uncontrolled female sexuality, portrayed, as Leigh Mercer has shown, through Emma’s transformation into a monstrous body, a vampire figure (47). As Elaine Showalter has noted in her discussion of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, also published in the final decade of the nineteenth century, the theme of vampirism reflects anxieties about the New Woman, and about blurred sexual boundaries in general (Sexual 179). Just as Stoker’s female vampire, who ‘represented the nymphomaniac or oversexed wife who threatened her husband’s life with her insatiable erotic demands’ (180), Emma, with ‘un tremendo mordisco sobre la yugular’ (a tremendous bite in his jugular vein) during the sexual act, menaces her husband with ‘una sangría suelta’ (excessive bleeding; 277). And, as in the case of La desheredada and La Tribuna, in which female desire is identified with the act of consumption, Emma’s overflowing sexual desire, ‘el renacimiento de su carne’ (the rebirth of her flesh; 288), leads to her uncontrolled consumption. Clarín’s female protagonist becomes obsessed with material pleasures and runs the family into debt, spending extravagantly on luxury items, particularly for her self-adornment. What provokes Bonis (and the narrator’s?) anxiety is not only the fear of female desire and the body, but also the erosion of the distinction between the material and the aesthetic – a distinction in which his masculine subjectivity is invested. Nöel Valis suggests that both Bonis and Emma parody the decadent archetype, particularly through their reversal of traditional gender roles (Decadent 136). While Clarín undoubtedly draws on decadent typology in his characterization of both figures, I would argue that it is really Emma who represents the archetype of the decadent aesthete. At first, Bonis displays some traits of the decadent type – his degenerate lifestyle and his desire to escape into an artificial world of his own creation. It is, however, Emma who seeks to transform her husband into a dandy figure, by aestheticizing and, by extension, feminizing him.8 In fact, Bonis, who passively lets himself be dressed (‘Se dejaba vestir’ [He allowed himself to be outfitted; 167]) in elegant clothing by his wife, is no more than ‘una figura de adorno para ella’ (a clotheshorse for her;

118

Marginal Subjects

166). Later in the novel, the narrator affirms that his body is, in fact, an aesthetic object of her creation: ‘El tocado de Bonis fue obra más complicada, y dirigida, en efecto, por su mujer’ (Bonis’s coiffure was more complicated, and in effect directed by his wife; 316). Furthermore, notwithstanding his love for art, Bonis recognizes his inability to express himself through art: ‘Yo amo el arte … pero no lo sé expresar, me falta la forma’ (I love art … but I do not know how to express it. I cannot find a form; 270); ‘Para artista […] le faltaba talento, habilidad’ (To be an artist … he lacked the talent, the ability; 415). Thus, while he can be someone else’s work of art, he cannot be an artist himself. Both Valis and Oleza show the influence of decadent literature, particularly of Alas’s French contemporary J.K. Huysmans, on the portrayal of Emma in Su único hijo (Valis, Decadent 140; Oleza 285n4), suggesting that Clarín’s female protagonist is modelled, to some degree, on Des Esseintes, the protagonist of his A rebours (1884). Certainly, Emma’s depravity (‘pervertidos sentimientos’ [perverse sentiments; 293]), her hunger for a life of new pleasures and sensations (‘sed de emociones extrañas’ [thirst for new emotions; 294]), her rejection of social conventions, and, above all, her self-conscious aestheticization, exemplified in her conspicuous consumption (Felski 94), evoke the figure of the decadent aesthete. Like the prototypical male dandy/aesthete, Emma cultivates style for its own sake, transforming her own body into an aesthetic artefact: her luxuriously adorned body, her carefully crafted ‘peinado’ (hairdo), her face, covered with the ‘polvos de arroz’ (rice powder; 314), call attention to her constructedness. Her fixation on her boots emblematizes her self-transformation into a fetish, in both the sexual and economic sense of the word. What Noël Valis considers to be Emma’s ‘unnaturalness’ (Decadent 142) represents a conscious performance of her identity, as the metaphor of the theatre suggests quite explicitly.9 Thus, Emma exemplifies the identity of the aesthete, which, as Felski has shown, is ‘revealed as artifice … undermining Romantic notions of authentic interiority and the organic subject’ (98). In addition, it is difficult to miss the undertones of homosexuality in Emma’s interactions with both Serafina and Marta, the two other principal female characters of the novel.10 The narrator presents the intimate relationship that develops between Emma and Marta as a marriage of two depraved minds who yearn for unnatural and perverse pleasures.11 Together they indulge in pleasures, both sensual and aesthetic, to give expression to the ‘depravación ideal’ (emotional depravity; 369) that is at the root of their temperament. Likewise, Emma’s attitude toward

Gender Trouble and the Crisis of Masculinity

119

Serafina is tinged with homoeroticism. It is significant that in one of the few scenes of the novel in which the narration is focalized through Emma’s perspective, the female protagonist lays bare her homoerotic desire, stripping Serafina’s body with her eyes and her imagination.12 When the opera singer shakes Emma’s hands ‘con fuerza y efusión’ (forcefully and effusively), the latter confesses to feeling envious of men who could fall in love with women like Serafina, who ‘tenían un no sé qué’ (had a certain indefinable quality; 383–4). Later, they speak alone, ‘sonriéndose, como acariciándose con ojos y sonrisas’ (almost caressing each other with their eyes and smiles; 387), completely ignoring the male gaze (Bonis’s) upon them.13 What Emma finds seductive in Serafina, according to the narrator, is the latter’s ‘vida irregular, la mujer perdida’ (irregular life, the dishonored woman; 384), revealing, once again, the masculine vision of female aestheticism as being tied to unnatural, deviant desires. The affinity between Emma’s self-conscious aestheticism and her ‘perverse’ desire is significant, since, as Felski has shown, ‘aestheticism’s denial of a natural self, and hence of a natural sexuality, provided a strategically valuable perspective for those who did not conform to dominant heterosexual norms’ (103). In contrast to Emma, who embraces artifice wilfully, Bonis seeks authenticity, although, paradoxically, through the artificial world of decadent romanticism. Notwithstanding his constant desire to live in the world of the imagination, the narrator notes that ‘a Reyes no le gustaba la ficción en nada’ (Bonifacio disliked pretense in anything), that he prefers to attend the opera singers’ rehearsals, rather than seeing the staged performance, because ‘allí [en el ensayo] veía al artista tal como era, no como tenía que fingir que era’ (there one saw the artist as he was, not as he pretended to be; 204). In this context, it is significant that Bonis rejects Emma’s artificiality to search for authenticity in the ‘other’ woman, Serafina. The latter, in Bonis’s fantasy, comes to represent a perfect amalgam of lover and mother, the ideal of authentic femininity, which has become denaturalized in the monstrous figure of Emma. The repeated references to Serafina’s ‘voz de madre’ (mother-like voice; 257 passim) evoke the essentialist myth of a prelapsarian, pre-Oedipal Mother that precedes the masculine socio-symbolic order,14 forming a stark contrast with Emma’s characterization as the antithesis of the maternal ideal. The ultimate irony, of course, is that, notwithstanding Bonis’s illusion, Serafina turns out to be less than the embodiment of ideal femininity; after having announced with her voice/song the realization of his dream of paternity, she seeks, in the end, to negate his

120

Marginal Subjects

faith in the authenticity of his only son. In fact, the narrator exposes the chasm that separates Bonis’s ideal from the adulterated world in which she is implicated – and in which she implicates him – by transforming the authentic mother into its antithesis: a prostitute driven by uncontrolled sexual desire, by her ‘furores de lubricidad’ (lascivious furore) and ‘extravíos voluptuosos’ (sensual excesses; 255). Ultimately, the narrator likens her to Emma, the anti-Mother, not only in her (moral and sexual) perversity, but in her desire to abort Bonis’s ‘only son,’ that is, symbolically to deny his existence. Serafina’s transformation from mother into whore, which exemplifies the constant sliding between the prostitute body and the maternal body in nineteenth-century literature (Bell 42), lays bare the fluidity of the borders between self and otherness, the ‘normal’ and the ‘deviant.’15 Bonis’s search for authenticity – not least of which is his search for an authentic masculinity through paternity – is, therefore, destined to fail. As in other literary works of the fin de siècle, a questioning of the authenticity of the self forms part of a more general epistemological crisis in which established social, economic, and aesthetic distinctions were becoming collapsed. For Laura Rivkin, Su único hijo is a self-conscious commentary on Clarín’s own struggle to beget his artistic child, to give birth to a new aesthetic (327). If Bonis searches for authenticity through art, his ‘vida … del arte’ (life … of art; 409) soon becomes a metaphor for the debasement of aesthetics, which cannot be kept pure from corruption. The more he seeks to escape into the world of art, through his relationship to Serafina and the other opera singers, the more clear the debasement of his ideals becomes to him, as is reflected in the metaphors of confusion, mixture, corruption, and adulteration that abound in the pages of the novel.16 In fact, the metaphor of the ‘burdel’ (brothel) with which Bonis himself refers to his own home captures aptly this motif of confusion: ‘Aquí todos vienen a divertirse y arruinarnos; todos parecemos cómicos y aventureros, herejes y amontonados.’ Este amontonados tenía un significado terrible en los soliloquios de Bonis. Amontonados era … una mezcla de amores incompatibles, de complacencias escandalosas, de confusiones abominables […] Él, Bonifacio, había tenido que consentir en que su querida entrase en casa de su mujer, y fueran amigas y comieran juntas. (409–10) ‘Here everyone comes to amuse themselves and to ruin us; we all seem to

Gender Trouble and the Crisis of Masculinity

121

be actors, adventurers, heretics, a promiscuous crowd.’ This word promiscuous had a terrible meaning in Bonis’s soliloquies. Promiscuous was … a mixture of grasping love affairs, of scandalous complacency, of abominable confusions … He, Bonifacio, had to agree to let his mistress enter his wife’s house and allow them to be friends and to eat together.

The sexual connotations of the word ‘amontonado’ (promiscuous) become apparent, as Bonis implicates himself in the crime of adultery, which, by definition, mixes things that should be kept separate. As Tony Tanner has shown, adultery, which implies ‘pollution, contamination, a “base admixture,” a wrong combination,’ produces an ‘irresolvable category-confusion’ that challenges social definitions (12), eroding distinctions between the natural and the social, the legitimate and the illegitimate, the private and the public, as we have seen in Fortunata y Jacinta. Unable to maintain ‘la familia honrada, sin adulteraciones, sin disturbios ni mezclas’ (an honourable family, without adultery, without disturbances or mixed blood; 343), Bonis can no longer find refuge in pure art. Art can no longer be kept separate from commerce, from economic interests, as we can see too well from the female opera artist’s transformation into commodity, nor can it be kept distinct from the materiality of the body. Art has become adulterated. Thus, if Bonis can be called an aesthete, he represents a debased aesthete who, while searching for the artistic ideal – and an autonomous subjectivity of his own – ends up by identifying excessively with the ‘base appetites of the flesh’ and the materiality of the body (Felski 109).17 As Felski has noted, in the literature of the fin de siècle an obsessive fear of the female body lies at the basis of masculine aestheticism (109). The gendered implications of Clarín’s parody of Bonis as an aesthete figure becomes strikingly clear: the already effeminate male protagonist becomes feminized further in his inability to achieve the masculine ideal of a detached aestheticism freed from the limits of materiality/corporeality. Bonis, as an artist, is denied the ironic selfconsciousness that defines the male aesthete’s identity, according to Felski (110); instead, the irony comes from the narrator, who parodies Bonis’s inability to take control of art. In contrast to other aesthete figures of fin-de-siècle literature, we do not see in Bonis a deliberate will to assume the decadent posture. Therefore, the ‘new aesthetic’ that, in Rivkin’s view, emerges in the novel (325), identifies debasement with the feminine. In this sense, I find it difficult to see Bonis’s femininity as a ‘creative force’ that em-

122

Marginal Subjects

bodies Clarín’s ‘redemptive vision’ (Rivkin 324, 328), at least in refiguring gender. While it is true, as Rivkin notes, that gender and genre are inextricably tied in Clarín’s novel, the masculine protagonist’s quest for form/identity through his struggle with gender is not resolved as harmoniously, or as unambiguously, as she seems to claim. If Bonis’s subjectivity comes into being through his ‘feminine art’ (Rivkin 327), the very gendering of the protagonist’s art as feminine – and, thus, implicitly debased – problematizes the vision of art as redemption. The gendering of the metaphor of paternity (and maternity) in Su único hijo merits special attention, precisely due to the ambiguous gendering of the characters who embody the paternal and maternal roles, respectively. In a parody of the Biblical scene of the Annunciation, Bonis has a revelation that he will become a ‘virgen madre’ (virgin mother): ‘la voz […] me anuncia que voy a ser una especie de virgen madre … es decir, un padre … madre; que voy a tener un hijo, legítimo por supuesto, que aunque me le paras tú, materialmente, va a ser todo cosa mía.’ No, no pensaba él que el hijo fuese de la querida, eso no: que Serafina perdonase, pero eso no: de la mujer, de la mujer … pero de cierta manera, sin que la impureza de las entrañas de Emma manchase al que había de nacer; todo suyo, de Bonis, de su raza, de los suyos. (382) ‘the voice … has announced to me that I am going to be a kind of virgin mother … or father, no, mother; that I am going to have a son, legitimate, of course, that although you, Emma, give birth to him physically, he is going to be all mine.’ No, he did not think that the son would be his mistress’, not that, may Serafina forgive him, but not that. It would be his wife’s, but in such a way that Emma’s inner corruption would not leave a mark on him. His very own son, child of his family, his race.

It is the male protagonist who wills the Word to become flesh, negating the female body associated with the baseness of matter, which threatens to corrupt his creation: the ‘son’ who stands for his art. That is, the aesthete defines his art and, by extension, his very identity, against the feminine. Yet later in the novel when Emma actually becomes pregnant, Bonis finds himself identifying, in an emotional scene, with the Biblical figure of Joseph, who is robbed of his paternity and, by extension, of his masculine authority: ‘“¡Qué horror! ¡Arrancarle a San José la gloria … el amor … de su hijo! … ¡Todo para la madre! ¿Y el padre? ¿Y el padre?”’ (‘How terrible! To tear away this glory from Saint Joseph … the love

Gender Trouble and the Crisis of Masculinity

123

of his own son! … It was all given to the mother! And the father? And the father?’ 440). For Bonis, it is the woman/mother who emasculates him through her power to engender his son and, symbolically, his art. The narrator, through Bonis’s perspective, transforms the female protagonist into the phallic mother, who neutralizes the father’s role and reduces him to mere progenitor. The fact that the novel is focalized primarily through Bonis’s masculine perspective reveals the narrator’s own identification with the male protagonist’s fear of the feminine, whose association with the monstrous is all too clear. If Emma’s sterility, her ‘mal parto’ (miscarriage; 171, 177), was previously a mark of her ‘unnatural’ (read: deviant) femininity, she is now a deviant mother for her protest against ‘Nature,’ manifested in a desire to abort her fetus. At the same time as the narrator presents, from Emma’s perspective, her protest against her pregnancy by adopting the free indirect style, he denies her agency over her own body: ‘Pero, ¿no la habían asegurado a ella, tantos años hacía, cuando el mal parto, cuando quedó medio muerta, con las entrañas hechas una lástima, que ya no pariría nunca, que aquello se había acabado, que no sé qué de la matriz?’ (But had they not assured her many years ago, when she had the miscarriage, when she was half-dead, her insides in a pitiful condition, that she could never again become pregnant, that all that had ended, that something had gone wrong with her womb? 430). As she encloses herself in her room and looks at the image of her pregnant body in the mirror, she imagines only the horror and illness that she associates with pregnancy and childbirth: ‘otra vez el cuerpo flaco, el color pálido, la calavera estallando debajo del pellejo amarillento, la debilidad, los nervios, la bilis’ (once again the feeble body, the pallid complexion, the skull standing out under the yellowish skin, the weakness, the nerves, the biliousness; 449). Although she pathologizes her pregnancy, reducing herself to a sick body, her desire is to escape through art the limits of the body, of the ‘materia’ (matter) that ties her to her femininity. By aspiring to a life of ‘mujeres superiores,’ ‘entregadas […] al arte’ (superior women … dedicated to art; 449), freed from the limits of the body, she seeks to embrace the aestheticism that is denied her as a woman, just as it has been denied her emasculated husband. It is through the bohemian opera singer Minghetti that Emma seeks connection to the aesthetic ideal, as Bonis has done through Serafina. Yet, unlike Bonis, who views the potential confusion resulting from adultery as undermining his ideal, Emma imagines this act of sexual

124

Marginal Subjects

deviance as a stimulus to her own pursuit of the ideal. When she first exchanges looks with Minghetti at the opera, the narrator transcribes her thoughts from her perspective, as she fantasizes about engaging in an adulterous relationship with the opera singer. Although the narrator denies that such ‘extravíos morales’ (moral excesses) of the female protagonist are a product of ‘el romanticismo literario, decadente, de su época y pueblo’ (decadent literary romanticism of her town and her time), he immediately adds that ‘algunas frases y preocupaciones de sus convecinos se le habían contagiado; y esta idea vaga y pérfida de la gran pasión que todo lo santifica, era una de esas pestes’ (she had picked up a few phrases and restlessness from the neighbours like a disease; this vague and treacherous idea of the Great Passion that sanctifies everything was one of these diseases; 327). Interestingly, she asks her legitimate husband to perform the role of Minghetti in the bedroom, while she performs that of Serafina, whom she accurately suspects to be Bonis’s lover. Such performances of identity conflate the roles of the aesthete and the adulteress, allowing the female protagonist to exercise a certain amount of agency by adopting deviant identities normally denied to women. Significantly, the identity Emma performs eventually becomes a reality, as textual evidence suggests the consummation of her adulterous relationship with the opera singer. Finally, an analysis of the ambiguous ending is crucial to the understanding of the relationship between aestheticism and gender in Clarín’s novel. If the ‘only son’ is a metaphor for Bonis’s art, we might ask ourselves, what is the copyist’s role in fathering (or mothering) his art? And what does it mean for the legitimacy and ownership of this work of art to remain unresolved? What does this doubt mean for Bonis’s crisis of masculinity, which is inseparable from his relationship to art? While some critics, such as Oleza, have interpreted Bonfacio’s affirmation of paternity to represent an act of faith, as the ‘product of his will’ that cancels out the dubiousness of the biological fact (55), it appears that the ‘son’ becomes yet another fetish to conceal the protagonist’s masculine lack. It is significant that Bonis, in his final words of affirmation, distances himself from the self by referring to himself in third person. That is, upon facing the possibility of a paternity cut short, of yet another symbolic abortion/castration, he reacts to the crisis of identity and of art by transforming himself textually, through the logos.18 Yet, such an action does not save Bonis’s masculinity, nor does it resolve the aporia of the ending, as it merely delays, in Valis’s words, ‘an ultimate accounting of origins’ (‘The Perfect Copy’ 864). The inde-

Gender Trouble and the Crisis of Masculinity

125

terminacy of his final text, represented by the fictive construct of his ‘only son,’ only feminizes him further. In this context, Bonis’s final selfaffirmation through his insistence on ‘the totalizing power of the textual’ exposes the masculine anxiety of the fin-de-siècle aesthete, which results in his negation of women (Felski 114). By the end of the novel, both Emma and Serafina become dispensable matter no longer relevant to his act of creation. Although this interpretation of the novel’s ending is hardly at odds with what we know about Clarín’s own misogyny, neither can we reduce the text automatically to our presumptions about the author’s gender ideology. As we have seen, the novel’s obsession with gender inversion and confusion does not translate necessarily into a progressive view of gender, serving, instead, to exacerbate cultural anxieties about the potential consequences of gender slippage, particularly for men. At the same time, a consciousness on the part of the male narrator – and, perhaps, even the character, to a certain degree – of the inevitability of the ‘crisis of category’ poses a challenge to both normative femininity and masculinity, making it impossible to maintain intact the established gender order (Bauer, ‘Something Lost’ 101). Thus, the male gaze that focalizes the narrative is not without fissures: in the end, even the masculinity of Clarín’s own narrator is undermined by his subjectsin-crisis, who struggle to negotiate their place in a world where the integrity of gender – and of many other social and epistemological categories – was quickly becoming eroded. If Clarín’s Su único hijo represents the crisis of gender from the perspective of normative masculinity, Emilia Pardo Bazán, in her Memorias de un solterón, appropriates the crisis of masculinity to challenge and to refigure, from a feminist perspective, established notions of gender. As in many of her other works of the 1890s, Pardo Bazán engages actively in contemporary debates on women and gender in fin-de-siècle Europe, leading her to deconstruct and denaturalize normative models of both femininity and masculinity; what the novel has in common with Su único hijo is its fascination with gender inversion/confusion characteristic of this epoch (Bauer, ‘Narrative Cross-Dressing’ 24). Considered to be her most openly feminist novel, Memorias de un solterón centres on the complex and evolving relationship between a male narrator and a female protagonist who embody the archetypes of the dandy/aesthete and the New Woman, respectively. This is not to suggest that Pardo Bazán’s own feminist project is without contradictions and ambiguities, as our analysis of the novel’s conclusion will show. Albeit in a different

126

Marginal Subjects

fashion from Clarín, Pardo Bazán, too, centres on the crisis of subjectivity of the ‘feminized male’ – the dandy/aesthete figure – transforming him into an ‘emblem of the contemporary crisis of values’ (Felski 92). Much of the criticism on the novel has focused on its female protagonist, Feíta, the prototypical New Woman who struggles to emancipate herself from the gender norms and expectations of her society. At the same time, the role of the masculine protagonist-narrator, Mauro, is equally crucial in that his narrative voice and gaze mediate the representation of Feíta. Furthermore, Mauro’s role as narrative focalizer, as Maryellen Bieder has suggested, is complicated by his own marginal position with respect to dominant gender norms (‘En-gendering’ 484– 5).19 Such a narrative strategy makes for a complex and ironic play of gendered perspectives that undermines both normative femininity and masculinity and, concomitantly, any notion of a stable or monolithic gender identity. While Memorias has been read predominantly as a feminist work that seeks to create, through the figure of Feíta, new spaces of female subjectivity, it is my contention that the novel is just as much about the crisis of masculinity provoked by the masculine narrator’s confrontation with a New Woman who challenges conventional gender roles and categories. It is, of course, not the unconventionality of Feíta alone that becomes the cause of Mauro’s anxiety, but the very possibility of the New Woman and its implications for an already conflicted male subjectivity. As in Clarín’s Su único hijo, the male protagonist’s crisis of masculinity induces a crisis of representation, which finds reflection in the writing of Mauro’s memoirs. However, while the response of Clarín’s narrator to the crisis of gender re-enacts a misogynistic gesture that seeks to negate female subjectivity, the crisis of masculinity in Memorias induces a more critical self-reflection on gender that opens up a possibility for the refiguring of the same. For Rita Felski, ‘femininity was to become a governing metaphor in the fin-de-siècle crisis of literary representation’ (91). She goes on to show how, in the literature of this period, the feminized, male subject – the dandy/aesthete figure, in particular – exemplified this crisis, through his refusal of the prevailing definitions of bourgeois masculinity and, by extension, of the bourgeois system of gender differentiation in general (Felski 94–7). In Memorias, Pardo Bazán’s male narratorprotagonist, Mauro Pareja, evokes just such a dandy figure through his self-characterization: his narcissistic obsession with what he calls ‘el culto de mi propia persona’ (the cult of my own person; 87), reflected in his exaggerated attention to dress and fashion (‘costumbre de vestir

Gender Trouble and the Crisis of Masculinity

127

con esmero y según los decretos de la moda’ [habit of dressing with flair and according to the dictates of fashion; 86]), his Epicureanism (his indulgence in ‘todo lo que es confort, bienestar, pulcritud’ [everything that’s comfort, well-being, beauty; 87]), his artistic profession (he is an architect), his love of letters, and his rejection of bourgeois conventions (more specifically, of marriage and the family) in favour of individualism. That is to say, the narrator-protagonist constructs himself selfconsciously as an aesthetic artefact, not only through his display of ‘style,’ but also through his act of narrative self-fashioning. Even as he asserts ironically, ‘no soy capaz de producir obras maestras de arte’ (I’m incapable of producing artistic masterpieces), he qualifies this statement by adding ‘a no ser que tal se juzgue el arreglo de mi vivir, que es realmente un capolavoro’ (unless my lifestyle, which is a real work of art, can be deemed such; 107). As is typical of the dandy figure in turn-of-the-century modernist texts, Mauro transforms the self into a work of art (Felski 97) through a sort of performance that he stages selfconsciously for his audience.20 As Jessica Feldman has noted, ‘dandies, by demonstrating that human identity is a matter of self-construction and presentation, have always self-consciously played with the construction of gender’ (13). Furthermore, literature of the fin de siècle has always questioned the idea of a natural sexuality by exploring unconventional sexual roles and manifestations of desire, including homosexuality, transvestism, voyeurism, and fetishism (Felski 102). In Pardo Bazán’s novel, Mauro Pareja aestheticizes these manifestations of non-normative sexuality through his self-conscious performances of gender and sexual identity. For example, he performs the role of the transvestite by cross-dressing in feminine attire, noting that his ‘botines blancos’ (white ankle boots; 87) are eye-catching in Marineda. It goes without saying that these ‘botines’ are transformed into fetish objects in their own right. Similarly, Mauro calls attention to his voyeuristic tendencies, particularly with respect to the Neira family, which serve as a substitute for emotional ties, especially those of a sexual nature, to others. Although Mauro seeks to distance himself from the passions of everyday life with his aesthetic pose, his defensive tone, as he insists on a detachment – sexual and otherwise – that he finds increasingly difficult to maintain, reveals the conflictive sexuality that lies behind his aesthetic stance. The question of homosexuality deserves special attention, given its identification with the aestheticism of fin-de-siècle discourses. As is well known, the end of the nineteenth century was a crucial moment in

128

Marginal Subjects

the formation of the modern homosexual subject: that is, the ‘homosexual’ became an identity category, in Foucault’s words, a ‘species’ (History 43), whose emergence came hand in hand with the development of a new psychopathology of perversions to classify and to control deviant sexuality.21 According to the historian Francisco Vázquez García, Spain was late in welcoming the medical model of sexual deviance, which was coming into acceptance by the mid-nineteenth century in other European nations such as France and Germany. In spite of the fact that this new model of ‘sexual perversion’ was beginning to emerge in the discourses of legal medicine during the last decades of the nineteenth century (Vázquez García, ‘El discurso’ 151–4), the term ‘invertido’ (invert), rather than ‘homosexual,’ was used in Spain until well into the first decades of the twentieth century, to designate those subjects whose sexuality was perceived to deviate from the norm (Vázquez García, ‘El discurso’ 157–8). That is to say, in nineteenth-century Spain, sexual inversion was primarily a category that denoted gender deviance, acquiring an explicit sexual dimension only later, around 1915 (Cleminson and Vázquez García 63). Yet, even as sexual deviation continued to be placed ‘within the broad remit of gender transgression’ (Cleminson and Vázquez García 69), sexual and gender inversion become conflated as a recurrent trope in the literary works of the late nineteenth century. Returning to our discussion of Memorias de un solterón, while it might be anachronistic to define literally the ambiguous sexual identity of the male protagonist by classifying him as a homosexual, the notion of sexual/gender inversion does serve as an appropriate metaphor for Mauro’s crisis of masculinity. Mark Harpring has interpreted the novel as a process of initiation of the male protagonist into bourgeois (heterosexual) masculinity, through a constant negotiation between his homosexual and heterosexual inclinations. In this critic’s words, Mauro ‘alternates between suggesting and rejecting his homoerotic tendencies as he works through … “homosexual panic,” or homophobia’ (200). This process of negotiation, according to Harpring, culminates in Mauro’s acceptance of the bourgeois norms of masculinity, as exemplified in his marriage to Feíta at the end of the novel (206). Whatever terms we might wish to use to characterize Mauro’s conflicted masculinity, it is clear that his gender/sexual identity is not without fissures and contradictions. From the first chapter of the novel, he calls attention to his feminine characteristics, even as he remains adamant in his denial of his ‘afeminación’ (effeminacy; 87). His rejection

Gender Trouble and the Crisis of Masculinity

129

of marriage and defence of celibacy dominate a major part of his memoirs, as he confesses to his incapacity to feel ‘verdadera pasión’ (true passion; 259) for any woman; such confession is tantamount to a denial of (hetero)sexuality.22 Yet, upon feeling desire for Feíta, he begins to suffer from ennui, which he attributes to the ‘cáncer del celibato’ (cancer of celibacy; 223). To add to this irony, the woman who becomes the object of his desire exemplifies, in society’s view, a masculine woman, in her appearance, dress, and behaviour: public opinion has, in fact, cast her as a ‘marimacho’ (butch; 190).23 Feíta’s intrusion in his life disturbs Mauro not only for the (homo)erotic sentiments that she arouses in him when he finds himself attracted to her masculine traits (an attraction that he denies almost too insistently), but also for her indifference to his existence as a ‘heterosexual’ man.24 That is, her struggle to transcend the limits of normative female subjectivity represents a literal encroachment on masculine subjective space, as evinced in Mauro’s accusation that she has appropriated his space by taking possession of his ‘dominios’ (dominions; 196). The representation of conflictive masculinity in Memorias, therefore, depends on its relationship to the feminine. On the one hand, the dandy/ aesthete/’sexual invert’ identifies himself with the feminine by rejecting bourgeois masculine norms and by embracing artifice. On the other, as Felski has suggested, the aesthete, through his own feminization, paradoxically seeks to distance himself from women and the masses, since woman emblematizes the uniformity and conventionalism of modern life that he abhors (106–7). That is to say, the aesthete endeavours to assert his superiority over woman by aspiring to a masculine aesthetic ideal constructed in explicit opposition to the materiality/corporeality of the feminine (Felski 108). As we have seen, Mauro’s celibacy reflects his fear of the female body and of sexuality in general. In recounting his relationship with his dozen or so former ‘girlfriends,’ he insists quite adamantly: ‘Lo que no hubo jamás, ni por asomos, en ninguna de mis novelitas cortas y del más calificado idealismo, fue conato o intención mía de convertir en repugnante seducción el hechicero idilio soso. Puedo jurar ahora mismo […] que a las distinguidas señoritas a quienes me comía con los ojos no las toqué ni con la punta de un dedo’ (What there has never been, even in the slightest, in any of my little novels of the most exquisite idealism, was an attempt or intention on my part to turn an enchanting and insipid romance into a repugnant seduction. I can swear right now … that I did not touch, even with the tip of my finger, the distinguished young ladies that I devoured with my eyes; 111).

130

Marginal Subjects

In an attempt to distance himself from the limitations of the body, identified with the feminine, he adds: ‘todas mis novias eran para mí en cierto modo una misma: eran la Mujer’ (in a certain sense, all of my girlfriends were, for me, one and the same: they were Woman; 111). That is to say, in his discourse Mauro essentializes ‘Woman’ to embody that which stands in opposition to the self-consciously ironic aestheticism of the male aesthete. In particular, the cursi woman who adorns herself without an awareness of her own cursilería represents the antithesis of the aesthete who presumably maintains an ironic distance from his own aesthetic construction.25 For example, Feíta’s sister Rosa evokes in his mind the figure of the female consumer addicted to trapos (clothes), a prototype prevalent in the literary works of the period and exemplified by characters such as Galdós’s Rosalía de Bringas, or the clients of Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames in his homonymous novel. At the same time, Mauro confesses that what disturbs him about women like Rosa is not so much the cursilería in itself, but the idea that ‘la mujer no se compone por nosotros, sino más bien por el gusto de componerse y emperifollarse, por el arte puro’ (woman does not dress up for us, but rather for the pleasure of dressing up and adorning herself, for the sake of pure art; 134). That is, from his perspective, woman cannot be pure art. In spite of his suspicious and, at times, openly misogynist attitude toward the female sex, Mauro recognizes that his own selfdefinition as a masculine subject depends on the feminine other. And precisely because Feíta cannot be reduced to the feminine other who facilitates the articulation of a normative bourgeois masculinity, Mauro feels emasculated, as if he did not exist as a man (193).26 Mauro’s attitude toward women bears out Jessica Feldman’s observations about the dandy’s contradictory relationship to gender: while the dandy defines himself ‘by embracing women, appropriating their characteristics’ (6), he also seeks to distinguish himself from women, elevating himself above them. The archetype of the dandy-aesthete on which Mauro models his identity is derived from the literary tradition of French decadentism for which he feels a great affinity.27 Elaine Showalter has shown that ‘decadence’ was a catch-all term applied by the bourgeoisie in the fin de siècle to ‘everything that seemed unnatural, artificial, and perverse’ (Sexual 169); it was often synonymous with sexual deviance and, in particular, with homosexuality. The trial of Oscar Wilde, which provoked a public scandal in England in 1895, the year before the publication of Pardo Bazán’s Memorias de un solterón, had international resonance through-

Gender Trouble and the Crisis of Masculinity

131

out Europe.28 Pardo Bazán herself, in a late work of criticism, refers explicitly to Wilde as a paradigmatic figure of the decadent movement, whom she celebrates in strictly aesthetic terms, divorcing his art completely from his scandalous life: ‘La decadencia representada por Oscar Wilde […] es un período en que el culto a la belleza se muestra fervoroso y engendrador, y en que el sentimiento lírico, al parecer agotado en sus fuentes por el romanticismo, renace en formas nuevas, exaltadas y a veces marvillosas’ (The decadence represented by Oscar Wilde … is a period in which the cult of beauty is fervent and productive, in which lyric sentiment, apparently exhausted in its sources by Romanticism, is reborn in new forms, exalted and at times marvellous; Un poco de crítica 135). Denise DuPont has argued that, in Pardo Bazán’s view, it is Wilde’s aesthetic that ‘saves’ him from his tainted life (358). This is particularly interesting, given that in her earlier Literatura francesa moderna (1910–14), Pardo Bazán links the moral decadence of society explicitly to ‘el descenso de la masculinidad’ (the waning of masculinity; qtd in DuPont 345), thus echoing the regenerationist discourses of the fin de siglo that linked national decadence to the crisis of masculinity.29 In spite of her implicit condemnation of Wilde’s social and sexual deviance that represents the manifestation of such crisis of masculinity, Pardo Bazán seeks to redeem the British writer by elevating him to the realm of pure aesthetics, of the sublime (DuPont 358–9).30 While it would be an exaggeration to call Memorias de un solterón ‘decadent literature,’ either to celebrate or to denigrate it, the gendered tropes that govern the self-construction of the male aesthete figure are hardly neutral: the representation of the aesthete is inflected by gender, as well as by class, interests.31 (We will return to the class issue later.) It is not insignificant that Pardo Bazán imposes a strategic distance between her literary persona and her work through the creation of a masculine narrator modelled on the decadent hero who, like the female protagonist, occupies a liminal position vis-à-vis dominant gender norms of the bourgeoisie. Through the creation of these deviant subjects who straddle the uncertain line between margin and centre, transgression and the norm, the author of the novel engages in her own negotiations of gender in the aesthetic realm.32 The author’s negotiations of gender culminate in the ambiguous conclusion of the novel, one that has elicited divergent interpretations. For Bauer, the novel ‘concludes stereotypically, with the impending marriage of Mauro and Feíta,’ although she qualifies her statement by adding that ‘the predictability of the novel’s ending is belied by cross-

132

Marginal Subjects

ings, by the erosion of gender boundaries, by masquerades and inverted signs’ (‘Narrative Cross-Dressing’ 28). Other critics have argued for a more unequivocally feminist stance in the novel’s conclusion, claiming that the male protagonist ultimately rejects the patriarchal order to become a champion of women’s emancipation and social change (Bretz 89–90; Charnon-Deutsch, Narratives 156). Yet, Charnon-Deutsch, too, qualifies her position by suggesting that such transformations in the patriarchal mindset can only occur on the level of the individual family, rather than on that of society at large (Narratives 158). Bieder, for her part, maintains that while marriage imposes a structural closure on the narrative, it ‘projects an open-ended, conflictive process’ (‘Engendering’ 490), thus undermining itself as an institutional status quo. That is, the institution of marriage provides the ‘new woman’ with a socially sanctioned space within which to assert her own subjectivity (Bieder, ‘En-gendering’ 491). Even as she continues to affirm her desire for freedom, Feíta enters matrimony with the intention of restoring the honour and stability of her family, which has been on the brink of economic ruin due to the ineptitude of its patriarch, don Benicio, and the uncontrolled spending of his daughters. Thus Feíta’s masculine traits are emphasized once again in the end, as she assumes authority over the bourgeois family upon the death of its patriarch.33 While the female protagonist maintains the ability to negotiate her own subjectivity even from within the social institution of marriage, Mauro’s position at the conclusion of the novel is much more problematic. The male protagonist, upon feeling desire for a woman for the first time, faces a potential threat to his autonomy as a subject since, as we have seen, he has defined himself in opposition to the constraints of the body, identified with femininity (Felski 112). Having celebrated his selfsufficiency up to this point through a rejection of the feminine, through ‘aquel huir de la mujer general, de la mujer según la han hecho nuestras costumbres y nuestras leyes’ (that avoidance of the ordinary woman, the woman formed by our customs and our laws; 260), he faces a crisis of identity at the end of the novel as he finds himself ‘el Mauro Pareja cauto, precavido y cuerdo de las primeras páginas de estas Memorias’ (that cautious, prudent and sane Mauro Pareja of the first pages of these Memoirs), swept away by passion and by ‘cuidados ajenos’ (other people’s troubles; 296). That is to say, what becomes increasingly evident to him is the contamination of his self-constructed aesthetic ideal by the materiality of the female body. To enter into marital life would mean the abandonment of the autonomous selfhood of the aesthete, devoid

Gender Trouble and the Crisis of Masculinity

133

of emotional ties, to form a union with a woman who has done no less than to provoke his crisis of masculinity. In an effort to regain his aesthetic distance from the object of his desire, he transforms Feíta into a masculinized ideal, distinguishing her from ‘la mujer general’ (the ordinary woman; 260). It is significant that Mauro closes his narration by affirming the singularity of the woman whom he has chosen as his mate (303); by maintaining Feíta’s distinction through the cult of aestheticism, Mauro is able to remain identified with the masculine until the very end. In view of the link that Felski has established between the crisis of masculinity and that of literary representation (91), it is significant that Pardo Bazán’s narrator announces a shift in strategies of narrative representation immediately following Feíta’s initial rejection of his marriage proposal, which results in a blow to his masculine identity. At this point (the beginning of chapter 22), Mauro interrupts the narration to address himself to the reader, declaring the need to ‘introducir en mi relato una ligera variante, puramente formal’ (introduce into my story a minor variation, of a purely formal nature; 263). That is, he asserts his narrative authority by choosing to imitate the novelists of ‘la escuela llamada del documento humano […] [novelistas] que jamás nos presentan comprobantes y justificantes de sus profundas y sutiles observaciones’ (the so-called school of human document … [novelists] who never provide proof or justification for their profound and subtle observations; 264). Mary Lee Bretz shows how such a shift in narrative procedures draws attention to the process of writing, foregrounding the novel’s ‘breaking of conventions,’ particularly its break from the central tenets of realism/naturalism (90). From this moment on, not only does Mauro abandon the role of disinterested observer, identified with the realist/ naturalist mode (Bretz 91), but his narration becomes increasingly melodramatic, with its plot of seduction, dishonour, and revenge ending in the tragic death of the family patriarch. Therefore, while Mauro seeks to reclaim the masculine authority of the realist narrator, he paradoxically finds himself undermining his own ideal of aesthetic distance and detachment. In a lecture given in 1916, Porvenir de la literatura después de la guerra (Future of Literature after the War), Pardo Bazán maintains that decadence began with the decline of naturalism. However, as John Kronik has pointed out, in spite of the feminist writer’s attack on decadentism’s extravagance and artifice, on its ‘desbordamientos literarios’ (literary excesses; qtd in Kronik, ‘Emilia Pardo Bazán’ 422), later in her criti-

134

Marginal Subjects

cal trajectory she defends those decadent artists (among them, Oscar Wilde) whom she considers to be endowed with an authentic and sublime genius, distinguishing them from the masses of inferior imitators (Kronik, ‘Emilia Pardo Bazán’ 422–3). Likewise, Mauro’s self-construction as an aesthete depends on an artistic vision that privileges pure form. We have seen how he has transformed himself into art, struggling constantly against the contamination of the body/matter, aesthetic conventionalism, and the inferior masses, all identified with the feminine. In the end, for both Mauro and for Pardo Bazán, the apparent opposition between naturalism and aestheticism becomes collapsed, insofar as both literary tendencies ultimately become troped as masculine – and, thus, elevated to the status of superior art. It is not merely gender, but also class, that plays a crucial role in the representation of the crisis of subjectivity in Memorias de un solterón. After Mauro begins to feel desire for Feíta, his anxiety about his uncertain masculinity finds expression in an obsessive rivalry with a working-class man with whom he believes he is competing for the object of his desire: ‘pensaba a todas horas en el compañero’ (he thought day and night about the compañero; 226). As his name signifies, Ramón Sobrado represents, in Mauro’s mind, a hyper-masculine subject whose ‘hermosura varonil’ (manly beauty; 226) stands in sharp contrast with his own effeminacy.34 In addition, his nickname, el compañero Sobrado (Comrade Sobrado), bears the mark of his social class, as well as his political affiliation. It is when he first meets the typographer face to face that Mauro becomes most acutely aware of class difference and, in particular, of the interrelatedness of his own class and sexual identities: he feels threatened by the potential loss of his social status when he sees his bourgeois effeminacy pitted against the hyper masculinity of the working-class man. If, as Harpring rightly states, ‘middleclass ideology depended on strict masculine and feminine categories’ (200), Mauro’s crisis of masculinity also casts in doubt his superior position within the class hierarchy as a bourgeois male subject. Thus, when Mauro faces the compañero in the café – that is, in the space of the working-class other – he struggles to assert his class superiority in order to compensate for his uncertain masculinity. Interestingly, when Feíta finally chooses Mauro over Ramón at the conclusion of the novel, she effectively acknowledges the superiority of the bourgeois aesthete – that is, his distinction over the former socialist-turned-bourgeois who now appears, in her eyes, ‘un tipo de lo más vulgar’ (a guy of the most vulgar variety; 303).

Gender Trouble and the Crisis of Masculinity

135

Although it may be the case that Pardo Bazán proposes new configurations of gender while attempting to maintain bourgeois class hegemony, I do not believe that bourgeois subjectivity can remain entirely untouched by challenges to gender normativity, given the interrelatedness of gender and class in this novel. Just as Mauro’s efforts to maintain a cult of male aestheticism are constantly undermined by his uneasy relationship to the feminine, one socialist worker’s transformation into a typical bourgeois does not remove the fear of an impending revolution that threatens an increasingly unstable and insecure bourgeoisie.35 The 1890s in Spain, when the action of the novel takes place, was also a period during which the threat, not only of gender anarchy, but also of political anarchism, loomed large in the popular imagination. This being said, while Pardo Bazán’s novel seeks to contain class rebellion through a rather facile manoeuvring of the plot at the end (a case in point is the legitimization of the union between Amparo and the bourgeois Baltasar Sobrado some twenty years later through a marriage forced by none other than el compañero, their illegitimate son), the crisis of gender/masculinity that the novel foregrounds through the selfconsciously ironic discourse of the narrator-protagonist is much more nuanced and complex. The format of the memoir allows Mauro, the narrator, to stand at a critical distance from the narrated subject, who struggles to confront and to contain his crisis of masculinity through his aesthetic self-fashioning. Thus it is not only through the invention of the New Woman but also through the self-conscious transformation of the masculine subject that Pardo Bazán seeks to challenge the established gender order and to create new spaces of subjectivity for both men and women.

5 Gender, Orientalism, and the Performance of National Identity in Pardo Bazán’s Insolación

The first four chapters addressed gender, sexuality, and class as the primary categories through which deviancy was expressed in the cultural representations of late nineteenth-century Spain. This chapter will foreground the ways in which discourses on the Spanish ‘race’ and nation also played a significant role in the formation of deviant subjectivities. As Susan Martin-Márquez has shown in Disorientations, the negotiations of race in Spain, particularly during the moment of imperial decline, were complex and oftentimes contradictory, representing an interplay of both biologistic and cultural notions of racial and national identity. It is, of course, a well-known historical fact that during the late nineteenth century Spain embarked on what Martin-Márquez has called a ‘second wave nation-building,’ through a renewal of its colonialist project in Africa, which served as a ‘compensatory gesture’ for the loss of colonies in the Americas (17–18). Thus, Africa and its cultural legacy, as represented by Andalusia, orientalized by the popular cultural imagination (Fernández Cifuentes, ‘Southern Exposure’ 133; Tofiño-Quesada 143), came to be an important signifier in discourses on Spanish national identity in the nineteenth century and beyond.1 Given this context, contemporary historians, such as Carl Jubran, have interrogated and critiqued the curious absence of Spain from studies on orientalism, beginning with that of Edward Said himself, whose work concentrates almost exclusively on the cases of France and Britain (3).2 Those who have studied the problem of orientalism in the Spanish context have noted the peculiarity of its situation, owing, presumably, to the nation’s racial and cultural hybridity. According to Joshua Goode, in spite of their differences, what nineteenth-century Spanish anthropologists had in common was their belief that the uniqueness of

Pardo Bazán’s Insolación

137

the Spanish ‘race’ rested on its history of racial mixture (28). Outlining how these theories of racial hybridity were institutionalized within the Spanish academies for the first time in the nineteenth century, most notably through the resurgence of the intellectual discipline of HispanoArabism, Jubran goes on to coin the term ‘internal orientalism’ to refer to ‘an internal process which involves the celebration of the “other” within the historiography of Spanish national culture and identity’ (45). The Spanish case would, therefore, complicate Said’s binary model of orientalism, whereby a culturally homogeneous European self was assumed to assert its superiority through the colonization of the oriental (in this case, Arab) ‘other’ (Jubran 45).3 In her insightful study of the relationship between gender and orientalism in three Spanish fin-desiglo novels, Kirsty Hooper cites Ignacio Tofiño-Quesada, who, for his part, addresses the problem of how ‘European conceptions of Spain as part of the Orient’ became internalized in discourses on Spanish national identity through representations of ‘the Self as Other.’ Hence, the paradox of Spanish orientalism is that it is ‘the narrative of a country that Orientalizes and indeed colonizes the Other (in this particular case, Africa), but which is described as Oriental itself’ (qtd in Hooper 172; Tofiño-Quesada 142–3).4 Said himself notes how European orientalist discourses of the nineteenth century were linked closely to scientific thought of the period that established a ‘division of races between advanced and backward, or European-Aryan and Oriental-African’ (206). For his part, Jesús Torrecilla shows, in his study of the formation of modern Spanish identity, that notions of Spain’s ‘Africanness’ since the eighteenth century had more to do with the perception of ‘its primitivism and backwardness, its lack of scientific development’ than with the nation’s Muslim heritage (España exótica 91–2). He adds: ‘the image of Africa can be substituted with any other (like Persia and Syria) that denotes backwardness or decadence’ (93). From the romantics who exoticized Spain identifying it with Africa, to late nineteenth-century scientific thinkers who linked national decadence to ‘racial’ backwardness, what they had in common was an essentialistic notion of Spain’s Africanness, in spite of the different values attached to it in different contexts (96–7).5 Pardo Bazán herself, as Brian Dendle has shown, was not only well acquainted with the racial theories which were being debated widely in the second half of the nineteenth century; she also participated actively in these debates. Her writings reflected many of the ideas of the Spanish anthropologists, for whom the notion of race was key to the

138

Marginal Subjects

definition of Spanish national identity (Goode, ‘Racial Alloy’ 33);6 for her, race was a crucial factor in the definition of Spanish national temperament or character. In fact, according to Dendle, Pardo Bazán’s scientific determinism regarding racial heredity came to form the basis of her literary naturalism (30–1). Throughout her writings, we see the impact of contemporary European thinkers who appropriated scientific discourse to justify racial inequalities and hierarchies: significant influences on her racial ideas include the work of the criminologist Lombroso and his followers, as well as of racialists, such as Gobineau, who unabashedly affirmed the superiority of the Indo-European (Aryan) race (Dendle 19).7 In her lecture on La revolución y la novela en Rusia (Revolution and the Novel in Russia), given at the Ateneo in 1887, Pardo Bazán asserts that ‘natural law’ dictates ‘la superioridad absoluta de la raza indoeuropea’ (the absolute superiority of the Indo-European race; 37), suggesting, furthermore, that the ‘purity of the races’ is scientifically demonstrable (41). Her racial ideas, however problematic they may seem from the modern standpoint, cannot be reduced to a univocal position, but, rather, they represent a form of cultural negotiation that reflects the same contradictions and ambiguities that characterized the constantly changing scientific discourses on race during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Pardo Bazán’s 1889 novel Insolación – written when both naturalism and racial theories were being debated widely in Spain – might be read as an allegory of the nation’s process of negotiation with its racial and cultural other. To be more precise, I refer to the relation of ‘northern’ Spain with Andalusia, its African-Oriental other, an ‘other’ that, nevertheless, forms a part of the nation’s cultural legacy and plays a crucial role in the construction of its identity. As Luis Fernández Cifuentes notes, it is paradoxical that, in the popular Spanish cultural imagination, the image of Andalusia represents ‘a form of primitive but authentic national identity,’ at the same time as it is identified with the African-oriental other (‘Southern Exposure’ 133). This paradox will be central to our analysis of the protagonist’s confrontation with national identity in Pardo Bazán’s novel. Insolación takes the orientalist myth of Andalusia as a point of departure for the female protagonist Asís’s negotiations of gender through which she comes into being as a desiring subject. Many critics have focused on the construction of her discourse of desire, as she gradually gains a consciousness and, eventually, an acceptance of her own body and sexuality. Elizabeth Scarlett centres her analysis on the female pro-

Pardo Bazán’s Insolación

139

tagonist’s inner struggle with her sexuality, which ‘turns the body into a main character’ of the novel (11). Tolliver, too, notes the centrality of the ‘problematic of the expression of feminine sexuality’ in the novel (103). For Noël Valis, the protagonist’s body plays a crucial role in mediating between psychic and social spaces, reinforcing the permeability between the two (‘Confesión y cuerpo’ 323). What is, however, most noteworthy is that the coming-into-being of the female desiring subject depends on the orientalization – and concomitant feminization – of the masculine object of desire, an Andalusian with whom the former commits an act of sexual transgression. In Insolación Pardo Bazán provokes reflections on the nature of the relationship between gender and orientalism by structuring the novel around a series of dichotomies: the feminine vs the masculine, north (Galicia) vs south (Andalusia), the European vs the oriental/African, civilization vs barbarism, and reason vs passion (Torrecilla, ‘Un país’). While Torrecilla maintains that the two masculine figures, Gabriel Pardo and Diego Pacheco, who vie for the female protagonist’s attention, represent each side of these dichotomies, I would argue that the ironic discourse of the novel constantly problematizes these oppositions – and, in the end, all but dismantles them (‘Un país’).8 Moreover, Pardo Bazán’s reconstruction of Galicia as the civilized, ‘European’ north is highly paradoxical, given the popular stereotype of Galicia in the nineteenth-century Spanish cultural imaginary as a rural, poor, and backward region with a high rate of migration to other parts of Spain and abroad. This region of the north was perceived – and rightfully so – to be untouched by the modernizing influence that shaped the urban centres of the other regions of the ‘north,’ such as Castile and Catalonia (Álvarez Junco and Schubert 164).9 In the final analysis, the construction of the Andalusian ‘other,’ in relation to northern Spain, which represents the normative referent, leaves us with a series of questions regarding the novel’s relationship to orientalist discourse. Does the novel seek to affirm the myth of a pure and authentic Spanish national identity, as set against the otherness of the Andalusian? Or does the figure of the Andalusian, on the contrary, stand as a symbol of the authentically Spanish, echoing European orientalist discourses on Spain (Torrecilla, ‘Un país’ 259)? Or does the novel reflect a fundamental ambivalence, or a more complex negotiation, between these positions? Finally, given the way in which orientalist discourse intersects with that of female desire in Pardo Bazán’s novel, we need to ask exactly how notions of gender and racial identity

140

Marginal Subjects

are played out in the constitution of the desiring female subject. Does Asís undermine the casticismo and the sexual norms imposed on her by the dominant social order by committing an act of sexual transgression with the orientalized other?10 Or is she, in the end, reduced to the object of conquest of a man who performs consciously the role of the orientalized other in order to colonize the female body and consciousness? It is far from coincidental that Pardo Bazán introduces the polemic surrounding the problem of national identity in the second chapter, precisely when the narrator gives way to Asís’s first-person narration. Structured in the form of a confession, Asís’s narration links images of her disordered body to her desire for Pacheco, awakened for the first time when she meets the Andalusian at the Duchess of Sahagún’s tertulia.11 A triangular dynamic develops, as Gabriel Pardo, Asís’s Galician compatriot and suitor who is also in attendance at the Duchess’s tertulia, initiates a polemic about the Spanish ‘race’ and national identity. As Jesús Filguera Ganzo has observed, it is in this chapter that the novel establishes ‘territorial distinctions’ – between the capital (Madrid), the north (Galicia), and the south (Andalusia) – that form the basis of this polemic that continues throughout the novel (84). Serving, perhaps, as a spokesperson for Pardo Bazán’s own ideas on the Spanish race, Gabriel links Spain’s national character to what he believes to be its racial ancestry, asserting that ‘España es un país tan salvaje como el África central, que todos tenemos sangre africana, beduina, árabe’ (Spain is a country as savage as central Africa, for we all have African, Bedouin, Arab blood), and that despite the facade of progress represented by ‘esas músicas de ferrocarriles, telégrafos, fábricas, escuelas, ateneos, libertad política y periódicos […] lo verdaderamente nacional y genuino, la barbarie, subsiste, prometiendo durar por los siglos de los siglos’ (all that talk about railroads, telegraphs, factories, schools, Ateneos, political freedom and periodicals … barbarism, what is truly and genuinely national, subsists, promising to last for centuries; 49–50). He follows up on his thoughts by advancing the naturalist thesis that ‘el primer rayito de sol de España’ (the first little ray of light from the Spanish sun; 50) would be sufficient to produce this barbarism, which, in his view, constitutes the true Spanish national character. Echoing European cultural discourses of the period, Gabriel Pardo not only proclaims the nation’s essential Africanness, but also presents Andalusia as the emblem of authentic Spain. Lou Charnon-Deutsch explains how Andalusia, since the romantic period, has come to embody the myth of the exotic, yet more authentic other in the eyes of foreign

Pardo Bazán’s Insolación

141

travellers from the northern regions of Europe: ‘At roughly the same time that the Orient was “invented,” as Edward Said put it, by Europeans, Andalusia was constructed as a dream world where time could be slowed, life savored to its fullest, and the disturbances and hypocrisy of the modern, “civilized” world of large European capitals avoided’ (The Spanish Gypsy 59). Moreover, the north/south antithesis within Spain, between the ‘civilized’ north and the ‘barbaric’ south ruled by passions, represents a transposition of the European romantic archetypes of the Nordic versus the Mediterranean temperament. In spite of Gabriel Pardo’s view that barbarism is the unifying essence of the Spanish national character (‘se nivelan las clases ante la ordinariez y la ferocidad general’ [class differences are levelled out by their general vulgarity and ferocity; 50]; ‘en las unidades nacionales […] veo una raza, que se determina históricamente’ [in national unities … I see a race that’s historically determined; 53]), he claims there are regional differences, asserting that his homeland Galicia is ‘la porción más apacible y sensata de España’ (the most peaceful and sensible part of Spain; 52) in contrast to the ‘savagery’ of the south. Speaking from a position of both northerner (Galician, as opposed to Andalusian) and southerner (Spaniard, as opposed to northern European), he negotiates the multiple and contradictory discourses that inform his construction as a national subject. That is to say, he embodies the paradoxes inherent in the definition of Spanish national identity as both unity and difference. Significantly, it is in the context of Pardo’s dispute with the Duchess about national identity that Pacheco makes his appearance into the scene as a stereotypical Andalusian, identified, as Torrecilla has noted, with all that is local, ‘popular,’ and picturesque, including gypsy and flamenco cultures (‘Un país’ 259). The parody of the Don Juan archetype – another literary rendering of the Andalusian myth – adds yet another dimension to Pacheco’s characterization.12 In the Duchess’s tertulia Pacheco intervenes in the dialogue, precisely, in defence of Andalusia – and, in particular, of the cultural refinement of its inhabitants, among whom are, in his words, ‘poetas, pintores, escritores’ (poets, painters, writers; 53). As the novel progresses, he becomes an increasingly overdetermined sign of Andalusianness. Asís, as well as the third-person narrator, repeatedly call attention to his geographical origin, referring to him as ‘andaluz’ (Andalusian), ‘gaditano’ (native of Cádiz), or ‘meridional’ (southerner), and characterizing him by his ‘acento andaluz’ (Andalusian accent; 60), his ceceo (70), to mark his condition as an outsider to Madrid.13 In fact, Pacheco, at one point in the novel, refers to

142

Marginal Subjects

himself as ‘forastero’ (outsider; 60). The relationship that the novel establishes between Andalusianness and Spanishness, however, continues to fluctuate and, ultimately, remains ambiguous. For Torrecilla the Andalusianization of Spain represents implicitly a manifestation of the author’s own ‘defensive nationalism,’ that is, her exaltation of an ‘authentic,’ yet denigrated, Spanish identity in the face of European modernity (‘Un país’ 255). Yet the celebration of Andalusia as the true emblem of Spain is undermined through the ironization of Pardo’s own perspective, as he spouts his theory of national identity in which he identifies the Spanish race with southern barbarism. The irony of Pardo’s depiction of Pacheco, in the second chapter of the novel, as ‘buen ejemplar de la raza española’ (fine example of the Spanish race; 57) becomes increasingly apparent, as the Andalusian comes to represent national decadence, ‘uno de los tipos que mejor patentizan la decadencia de la raza española’ (one of the types that best evince the decadence of the Spanish race; 166). Gabriel thus echoes the discourse of racial atavism prevalent in the fin de siglo, suggesting that the Andalusian belongs to an inferior, degenerate race, in contrast to Asís, ‘que es de otra raza muy distinta’ (who is of a very different race; 167).14 What is noteworthy is the way in which essentialist myths of national, regional, and racial identity within Spain intersect with European discourses of degeneration originating outside of Spain to establish and reinforce social hierarchies based on race. As Campos Marín et al. note, the appropriation of French degenerationist theory by late nineteenthcentury Spanish physicians, who believed the entire Spanish race to be in danger, undoubtedly had much to do with the anxieties provoked by the nation’s imperial decline, which culminated in the defeat of 1898 (161). It is not only Gabriel Pardo, but also Asís herself, who constructs an image of her future lover on the basis of his racial (and implicitly ‘national’) features. When she first meets Pacheco, Asís observes that ‘aunque andaluz, le encontré más bien trazas inglesas’ (though Andalusian, he seemed to me to have the appearance of an Englishman; 53), associating his physical traits with those of the northern European.15 During their subsequent encounter, she makes note of what she perceives as ‘la mezcla de razas’ (racial mixture) in Pacheco’s features: ‘Con un pelo negrísimo y una tez quemada del sol, casaban mal aquel bigote dorado y aquellos ojos azules’ (that golden mustache and those blue eyes didn’t match his jet black hair and sunburnt complexion very well; 64).16 In spite of Pacheco’s assertion that ‘soy español de pura san-

Pardo Bazán’s Insolación

143

gre’ (I’m a pure-blooded Spaniard; 64), what fascinates Asís is the racial mixture that the Andalusian embodies: a mixture between what is most authentic about Spanish identity and what is exotic for its foreignness. That is to say, ‘la mezcla de razas’ (racial mixture; 64) that Asís sees in Pacheco undermines not only his claim to racial purity, but also the very notion of racial purity as the basis of national identity. Elizabeth Scarlett notes that, in Insolación, ‘racial difference and gender difference appear linked, as enabling conditions for desire’ (37). Pacheco, whose racial difference is evoked continually throughout the novel, is a kin of a sort to the feminized dandy figure Mauro Pareja in Memorias de un solterón, who, as we have seen, transforms himself self-consciously into an aesthetic artefact. Likewise, in Insolación, Asís makes note of Pacheco’s self-adornment, from the first moment in which his elegant dress captures her attention. For the female protagonist, Pacheco, with his ‘traje ceniza, elegante, de paño rico y flexible’ (elegant, ash-coloured suit made from pliant and luxurious woollen cloth), is a perfect ‘galán’ (handsome young man; 77); her eyes gaze upon his ‘cuello delgado y airoso’ (thin and graceful neck; 65), ‘el pelo […] sedoso,’ ‘la blancura de sus dientes’ (his silky hair, the whiteness of his teeth; 77) – a description that brings to mind idealized feminine archetypes in literature and the arts from the Renaissance to Romanticism. Later in the novel the third-person narrator insists, once again, on parodying this archetype of the feminized aesthete through Asís’s eyes: ‘el galán venía todo soplado, con una camisa y un chaleco como el ampo de la nieve, el ojal guarnecido de fresquísimo clavel, guantes de piel de perro flamantitos, y, en suma, todas las señales de haberse acicalado mucho’ (the handsome young man was all dressed up, wearing a shirt and a vest like a snowflake, the buttonhole decorated with a fresh carnation, luxurious leather gloves made of dog hide, in sum, all the signs of having groomed himself with care; 142). The self-adornment of the dandy figure, as we have seen in the case of Mauro in Memorias de un solterón, represents a conscious performance of gender. The evocation of the feminized dandy figure goes hand in hand with the narrator’s orientalization of Pacheco as the racial other, reflecting the gendered representation of Andalusia itself in the late nineteenth century as the exotic female other in relation to the masculinized ‘modern, industrialized’ north (Charnon-Deutsch, Fictions 210). One of the fundamental questions raised by the novel is that of the positioning of the female subject in relation to the discourses of gender and orientalism. A more general question is why Pardo Bazán seems

144

Marginal Subjects

to have a preference for ‘the Arab type,’ as Marina Mayoral suggests, to represent the image of the masculine other who awakens transgressive desires in the bourgeois/aristocratic woman (‘De Insolación’ 132).17 Interestingly, although Asís is Galician – and her compatriot Pardo defines her ‘nationality’ as such – in many ways she is more identified with the nation’s centre, given her long-time residence in Madrid and the casticismo implicit in her class attitudes. As a Galician of aristocratic standing, she assumes the ‘anti-Southern prejudices of Castilians and other Spaniards’ (Scarlett 37). As we have seen, Asís inverts traditional gender hierarchies that cast the man as the subject and the woman as the object of desire by assuming the position of the female colonizing subject who transforms the masculine other into the object of her orientalist gaze. As in colonialist discourse, Asís’s narrative of desire carries out, implicitly, the domestication of the other, who provokes feelings of ambivalence in the colonizing subject (Bhabha 73). To draw on Homi Bhabha’s observations on colonialist discourse in relation to Pardo Bazán’s novel, the colonizing ‘I’ – represented by Asís, who looks upon the other, represented by the orientalized figure of the Andalusian – finds herself vacillating between ‘the recognition of cultural and racial difference and its disavowal’ (73), as she seeks to overcome the anxiety evoked by what is foreign to her.18 On the one hand, Asís’s discourse of desire depends largely on the exoticization and primitivization of an Andalusian man who exercises a seductive appeal, precisely because he represents otherness. On the other, Asís, as we have already seen, identifies Pacheco’s difference, paradoxically, with what, in her imagination, most authentically captures the national essence (‘lo castizo’): the festival of San Isidro to honour the patron saint of Madrid, and the fondas and merenderos where the common people gather.19 Even as Asís legitimizes her desire through her discourse, she maintains an ambivalent attitude toward the racial other. Her desire for Pacheco clearly represents an act of transgression, as an emblem of all that has been forbidden a woman of her position, through her socialization.20 As she gradually gives in to her desire, she allows herself to fall under the seductive appeal of the Andalusian, who takes her out of her familiar social space, exposing her to the dangers of nature (symbolized by the recurrent image of the sun) and of the ‘atmósfera popular’ (popular atmosphere; 69). Asís’s physical displacement from Madrid’s urban centre – as she travels down la calle de Toledo through the popular neighbourhoods of the south to reach the outskirts of the city – reflects her deviation from established norms of conduct and morality. It is on

Pardo Bazán’s Insolación

145

the periphery of the city that her ‘resbalón’ (slip-up; 94) – that is, what she perceives as her moral downfall – occurs. As Jesús Filgueira Ganzo has suggested, the novel’s topography constantly points to ‘the border between center and periphery, which is a social, emotional and literary border’ (89). It goes without saying, of course, that Asís has left the domestic space of the respectable home to enter a public space where, in her words, ‘no había más personas regulares que nosotros’ (other than us, there were no normal people; 69). Thus, she loses her ‘purity,’ understood also as ‘casticismo,’ literally and symbolically, mixing not only with the Andalusian, but also with the common people, ‘mendigos, fenómenos, chiquillos, harapientos, gitanas, buñoleras y vendedoras’ (beggars, freaks, children, men in tattered clothing, gypsy women, fritter bakers, and peddlers; 69). Ironically, while the aristocratic classes traditionally looked to ‘popular culture’ to find lo castizo, Asís’s actual contact with the popular classes and her attempts to imitate them ’corrupt’ her and, in fact, make her ill.21 The ‘mareo’ (dizziness) that Asís begins to feel, under the influence of alcohol and the sun, appears to bring her close to the state of ‘salvajismo y [la] barbarie’ (savagery and barbarism; 85), which, according to Gabriel Pardo, characterizes all Spaniards, regardless of social class, gender, or region of origin. If desire and the force of ‘nature’ threaten to collapse all distinctions – social, cultural, and regional – Asís seeks to maintain them by affirming Pacheco’s difference. Elizabeth Amann rightfully calls attention to the theatrical nature of the entire festival scene, characterizing it as a ‘national performance,’ an ‘enactment of Spanishness’ (180). When Asís sees the lively interactions of the common people by the Manzanares River, the scene reminds her of ‘escenas animadísimas de esas que se pintan en las panderetas’ (those very lively scenes of the type that are painted on tambourines; 65), which evoke a stereotypical image of ‘Spanishness,’ as if it were a representation of local colour meant for the tourist. Asís’s vision of the festival is perfectly in sync with that of the Duchess – an Andalusian, like Pacheco – who describes it as ‘de lo más entretenido y pintoresco’ (most entertaining and picturesque; 55). Pacheco, for his part, participates actively in this performance: ‘Pacheco me propuso que, para adoptar el tono de la fiesta, comprásemos una botita muy cuca que colgaba sobre el escaparate y la llenásemos de Valdepeñas’ (Pacheco proposed to me that, to get into the spirit of the party, we should buy a cute little boot that was hanging in the shop window and fill it with Valdepeñas wine; 65). Paradoxically, it is through a con-

146

Marginal Subjects

sciously theatrical act that he seeks to authenticate this experience of typical Spanishness, which the festival of San Isidro represents for the lovers. The entire scene acquires an increasingly parodic overtone, as Diego and Asís begin to hear ‘los pianos mecánicos que nos aporrean los oídos con el pasodoble de Cádiz repitiendo desde treinta sitios de la romería: ¡Vi-Va España!’ (mechanical pianos that pound on our ears with the pasodoble Cádiz repeating from all over the pilgrimage site: Long Live Spain! 68). It is significant, in this context, that Cádiz is a comic opera (zarzuela) with an openly nationalistic theme.22 Although the plot of the opera centres on a love story, according to José Prieto Marugán, its true protagonist are the people of Cádiz who patriotically defended the city against Napoleon during the siege of 1812. Prieto Marugán notes that when the work debuted in Madrid in 1886 it was met with popular acclaim, having awakened strong nationalist sentiments in the audience. The rhythm of the pasodoble that closes the first act, to which the soldiers of Cádiz march against the French invaders, became immensely popular and, subsequently, served as a marching song for the Spaniards during the Spanish-American War. Through a reference to this particular zarzuela, as a metaphor for the characters’ own national performance, the novel highlights the performative nature of Spanish national identity. If Pacheco seeks to authenticate the experience of Spanishness through his self-conscious performance, it is, in part, to cater to Asís’s desire to see the San Isidro festival as a symbol of what Pardo had previously characterized as ‘otra manifestación bien genuina de la vida nacional’ (another really genuine manifestation of national life; 51). When Pacheco and Asís, looking for a restaurant in which to have their midday meal, come across the only merendero in sight, Asís remarks that the establishment ‘tenía más carácter’ (had more character; 73) than the more elegant fondas in which she has been accustomed to dining. By ‘carácter,’ she refers to an implicit set of characteristics, which in the popular imagination mark the establishment’s authenticity, thus distinguishing it from others that do not have these same traits. The irony, of course, is that the very notion of ‘character,’ which presumably makes the merendero most authentic, is in fact a form of imitation, an anachronistic rendering of a myth, equivalent to bringing a Romantic cuadro de costumbres to life.23 As Pardo has remarked in his earlier disquisition on national identity, Spanishness is, in his view, a performance bordering on parody: ‘una Españita bufa, de tapiz de Goya o sainete de don

Pardo Bazán’s Insolación

147

Ramón de la Cruz’ (a farcical Spain, right out of a tapestry by Goya or a one-act play by Ramón de la Cruz; 55). It is no more than a ‘moda’ (fashion; 55) to be imitated. The more Asís seeks to approximate what she understands to be the essence of Spanish national identity, the more it becomes exposed as an absurd parody, an ‘imitation for which there is no original,’ to adopt Judith Butler’s words in another context (‘Imitation’ 21).24 Likewise, Pacheco’s efforts to reproduce an authentic experience of Spanishness for Asís is predicated on his own transfiguration into the exotic other. It is precisely in the popular atmosphere of the merendero that Asís gains a heightened awareness of the ‘racial’ features that mark Pacheco’s otherness: ‘parecía doblemente morena su tez […] doblemente tostada’ (his complexion seemed doubly dark-skinned … doubly tanned; 77). The appearance of the gypsy fortune-teller highlights further the performance of national identity being enacted in the merendero scene, as the gypsies are, of course, perceived to be an emblem of Andalusia in the popular imagination.25 When the lovers find themselves with an entire group of gypsies, Pacheco goads on their performance of Andalusianness, urging them to bring out their guitars and ‘cantase por lo más jondo’ (sing in Flamenco style; 81). Asís, for her part, is seduced by this performance, as she is by Pacheco’s role in it, noting that she is ‘más divertida que en un sainete’ (more amused than watching a one-act comedy; 81). The metaphor of the sainete is quite apropos here, as this genre has been identified with costumbrismo, and in the nineteenth century it became increasingly characterized, according to Josep Maria Salas Valldaura, by the ‘rendering of the image of the Spaniard and of authentic Spanishness as southern’ (qtd in Harney 315). Lucy Harney, commenting on Valldaura’s work, makes note of the ‘conspicuous privileging of Andalusia and the barrios bajos (populated predominantly by inhabitants of Andalusian extraction) as the settings of sainetes, a practice which began with de la Cruz and would persist throughout the genre’s history’ (315). The larger question is, precisely, the cultural significance of such renderings of Andalusia. If Asís implicitly compares the performance of the gypsies to a sainete, such a comparison reflects the privileging of a particular image of Andalusia on the part of the dominant social classes, which had a stake in transforming this region into the emblem of authentic Spanishness. We can see how Spain’s ‘defensive nationalism,’ to return to Torrecilla’s concept, comes into play in maintaining such a symbolic construction of the nation, particularly

148

Marginal Subjects

given the context of Spain’s imperial decline in the nineteenth century, and the concomitant fear of foreign influence (‘Un país’ 255). Asís’s search for the essence of Spanishness is imbricated in issues of class, as well as in those of race and nation. The merendero scene is one in which Asís’s own class attitudes become most apparent. The contrast between the hands of the protagonist and the gypsy woman who approaches her highlights most starkly the class differences between the two characters: La mano de la gitana, al lado de la mía, parecía un pedazo de cecina feísimo: la tumbaga de plata, donde resplandecía una esmeralda falsa espantosa, contribuía a que resaltase el color cobrizo de la garra aquella, y claro está que mi diestra, que es algo chica, pulida y blanca, con anillos de perlas, zafiros y brillantes, contrastaba extrañamente. (77) The hand of the gypsy woman, next to mine, looked like a very ugly piece of cured meat: the silver metal, where a hideously fake emerald sparkled, made the copper colour of that claw stand out; and, of course, it contrasted oddly with my right hand, which is rather small, smooth and white, with its rings of pearl, sapphire and diamond.

Beyond dehumanizing the other, reducing her to a ‘pedazo de cecina’ (piece of cured meat), Asís classifies all of the common people who make their appearance in the merendero, whether gypsies or chulas, into the common category of ‘tunantes, embusteronas’ (villains and scam artists; 79) who threaten the social hierarchy by mingling with her in the same space. She begins to perceive all those who represent the social and racial other as colluding to subvert, in her own words, ‘nociones de la corrección y de la jerarquía social’ (notions of correctness and of social hierarchy; 80). That is to say, the exoticism of the other maintains its appeal while it remains a mental image, a mere representation – like the common people in the costumbrista scenes painted on the tambourines – however, it becomes a potential threat to her own identity with the actual transgression of the boundaries between self and other, colonizer and colonized, centre and margin. Asís finds it increasingly difficult to distinguish herself from the social, racial, and national other, as she becomes drawn into the common mix – ’la ola del gentío’ (throng of people; 87) – by the equalizing forces of the sun and alcohol, recalling Pardo’s words that under the effect of the Spanish sun ‘se nivelan las clases ante la ordinariez y la ferocidad

Pardo Bazán’s Insolación

149

general’ (class differences are levelled out by their general vulgarity and ferocity; 50). Reflecting retrospectively on her act of transgression, Asís reluctantly acknowledges this erasure of distinctions, claiming ‘Aquí estoy yo, que me he portado como una chula’ (Here I am behaving like a low-class woman from Madrid; 96). The solution that she proposes for herself, in her mind, is to escape from the pernicious influence of the southern sun – and of the southerner she holds responsible for exposing her to its effects – ’en tomando el tren de Galicia’ (taking the train to Galicia; 96), that is, by travelling back home to the north. The journey she anticipates represents a symbolic return to her proper place, to ‘civilized’ society ruled by reason, and to all that is antithetical to the barbarism of the south. Nevertheless, it is significant that Asís postpones this journey back to Galicia until the end of the novel; in fact, the actual journey has yet to take place when the novel closes. From this moment onward, she becomes increasingly aware of the conflict between self and other, sameness and difference, symbolized by the north/south polarity – a conflict complicated by her ‘racial’ and class positioning. Asís’s first outing with Pacheco, which culminates in the merendero scene, precipitates the course of her desire; this desire, in turn, is intertwined closely with her negotiations of national identity. As in La desheredada, Fortunata y Jacinta, and La Tribuna, the spatial trajectory of the female desiring subject through the urban space reflects symbolically her efforts to traverse boundaries and to mark out new spaces of subjectivity. The metaphor of the mareo in Insolación aptly captures not only the bewilderment that the protagonist experiences as she begins to acknowledge her desire, but also the confusion that results from the transgression of social, racial, national, and spatial boundaries. The state of disarray in which Pacheco finds her living room – ’el mayor número posible de cosas inconexas […] Todo revuelto, colocado de la manera que más dificultase el paso a la gente’ (the greatest possible number of unrelated things … All mixed up, placed so that people would not be able to make their way through; 108) – reflects symbolically the state of disorder in which the protagonist finds herself. If female characters like Fortunata, Isidora, and Amparo, who belong to the working class or the petty bourgeoisie, consciously resist the social norm, even revelling in their acts deviation, Asís’s aristocratic background binds her more closely to the social centre in spite of her act of transgression. On awakening from her state of inebriation the morning after her outing with Pacheco, Asís heads north toward the Castellana to

150

Marginal Subjects

call on her devoutly religious and unemancipated spinster aunts, and later that evening takes a stroll through the Barrio de Salamanca with her Galician compatriot, Gabriel Pardo. The latter’s appearance, which immediately follows Pacheco’s unexpected visit to the protagonist’s home, highlights the triangular nature of her relationship not only with the two men who vie for her attention, but also with the national characteristics they represent. Asís’s paseos (strolls) through the aristocratic neighbourhoods off of the Castellana are set in sharp contrast with her escapade with Pacheco the previous day, which took her through the working-class neighbourhoods in Madrid’s southern peripheries to the countryside of San Isidro. During the Restoration period, the newly constructed Recoletos/ Castellana neighbourhoods of the barrio de Salamanca became the ‘new hub of the nobility/bourgeoisie’ of the nation’s capital (Juliá 420). In Insolación, the ‘ambiente oxigenado y oloroso, espacio libre, y una bóveda de firmamento que parece más elevada que en el resto de Madrid’ (atmosphere of fresh and fragrant air, open space and vault of the sky that appears more elevated than the rest of Madrid; 114), and the silhouettes of the elegant buildings that Asís observes during her evening stroll through this new district of the city, represent the antithesis of the cramped and crowded, if more picturesque, neighbourhoods of the south. What is, however, most noteworthy in this scene is the cautiousness and restraint that she exercises to conceal from Pardo her desire for the Andalusian, so as to maintain her social respectability. It is as if she were enacting through her spatial trajectory a symbolic rejection of the ‘barbaric’ south, represented by Pacheco, to return home to the ‘civilized’ north, represented by Pardo. Asís’s symbolic trajectory, however, fails to banish her desire for the south/erner, as the image of Pacheco’s tarjetero (wallet), which Pardo has discovered in her living room, haunts both her and her companion throughout the evening. The irony is that Pardo, who, at least in this scene, appears to serve as the feminist author’s direct spokesperson, implicitly defends Asís’s act of transgression by condemning society’s double standard when it comes to defining morality for men and women. The consequence is that not only does Asís find herself justifying her ‘resbalón’ by acknowledging Pardo’s naturalist thesis in spite of her initial resistance to his theory, but in her words, ‘veía tambalearse infinitas ideas de las que había creído más sólidas y firmes hasta entonces’ (she saw boundless ideas that she had believed to be most solid

Pardo Bazán’s Insolación

151

and firm until now tottering; 123). The clear-cut oppositions – north and south, reason and passion, civilization and barbarism – which had previously defined Asís’s world, become dismantled, as her relationship to both terms of the opposition becomes increasingly complex. The scene that follows (chapter 16), in which Asís allows Pacheco, for the first time, to come to her home with her explicit permission, represents a turning point in her struggle to assert herself as a desiring subject through her negotiations of gender and nationality. Throughout the chapter, the narrator repeatedly refers to Pacheco as ‘el meridional’ (the southerner), defining his identity, once again, on the basis of his southern origin. His self-conscious performance of the role of Don Juan – an Andalusian himself, we must not forget – becomes most apparent in his deliberate manipulations of romantic discourse in the attempt to seduce the female protagonist (Zecchi 299–300). In fact, the narrator calls Pacheco ‘el amante’ (the lover; 133) for the first time in this scene, implying that the seduction will soon become a fait accompli. A major part of this chapter is presented in dialogue form with little intervention from the narrator; moreover, Pacheco’s exaggerated parody of romantic literary language, to the point of cursilería – ‘esta eterna vulgaridad’ (this eternal vulgarity; 138), the narrator calls it – confers on the entire scene a tone of overt theatricality, to the point that Asís herself observes that ‘Cuando uno habla así … me parece cosa de novela o de comedia’ (When one talks like this … it seems like something out of a novel or a play; 137). What is noteworthy here is that Asís is now able to see Pacheco’s performance as such, even as she acknowledges openly her desire for him for the first time. More significantly, she recognizes that the object of her desire is, precisely, the performance that the Andalusian’s identity constitutes: La dama se dedicó a recordar mil pormenores, que reunidos formaban lindo mosaico de gracias y méritos de su adorador. La pasión con que requebraba; el donaire con que pedía; la gentileza de su persona; su buen porte, tan libre de menor conato de gomosería impertinente como de encogimiento provinciano; su rara mezcla de espontaneidad popular y cortesía hidalga; sus rasgos calaverescos y humorísticos, unidos a cierta hermosa tristeza romántica (conjunto, dicho sea de paso, que forma el hechizo peculiar de los polos, soleares y demás canciones andaluzas), eran otros tantos motivos que la dama se alegaba a sí propia para excusar su debilidad y aquella afición avasalladora que sentía apoderarse de su alma. (139)

152

Marginal Subjects

The lady spent her time remembering thousands of details which, all together, formed a pretty mosaic of the charms and merits of her adorer. The passion with which he flattered her; the wit with which he begged her; the gracefulness of his person; his fine bearing, totally free of even the slightest hint of both impertinent presumption and provincial timidity; his rare blend of the spontaneity of the common folk and the courtesy of the gentleman; his reckless and comic qualities combined with a certain beautiful and romantic sadness (a combination, let it be said in passing, which makes up the special charm of the polos, soleares and other Andalusian songs), were additional reasons that the lady put forward to excuse her weakness and that overwhelming fondness that was taking possession of her soul.

Asís’s thoughts, therefore, reveal that the object of her desire is a hybrid of opposing tendencies that dismantle the north/south, civilization/ barbarism binary established in her mind. The metaphor of the Andalusian popular songs to characterize Pacheco suggests, once again, the performative nature of national identity, as he becomes identified with a popular cultural form that presumably enacts Andalusianness. Asís’s words, ‘Estos andaluces nacen actores ‘ (These Andalusians are born actors; 140), show her awareness that the Andalusianness she finds so charming in Pacheco is always already a performance, just like the popular songs and other ‘typical’ manifestations of Andalusian popular culture – whether it is gitanismo or flamenquismo – which have come to be invested with regionalist and nationalist connotations.26 In her final, but futile, attempt to resist her desire for the other that threatens her subjectivity, she convinces herself that her only remedy is the ‘extracto de Vigo’ (extract of Vigo; 140), that is, a return to her northern homeland of Galicia, which stands antithetical to Andalusia and to all that it symbolizes. Yet the journey to the north is postponed once again, due to the force of Asís’s desire. The Andalusian lures her back to her deviant path, if not literally to the south, then to the southern sun, ‘el sol instigador y cómplice de todo aquel enredo sin antecedentes, sin finalidad y sin excusa’ (the sun, instigator and accomplice to all that intrigue without cause, without purpose and without excuse; 145), by proposing yet another excursion away from the centre of the city. This time, Pacheco takes her to Las Ventas, passing through a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Madrid, ‘una comarca la más escuálida, seca y triste que puede imaginarse’ (the most squalid, dry and miserable region that can be imagined; 146), which presents a striking contrast with ‘la zona del Re-

Pardo Bazán’s Insolación

153

tiro’ (the Retiro district; 146) to which Asís is accustomed. Such neighbourhoods on the peripheries of the capital, among them, Las Ventas, were constructed during the late nineteenth century to accommodate the immigrants from the rural areas for whom there was no affordable housing in the central neighbourhoods and, much less, in the newly constructed ensanche (suburban development; Juliá 426). As in her first excursion with Pacheco, Asís, an honourable aristocratic woman, finds herself out of place once again in an unknown territory on the peripheries of the urban centre. And, as in the San Isidro episode, she discovers herself, to her alarm, in ‘un sitio de los más públicos’ (a most public place; 146), having deviated from the ‘proper place’ of a woman in her social position. Once again, the narrator calls attention to the protagonist’s deviance by already referring to the pair as ‘amantes’ (lovers; 148), even before their relationship is consummated. The lovers’ excursion to Las Ventas virtually replicates the scene of their first excursion to the San Isidro Festival, as Asís herself observes with consternation: ‘¿Otro San Isidro tenemos?’ (Do we have another San Isidro? 146). Upon making their transition from the upscale Retiro neighbourhood to the more squalid zones on the outskirts of the city near the bullfighting plaza, the narrator, adopting Asís’s viewpoint in free indirect style, makes note of the theatricality of the protagonist’s trajectory, characterizing it as a ‘sorpresa escenográfica’ (scenographic surprise; 147). Continuing with the theatrical metaphor, the narrator adds, as if Asís were an actress on stage: ‘en primer término, escombros y solares marcados con empalizadas; y allá en el horizonte, parodia de algún grandioso y feroz anfiteatro romano, la plaza de toros’ (in the foreground, garbage and pieces of land marked by fences; and there on the horizon, a parody of some grandiose and ferocious Roman ampitheatre, the bullfighting ring; 147). Searching for a place to have their midday meal, the lovers come across an establishment whose appearance strikes Asís as ‘original y curioso’ (original and strange; 148); thus she echoes her portrayal of the first merendero as having ‘character,’ as if she were describing a scene out of a costumbrista novel. If, as Zecchi has noted, Pardo Bazán’s novel parodies the idealism of the sentimental novel (294), this second merendero scene in which the lovers are brought to a ‘salita […] pequeña, recogida, misteriosa’ (small room, secluded, mysterious; 149) – the lover’s nest, complete with a bed behind the curtains – exemplifies such a parody. The novel appears to set us up for an idealized love scene of the kind that might be found in a sentimental novel, only to deflate our expectations by unmasking Asís’s sexual

154

Marginal Subjects

desire for what it is; the protagonist herself suffers disillusionment as soon as she is struck (and embarrassed) by the utter vulgarity of her own situation. This second merendero scene also mimics the San Isidro episode almost exactly, particularly when the common folk enter into the establishment where the lovers are dining to stage a performance similar to that staged by the gypsies in the first part of the novel. Although the ‘operarias de la Fábrica de Tabacos’ (female tobacco factory workers; 150) who make their appearance in the restaurant speak with the ‘acento de la plebe madrileña’ (accent of the common people of Madrid; 151), Asís transforms these women, as she did with the gypsies in the first merendero scene, into the representatives of the Spain of ‘patriotismo y flamenquería, guitarreo y cante jondo, panderetas con madroños colorados’ (patriotism and flamenquism, guitar strumming and deep song, tambourines decorated with red strawberry bushes; 55), evoking the Andalusian myth once again. The narrator recurs repeatedly to theatrical metaphors to describe the ‘curiosa escena coreográfica’ (strange choreographic scene; 151) that unfolds in front of the lovers’ eyes, as the cigarreras (cigar makers), like the gypsies in the previous scene, begin to dance to the tune of the very same patriotic zarzuela: Un piano mecánico soltaba […] el duro chorro de sus martilleadoras tocatas: Cádiz hacía el gasto: pasodoble de Cádiz, tango de Cádiz, coro de majas de Cádiz … y hasta una veintena de cigarreras […] saltaba y brincaba al compás de la música […] parecía efecto teatral, coro de zarzuela bufa. (151–2) A mechanical piano let out … a harsh stream of pounding toccatas; Cádiz paid for everything; pasodoble of Cádiz, tango of Cádiz, a chorus of working-class women of Cádiz … and about twenty cigar makers … hopped and jumped to the beat of the music … the effect seemed theatrical, a chorus of a farcical zarzuela.

The theatricality that imbues this ‘cuadro’ (sketch), as the narrator calls it, recalls Pardo’s earlier pronouncement that Spanishness is no more than a farce, a ‘fashion’ to be imitated. The national spectacle is completely stripped of authenticity by this time, as Asís becomes increasingly aware that it is only through these repetitive gestures of Spanishness – and, here, Spanishness and Andalusianness are, once again, conflated – that national identity comes into being.

Pardo Bazán’s Insolación

155

When two young girls approach the lovers to beg for money, the narrator, echoing Pardo’s and, most likely, Pardo Bazán’s own views on race, racializes the beggars’ physical features, attributing to their African/Arab origin what she perceives as their savagery. The older sister, according to the narrator’s perception, has ‘ojazos […] árabes’ (lovely big Arabic eyes), and the younger one shows ‘una indómita fiereza muy en armonía con sus pupilas africanas’ (an indomitable ferocity very much in harmony with her African pupils; 154). Pacheco, for his part, exploits this situation, feigning an affinity with the gente del pueblo (common people), in spite of his own class position, in order to play up his ‘Andalusianness’ for Asís’s sake, in a continued effort to draw her orientalist gaze. The scene could not be more parodic: the ‘hijo legítimo de Andalucía’ (legitimate son of Andalusia; 156), having imbibed glass after glass of the authentically Andalusian Tío Pepe (the sherry, the narrator claims, is ‘más auténtico que la famosa manzanilla del Santo’ [more authentic than the famous sherry of the Saint; 153]) and ‘ceceando como nunca’ (speaking with a stronger Andalusian accent than ever; 156) performs the role of the Andalusian libertine Don Juan, as he flirts and dances with the cigarreras. As we will see, the sentimental drama that ensues between the lovers – and Asís’s final emergence as a desiring subject – are, therefore, closely intertwined with these performances of national identity. As Amann has noted, what is different about this second merendero scene is that Asís is no longer a mere spectator, but rather an active participant in the performance (183–4). If, in San Isidro, Asís relied on the Andalusian to authenticate the national spectacle, this time around, she consciously performs the nation, fully aware that she is part of the theatrical act, of this incessant compulsion to imitate ‘Spanishness.’ Barbara Zecchi’s observation that ‘Asís enters the scene as a spectator and leaves transformed into Carmen’ is much to the point (302). She comes to form a part of the ‘cuadro’ (sketch; 152), as the lover’s nest inside the merendero becomes transformed into a metaphorical stage, where she finds herself acting out her desire – in spite of her efforts to disguise it – in front of the cigarreras, who curiously look in from the outside on the lovers’ quarrel. It is, significantly, Asís herself who has opened the window that allows her spectators full view of their sentimental drama. The narrator exaggerates more than ever Pacheco’s Andalusianness, comparing his eyes, once again, to ‘el agua del Mediterráneo’ (the waters of the Mediterranean) and alluding to his ‘cólera meridional’ (southern temper; 159). His stereotypical Andalusian pas-

156

Marginal Subjects

sion stands in sharp contrast to Asís’s own performance of gender and nationality, as she exits from the merendero with the feigned civility of the northerner – and, even more ironically, of the honourable widow – resolving to return to Galicia the following day. In spite of her resolution, however, and her appeal to ‘el amor propio y el decoro’ (pride and decorum; 162), Asís finds herself unable to overcome her desire for the Andalusian and the exotic otherness that he embodies. Her dream following her quarrel with Pacheco, which the narrator recounts from the protagonist’s perspective in free indirect style, not only exposes her desire, but also shows the extent to which it is imbricated in issues of national identity. In her dream, she finds herself on the train headed toward her homeland Galicia, traversing the unending stretch of ‘páramos castellanos’ (Castilian steppes; 163) under the oppressive heat of the scorching sun. The image of the sun provides an explicit connection to Asís’s mareo during the San Isidro festival and recalls Pardo’s pronouncements on the Spanish national character, presumably the effect of ‘el influjo barbarizante o barbarizador […] del sol’ (barbarizing influence … of the sun; 51). Stifled by thirst, she reaches for a bottle full of what she believes to be water, only to discover that it contains sherry. The metonymic chain of associations evoked by this alcoholic drink from Andalusia – Pacheco drinking Tío Pepe in the merendero, the heat/sun of the south, which Pardo identifies as the cause of barbarism, Asís’s mareo and ‘insolación’ (the title of the novel itself), the list goes on – all become signs of Spanish national identity. Unable to quench her thirst – a rather transparent symbol of unconsummated sexual desire – and desperate to escape the heat, the female protagonist continues her journey toward the north. As the train finally abandons the terrain of ‘Castilla la fea, la árida, la polvorosa’ (Castile, the ugly, the arid, the dusty; 163) and enters into the mountainous region of northern Spain, Asís finds temporary relief from ‘la horrible sed’ (the horrible thirst; 164). This relief, however, is short-lived, as she finds herself soon submerged in ‘la eterna lluvia del Noroeste’ (the eternal rain of the northeast; 164), which infiltrates her body and drowns her heart. In the end, the northern rain (of Galicia) becomes equally oppressive to her as the southern sun (of Castile/Andalusia). The obvious sexual symbolism aside, it is apparent that Asís seeks, once again, to reconcile the conflict between the two terms of the north/south dichotomy at the basis of the conceptualization of national identity, as she struggles to come to terms with her desire. Just as Pacheco’s constant performances of identity undermine her attempts to reduce him to a categorical oth-

Pardo Bazán’s Insolación

157

erness, her own subjectivity can no longer be reduced to a stable sign of nationality; her desire draws her increasingly toward the racial and national other, leading to its final consummation.27 The ending of the novel merits special commentary, owing to its ambiguity. Interestingly, what would normally be considered the climax and resolution of a novel is relegated to an epilogue, as if the events in this final chapter were a postscript to the rest of the narrative. In contrast to the previous chapter, in which the narration was focalized largely through Asís, the narrator, in the epilogue, imposes a distance between herself and the female protagonist’s narrative of desire. In fact, the opening lines of the epilogue, ‘No entremos en el saloncito de Asís mientras dure el tiroteo de explicaciones‘ (Let us not enter in Asís’s living room while the ricochet of explanations is still going on; 167), signal this deliberate act of narrative distancing. If, previously, the free indirect style allowed us access to the workings of Asís inner mind, here the narrator limits herself to transcribing and summarizing the characters’ dialogue, opting to leave room for the reader’s own interpretation of the denouement: ‘si no es preferible dejarlo sugerido a la imaginación del lector para que lo deduzca y reconstruya a su modo’ (if it isn’t preferable to leave it as a suggestion in the reader’s imagination so that s/he can deduce and reconstruct it in his or her own way; 170). On the one hand, the female protagonist, at the end of the novel, openly defies social norms by following the course of desire and consummating her relationship with Pacheco. The dialogue makes it clear to the readers that it is she who urges him to spend the night in her home with the imperious command: ‘Quédate’ (Stay with me; 170). At this point, the narrator distances herself again from Asís, appearing to condemn her decision (‘El plan era absurdo’ [The plan was absurd]) and, quite literally, closing the door on the transgression of ‘los dos delincuentes’ (the two criminals; 170). In order to avoid writing a ‘mala obra’ (bad work), the narrator states, she will not re-enter the scene ‘hasta que el sol alumbra con dorada claridad el saloncito, colándose por la ventana que Asís, despeinada, alegre, más fresca que el amanecer, abre de par en par, sin recelo o más bien con orgullo’ (until the sun lights up the living room with golden clarity, seeping through the window that Asís, dishevelled, happy, fresher than the dawn, throws wide open, without misgiving, but rather, with pride; 171). The open view of the lovers through the window, ‘juntos, casi enlazados, como si quisiesen quitar todo sabor clandestino a la entrevista’ (together, almost yoked together, as if they wanted to remove any hint of the clandestine

158

Marginal Subjects

from the meeting; 171), recalls the window scene in the merendero of Las Ventas where their sentimental drama became a spectacle for all to see. While in the previous scene Asís became the unsuspecting and unwilling object of the public gaze, here she deliberately exhibits her disordered body through the window in an act of open defiance, exposing to the public eye ‘a transgression committed within domestic walls’ (Zecchi 303). If the window marks the divide between interior and exterior space, the private and the public, the female protagonist erases this boundary, thus symbolically transcending the limits that social norms have imposed on female subjectivity. One of the central symbols in the novel is, of course, the sun, identified with the south and with the Andalusian himself (with his ‘tez quemada del sol’ [sunburnt complexion; 64]), and which, according to Pardo, is the cause of the ‘barbarism’ that defines the Spanish national character.28 In this final scene, the presence of the sun, which illuminates the lovers in front of the window, thus exposing their transgression, might be interpreted to suggest the triumph of Nature over society. If we consider this scene in the context of the oppositions that have structured the novel throughout, it might seem logical to conclude that the protagonist, having consummated her desire, has chosen to embrace difference and otherness: the south (Andalusia/Africa) over the north (Galicia/Europe), barbarism over civilization, and passion over reason. That is, Asís appears to have come to terms with the ‘other’ within the self, much in the same way Spanish national identity is a construction that emerges from negotiations with the racial/cultural other. However, the narrative strategies of the novel foreclose any simple resolution to the female protagonist’s confrontation with gender and national identity. As Tolliver has observed, ‘Asís’s ambivalence may be close to resolution, but the narrative ambivalence continues’ (114). That is, precisely when the female protagonist achieves plenitude as a desiring subject, the narrator seems to delegitimize Asís’s narrative of (deviant) desire by introducing the ‘idea inesperadísima’ (totally unexpected idea) of marriage that ‘desenlazó precipitada y honrosamente la historia empezada por tan liviano y censurable modo en la romería del Santo’ (resolved suddenly and honourably the story which was begun in such a frivolous and reprehensible way at the pilgrimage of the Saint; 170–1). Yet, in the next breath, the narrator complicates the matter further by posing the following question to tease the reader: ¿A cuál de los amantes, o mejor dicho, aunque la distinción parezca espe-

Pardo Bazán’s Insolación

159

ciosa, de los dos enamorados, se le ocurrió primero la idea? ¿Fue a él, como único paliativo, heroico, pero infalible, de su extraña guilladura? ¿Fue a ella, como medio de conciliar el honor con la pasión, el instinto de rectitud y el respeto al deber que siempre guardara, con la flaqueza de su voluntad, ya rendida? […] Y reconstruya también a su modo los diálogos en que la idea se abrió paso, tímida primero, luego clara, imperiosa y terminante, después triunfadora, agasajada por el amor que, coronado de rosas, empuñando a guisa de cetro la más aguda y emponzoñada de sus flechas, velaba a la puerta del aposento, cerrando el paso a profanos disectores. (171) To which of the lovers, or rather – although the distinction may seem specious – the two people in love, did the idea occur first? Did it occur to him, as the only palliative, a heroic, but infallible palliative, for his foolishness? Or did it occur to her, as a way of reconciling honour with passion, her honourable instinct and the respect for duty that she always conserved, with the weakness of her will, already conquered? And [let the reader] reconstruct in his or her own way the conversations in which the idea made its way, timid at first, but then clear, imperious and categorical, then triumphant, regaled by a love that, crowned with roses, brandishing its sharpest and most poisonous arrows like a sceptre, watched over the bedroom door, blocking the path of its profane dissectors.

First of all, the highly ironic tone of the narrative voice prevents the reader from taking any of the narrator’s statements at face value. Secondly, regardless of the person responsible for the idea of marriage, the answers to the questions posed by the narrator are meant to remain mere speculation. The narrator’s exhortation to the reader that ‘que cada cual lo arregle a su gusto’ (let each person settle this as s/he likes; 171), as Tolliver suggests, appears to signal the narrator’s relinquishment of her authority over her narration, deliberately leaving the resolution open to the reader’s imagination (115). The play of perspectives between the narrator and the female protagonist is, in fact, quite complex, as the narrative irony is double-edged: even while the narrator might seem to be undermining Asís’s narrative of desire, the former is also undercutting her own narrative authority over the female protagonist. Thus, the function of narrative irony is not only to buffer the author from her ‘subversive story,’ as Tolliver suggests (105), but also to parody and to protest narrative conventions that domesticate the deviant female subject, ultimately circumscribing her

160

Marginal Subjects

desire within social norms. After all, the fate of the ‘futuros esposos’ (future husband and wife; 171) is all but settled, as the lovers’ marriage, like Asís’s return to Galicia, is deferred beyond the final page of the novel. As Marina Mayoral observes, ‘there is a chance that everything will remain a mere prospect’ (‘Estudio introductorio’ 35). The novel closes with a dialogue between the lovers on the eve of their departure to their respective places of origin – Asís to Vigo, and Pacheco to Cádiz – thus, calling attention, once again, to the national difference at the basis of the characters’ negotiations of identity. What is most striking is the theatrical nature of this dialogue, which re-enacts the performances of gender and nation in which the two characters have been engaged from the moment of their first encounter. In spite of the fact that they have already consummated their desire before marriage, they rehearse, with a full awareness of their theatricality, their roles as husband- and wife-to-be that social conventions and Catholic morality dictate: the lovers preach ‘formalidad’ (correct behaviour) until ‘el cura’ (the priest) sanctifies their relationship; Pacheco resolves to seek a political position ‘con la ayuda del papá suegro’ (with the help of the father-in-law; 172) and to dedicate himself to Asís’s daughter, thus appearing to cement the foundations of the patriarchal nuclear family. Yet the self-consciousness with which the lovers imitate these normative social roles transforms their performance into a parody of these roles, rather than leading to their reinforcement. At the very end of the epilogue, Pacheco evokes the figure of the gypsy woman who approached Asís in the first merendero scene to read her fortune, imitating ‘el acento y modales de la gitana’ (the accent and manners of the gypsy woman): ‘Un viaje me vasté a jaser, y no ae ser para má, que ae ser pa satisfasión de toos … Una presonilla está chalaíta por usté’ (You’re going to take a trip for me, and it will not be for me, but for everyone’s satisfaction … A little somebody is crazy about you; 172).29 Through the imitation and impersonation of the gypsy who symbolizes the orientalized other, Pacheco insists, yet again, on calling attention to the difference that marks his own identity as an Andalusian. On the literary level, the uncertainties surrounding the lovers’ future, in spite of the gypsy’s prophecy, parody the conventional fairytale ending that, in the traditional sentimental novel, would expect to end with a wedding and, thereby, with the restoration of social order. Asís’s narrative of desire finds no such simple resolution. Nor can we deduce from this narrative, in a categorical fashion, Pardo Bazán’s own position regarding the racial/national other. That the voice of the

Pardo Bazán’s Insolación

161

Andalusian impersonating the gypsy concludes the novel could be read as much as a colonizing gesture, or as a necessary recognition of difference within the self, on the part of the author. Based on a reading of her works across different periods of her trajectory as a writer, Dendle concludes that the author was, in fact, ambiguous in her attitude toward race (23). The narrative ambivalences in Insolación reflect the contradictions with which Asís (and perhaps Pardo Bazán herself?) struggles in her negotiations of gender and national identity, as she seeks to articulate new spaces of subjectivity for herself.

6 Taming the Prostitute’s Body: Desire, Knowledge, and the Naturalist Gaze in López Bago’s La prostituta Series

In the wake of industrialization in nineteenth-century Spain, as well as in neighbouring France, prostitution not only became a pressing social concern and subject of debate among physicians and public hygienists, but also began to occupy a prominent place in the literary imagination. Starting in the 1830s and 1840s, plots about prostitutes proliferated in the fiction of notable French writers such as Alexandre Dumas, Eugène Sue, Honoré de Balzac, and, later in the century, Émile Zola. The romantic prototype of the prostitute who found redemption through physical and mental suffering and, eventually, through selfsacrifice, gave way, later in the century, to the image of the prostitute as a pathologized body who was to become the target of medical and social interventions. In French naturalism, Zola’s Nana (1880) became the archetype of the mujer infame (dishonoured woman), the ‘devouring woman,’ who awakened dangerous desires in the men who gazed upon her body (Fernández, Mujer pública 7, 13). The case of fin-de-siglo Spanish literature was no exception: prostitutes and other sexually deviant women filled the pages of both canonical and popular literary fiction, raising crucial questions about women’s role and agency during a critical historical moment for the refiguration of gender. We have seen the different ways in which critically acclaimed realist writers such as Galdós, Clarín, and Pardo Bazán have responded to the cultural anxieties provoked by the breakdown of established boundaries through their representations of deviant subjects who struggled to negotiate their place within the emergent social (dis)order. Contemporaneous with these authors, there emerged, in the 1880s, another group of fiction writers, the so-called radical naturalists – Eduardo López Bago, Alejandro Sawa, Enrique Sánchez Seña, and Remigio Vega

López Bago’s La prostituta Series

163

Armentero, among others – whose works were immensely popular during the moment of their publication in spite of their subsequent relegation to critical obscurity. In fact, López Bago, the subject of this chapter, was the most widely read author in Spain by the end of the nineteenth century. The ‘radical naturalists’ moulded themselves on Zola’s scientific naturalism, even as they resorted to lurid and sensationalistic representations of sexual deviance, most frequently of the prostitute woman, characteristic of the melodrama or the folletín (newspaper serial).1 As our reading of López Bago’s La prostituta series (1884– 5) will show, popular writers of the period sought to contain and to control disorder by imposing knowledge on the prostitute, an emblem of female sexual deviance par excellence, even as they, along with their readers, partook paradoxically in the pleasure of gazing upon the forbidden, deviant other. Jann Matlock, in her study of prostitution in nineteenth-century France, observes the nineteenth-century novel’s ‘peculiar dependence upon the prostitute as the center of its disciplinary regime,’ drawing a parallel between the disciplinary function of literature and other forms of social practice aimed at containing disordered bodies (10). As in France, moreover, the influence of the burgeoning fields of medicine and the new anthropological sciences in Spain during the same period made way into the terrain of literature and aesthetics, arising from a common interest in keeping deviant bodies and sexualities under check (Cardwell, ‘Médicos’ 93–6; Rivière Gómez, Caídas 21–53). Michel Foucault has shown that sexuality emerged in the nineteenth century within a discursive domain that sought to differentiate the ‘normal’ from the ‘deviant’ (History 39–40). Within this opposition, female deviants, and especially prostitutes, were identified with the ‘degenerate other’: ‘Crippled, degenerate, abnormal, primitive, atavistic … these were the ways in which prostitutes were presented, as clearly psychically and physically different from “normal” women’ (Rivière Gómez, Caídas 48–50). As such, the prostitute became a target of disciplinary intervention in Spanish Restoration society through her subjection to various measures of social control situated at the intersections of medicine, hygiene, law, and (religious) morality.2 What interests me is the place of fiction – and the role of literary representation, in particular – within nineteenth-century disciplinary systems that sought to contain and to control the deviant female other, emblematized in the prostitute figure, a disordered body presumably overflowing with desire. Matlock privileges literature among such dis-

164

Marginal Subjects

ciplinary systems, arguing for an analogy between measures of social control that targeted the prostitute’s body, on the one hand, and novels that generated ‘plots of containment’ to impose knowledge and order on the deviant female subject (21), on the other. At the same time, she challenges Foucault’s universalistic model of disciplinary power in accounting for ‘the workings of power on bodies and through bodies,’ shifting her focus, instead, on ‘the ways strategies of resistance might arise out of even the most containing discourse’ (13). Most importantly, Matlock stresses the need to account for the role of gender in scrutinizing critically both the workings of power and the strategies of resistance in relation to the prostitute figure, in light of the fact that the masculine gaze of the naturalist narrator produces her explicitly as a gendered and sexualized body. A focus on gender will, therefore, be central to our analysis of desire and knowledge in relation to the prostitute’s body in the novels that form a part of Eduardo López Bago’s La prostituta series: La prostituta, La Pálida, La buscona, and La querida. The title of each novel that forms a part of this tetralogy, in fact, refers explicitly to the prostitute figure who is the protagonist of the work. In accordance with the formula of serial fiction, each novel is meant to be read as an ‘instalment’ that whets the reader’s appetite for the sequel to follow.3 Several questions come to mind in approaching representations of the prostitute in López Bago’s work: Why this obsession with the prostitute, and what is at stake in the desire to know her? If sexual deviance – and, in particular, female sexual deviance – triggers the desire for knowledge, how does this ‘will to knowledge’ manifest itself in fiction? Finally, what does the representation of the prostitute in the work of this author reveal about her place in the cultural imaginary of nineteenth-century Spain? The feminist historian Joan Scott, following Michel Foucault, shows how knowledge, particularly as it pertains to gender difference and relations, is produced in complex ways within ‘epistemic frames’ that are always contestable. Through knowledge production, ‘relationships of power – of dominance and subordination,’ are constituted, often under the guise of ‘truth’ (Scott, Gender 2). Pura Fernández similarly adopts a Foucauldian perspective to show how the radical naturalists modelled themselves on the procedures of scientia sexualis to produce the ‘truth of sex’ and to generate a social order based on the utility of the subject (‘Scientia sexualis’ 231). In both his fiction and his essay entitled ‘La moral del naturalismo’ (The Moral of Naturalism), López Bago echoes Zola’s doctrine, calling for an analysis of prostitution based on the

López Bago’s La prostituta Series

165

experimental method, in order to gain mastery over this ‘llaga social’ (social ulcer; La buscona 253) and to eradicate it scientifically. This position is echoed repeatedly in López Bago’s fiction, whose narrators frequently identify with the role of the naturalist physician. The narrator of La Pálida, for example, compares the task of the naturalist novelist to that of the physician who studies pestilent diseases and their bodily manifestations in order to find a cure for these ills (32–3). The naturalist writer, therefore, presents himself as the authoritative voice of science, whose project is not only to know, but also to contain and to regulate deviance. By imposing a scientific knowledge system on the deviant and diseased female body, these works of radical naturalism sought to contain the ‘fantasy of uncontrollable and overwhelming desires’ at the centre of their plots (Matlock 7). In relation to the problem of desire in the prostitution novel, two questions come to mind. First, we must ask ourselves in whose interest the knowledge about the prostitute – or, more generally, about the deviant woman – is being produced, since such knowledge ‘must be understood as part of efforts to stabilize social relations and practices’ (Shapiro 25). At the same time, if knowledge is necessarily imbricated in desire, whose desire is being represented through the prostitute? It is to state the obvious to say that virtually all of the representations of the prostitute in nineteenth-century Spain, whether in scientific or literary discourse, were generated within the confines of the ‘male body politic’ (Bell 11), whereby the deviant female body was targeted for surveillance and, in many cases, disciplinary intervention. Whether the prostitute is the object of compassion or condemnation, it is masculine knowledge that engenders her. The true subject of these representations, then, is not female desire and sexuality, but the desire for male knowledge of female desire and sexuality. The controlling masculine gaze of these narratives typically produces, to borrow Matlock’s term, a ‘fantasmatic’ desire or investment in the prostitute figure, who represents both the fantasy and fear of seduction (7). Charles Bernheimer, likewise, emphasizes the function of (male) fantasies, particularly those of ‘gender and power,’ that underlie representations of prostitution in both literary and scientific discourses of nineteenth-century France (3). In the Spanish context, López Bago’s work offers an ideal case study for exploring the complexity of the tension between desire and knowledge, since his representation of the prostitute emerges at the intersections of literature and science. One of my premises, following Matlock and Bernheimer, is that while liter-

166

Marginal Subjects

ary representations need to be distinguished from the real prostitutes who lived out in the new urban societies of the nineteenth century, there is a constant slippage between fantasy and the real in these representations. It is this space of tension between desire and knowledge, the fantasmatic and the real, in the construction of the prostitute subject which will be the focus of my analysis. In López Bago’s La prostituta series, these tensions are played out in the representation of the prostitute’s body. From the opening pages of the novel, it is clear that the controlling gaze of the novel is gendered masculine, as is the implied reader with whom he establishes a tacit complicity.4 The novel opens as the masculine narrator gazes, from a distance, at the brothel that is at the centre of the narration. Through the technique of personification, the narrator identifies the physical building of the brothel with the diseased and nausea-inducing bodies of the prostitutes who inhabit this space: images of the ‘fachada ruinosa’ (dilapidated facade), ‘andrajos cubiertos de fango’ (rags covered with mud), and of the ‘llagas’ (sores) and ‘miembros podridos’ (rotten limbs) of the beggars who expose their bodies to inspire the public’s pity, reflect the prostitute’s condition (119).5 Immediately following the description of the building, the narrator’s gaze singles out the figure of a prostitute on the balcony, who, in turn, seeks to seduce her potential clients with her gaze: ‘en su mirada había una interrogación para cada transeúnte, una sonrisa en sus labios que acompañaba la interrogación con un ofrecimiento’ (in her gaze there was a question for each passerby, a smile on her lips that accompanied the question with an offer; 121–2). From this moment on, the omniscient narrator gradually implicates his (male) readers in the world of prostitution, identifying them with the prostitute’s potential client who is about to enter the brothel. Exploiting the visual metaphor further, the narrator presents his narrative ‘cuadro’ (sketch), referring to the balcony windows of the brothel as ‘gigantescas pupilas abiertas’ (gigantic open pupils; 123). As Pura Fernández has noted, the double meaning of the word ‘pupilas’ (pupils/whores) is suggestive of the specular relationship between the prostitute’s client and the readers of the novel: the narrator’s use of the pronoun ‘we’ as that which is the object of the gaze of ‘aquellas pupilas fijas’ (those fixed pupils; 130) further reinforces this identification.6 The positioning of the narrator’s gaze in relation to this world – and to the subjectivity of the prostitute herself – will be my point of entry. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator occupies a position that marks,

López Bago’s La prostituta Series

167

both physically and symbolically, the borderline between the interior and the exterior of the brothel. This sense of liminality is evoked by images such as the building’s entryway: ‘el portal’ (front door; 127), ‘el cancel’ (inner door; 128), and the ‘balcones’ (balconies) that metaphorically frame his narrative ‘cuadro’ (sketch; 123). When the narrator first contemplates the brothel from the exterior, his disgust (‘asco’) forces him to stop short of penetrating through its doors with his gaze, yet as the narration progresses he becomes increasingly drawn to the world inside. He follows with his gaze one of the bourgeois clients of the brothel until the latter disappears into the prostitute’s room, at which point the narrator closes the door behind him, imagining his pleasure, until the man emerges once again from the room. What is elided from the narrative is ‘sex’ itself, which, as Foucault would say, was constituted in nineteenth-century scientific discourse as a problem of truth (History 56). In fact, what is cast discursively as the unspoken ‘secret’ of deviant female sexuality, which evades masculine knowledge and reduces the narrator to moments of silence, serves paradoxically as an incitement to his narrative. If, according to Foucault, nineteenth-century discourses that sought the ‘truth’ of sex modelled themselves on scientific discourse (History 64), López Bago’s ‘medical-social study’ exemplifies just such a discourse. The first named prostitute character to make her appearance in the novel is Mari Pepa, the owner of the brothel described in the first chapter. It is notable that her body, which appears to defy medical classification, is coded as the ‘secret’ to be deciphered. Not only is her body quite literally submitted to the gaze of the physician who comes to inspect it for disease, but the narrator, following suit, inscribes her within contemporary medical discourses that linked prostitution to hysteria and other forms of mental illness (Giné y Partagás, Curso elemental 328; Hauser 215; Pulido Fernández 142).7 The narrator calls attention to the prostitute’s ‘enervación mental’ (mental enervation), her ‘estado morboso’ (morbid state), and her ‘desarreglo orgánico’ (organic disorder; 145), not to mention her epileptic-like state: ‘la exquisita impresionabilidad de las naturalezas nerviosas, las frenéticas y terribles expansiones que convierten y modifican el desmayo, dándole los caracteres epilépticos’ (the extraordinary impressionability of those with nervous constitutions, the frenetic and terrible expansions that transform and modify their listlessness, giving it the characteristics of epilepsy; 165). Such characterizations of the prostitute exemplify what Foucault has

168

Marginal Subjects

called the ‘hysterization of women’s bodies,’ a discursive strategy that promoted a view of women’s sexuality as intrinsically pathological and, therefore, in need of regulation (History 104). After the narrator presents the ‘case study’ of Mari Pepa, he immediately turns his attention to the two men who are active participants in the establishment and promotion of the prostitution industry in Madrid. Arístides, alias ‘El chulo,’ asserts his domination not only over Mari Pepa, who becomes his concubine, but also over the entire city by setting up a chain of brothels and trafficking women who, as Corbin has shown in another context, are reduced to their role as seminal drains for bourgeois men (211). The brothel that Arístides sets up for Mari Pepa becomes a panoptical structure that allows for surveillance through the control of the space that the prostitutes inhabit. For his part, the Marquis of Villaperdida, responsible for the infection and death of his wife from syphilis, perversely seeks to expiate his sins and buy his salvation by using the profit from the brothels to donate to charity. The Marquis’s characterization of the prostitute through images of putrefaction, pestilence, and miasma – ’miasmas pestilentes’ (pestilent miasmas), ‘inmundicias de la carne’ (garbage of the flesh), and ‘agua desestancada del cenegal’ (water freed from the quagmire; 168) – reflects cultural anxieties about the potential of the contaminated ‘other’ to infect the male bourgeois and, by extension, the entire social structure (Corbin 212). The syphilitic body of the Marquis of Villaperdida occupies a prominent place in the author’s ‘medical-social study’ and represents the materialization of the masculine fear of contagion by the prostitute’s body. It is through the pimp’s eyes and memory that the narrator first presents an unforgettably graphic image of the Marquis’s diseased body: la palidez amarillenta de aquel semblante demacrado, en que la piel era seca y térrea, y en el que eran los ojos lo único que brillaba, con el brillo intenso de la calentura hética […] aquellos miembros enflaquecidos sin duda por los sudores nocturnos de esta misma fiebre subsistente […] el terrible calor de aquellas manos, y el olor infecto que […] exhalaba el cuerpo del excelentísimo e ilustrísimo señor Marquis of Villaperdida. (162) the yellow pallor of that haggard face, on which the skin was dry and earthen, on which the only thing that shone were the eyes, with the intense brightness of consumptive fever … those limbs, weakened without doubt by those night sweats from this same enduring fever … the terrible heat of

López Bago’s La prostituta Series

169

those hands, the disgusting odour that … the body of his very illustrious Excellency, the Marquis of Villaperdida, gave off.

In the chapter that follows, the naturalist physician, Doctor Pérez, seeks to impose scientific discourse on this body by performing a ‘verbal autopsy’ on it (Sutherland 281). The physician enumerates in great detail the sordid symptoms of this disease and predicts its physical ravages on each part of the patient’s anatomy, as if, in his own words, ‘tuviera entre mis manos el cadáver’ (I had a cadaver in my hands; 185).8 Interestingly, Erika Sutherland notes that a significant detail that is left out of Doctor Pérez’s list of the syphilitic’s symptoms, normally a part of nineteenth-century medical treatises, is the manifestation of the disease on the male sexual organ (281). However, Sutherland does not pursue the question of the possible reasons for this omission, except to state that Dr Pérez’s verbal autopsy of the syphilitic’s body is ‘no ordinary clinical portrait’ (282). Undoubtedly, what is silenced has much to do with its possible impact on the readership to which the narration is addressed. Clearly, the audience that López Bago had in mind was less a ‘scientific’ audience interested in the physiological effects of syphilis on the male body than a broad middle-class readership – constructed as male, I would add – with a high degree of anxiety about the contagion of this ‘llaga social’ (social ulcer). The image of a diseased penis would undoubtedly strike at the heart of this fear. Moreover, while the narrator seeks to reinforce the naturalist physician’s claim that ‘el lenguaje científico siempre es puro’ (scientific language is always pure; 186), this language, in fact, partakes of moralreligious discourse from which science presumably sets itself apart.9 Dr Pérez’s references to syphilis as an ‘infection,’ ‘cancer,’ or ‘ulcer’ that causes ‘desórdenes tan profundos’ (such profound disorders) in the physiological organism is strikingly similar in tone to Father Manrique’s characterization of the disease as a ‘perversión’ (perversion; 185) that causes moral repugnance and cannot, therefore, be spoken about explicitly. In other contexts, the narrator uses scientific rhetoric as a means of eradicating what he deems morally repugnant. In La Pálida, the narrator considers the need to self-censor representations of Estrella’s deviant sexuality, suggesting that he has destroyed the pages he has written on ‘estas repugnancias’ (these repugnancies), even as he insists on the necessity of documenting this and other ‘miserias sociales’ (social miseries, 32). ‘Silence’ in discourses on sex, as Foucault

170

Marginal Subjects

has suggested, ‘is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies’ (History 27). In other words, to not speak of sex explicitly was ‘not a plain and simple imposition of silence,’ but a ‘new regime of discourses,’ a ‘different way’ of putting sex – that is, deviant sexuality – into discourse (History 27). Therein lies the paradox of the narrator’s insistence on silencing ‘estas repugnancias’ (these repugnancies) in López Bago’s novel, passing over them ‘con la mayor rapidez posible’ (as quickly as possible; La Pálida 32), even as he focuses extensively on them in his ‘scientific’ analysis. The question is to what extent these significant silences in the work of the radical naturalist undermine his claim to scientific authority by unwittingly calling attention to his fascination with deviant sexuality. The appearance of the female protagonist Estrella (alias La Pálida) in the chapter that follows the verbal autopsy of the Marquis’s body calls attention further to the masculine gaze that controls the narration. When the narrator first introduces Estrella to his readers, he appears to be constructing a naturalist case study of a prostitute who is a product of her hereditary origins and social milieu. By retelling the protagonist’s life story as told to him by her, the naturalist narrator shows how hereditary forces (suggested by her mother’s debilitating illness and her father’s alcoholism, considered, in the nineteenth century, to be a degenerative disease), coupled with the social and material circumstances of her environment (she is a victim of poverty, parental neglect, abuse, and violence), precipitate Estrella’s fall into prostitution. She is, in fact, literally collapsed and in a state of inanition when she first arrives at Mari-Pepa’s brothel. Notwithstanding Estrella’s inscription in the narrator’s ostensibly scientific discourse, the authority of this discourse soon becomes undermined by his voyeuristic investment in the prostitute’s body. From the moment of her first appearance, the narrator surrounds Estrella’s body with a mystique that fascinates all of the men who seek to ‘know’ her: the gazes on her body multiply as the novel progresses. The scene in which the Marquis expresses his wish to contemplate her body without being seen emblematizes her status throughout the novel as the elusive object of the male gaze. In the narrator’s words, she is ‘un conjunto de belleza igual, uniforme, tranquila, pero misteriosa, siendo su misterio una irresistible atracción primero, y después el amor no, pero sí enloquecimiento’ (a combination of constant beauty, calm but mys-

López Bago’s La prostituta Series

171

terious, her mystery being an irresistible attraction first, then not love, but madness; 199), and ‘un cuerpo nuevo, una carne intacta y joven, que se cerraba, como las puertas de marfil del Tabernáculo, sobre el divino misterio de la virginidad’ (a new body, the young and virgin flesh, which closed, like the ivory doors of the Tabernacle, on the divine mystery of virginity; 211). Yet, while the narrator represents the prostitute’s body as eluding discourses of knowledge and mastery, her deviant sexuality, as Foucault would say, becomes exploited as the ‘secret’ that incites the desire for knowledge (History 35). Thus desire and knowledge become mutually imbricated in the discursive production of the prostitute’s body. In this context of the masculine will-to-knowledge, the narrator selfconsciously transforms Estrella, through Arístides’ imagination, into an objet d’art, an artistic representation to be sold to her potential clients: ‘Retratarla, retratarla ante todo; hacer tres clases de retratos: vestida, medio vestida y desnuda […] Y nadie vería a la Pálida; permanecería encerrada en el lupanar, mientras que circulaba de mano en mano su imagen, capaz de exaltar y sobrexcitar los sentidos del más casto […] Pensándolo bien, no se trataba de una mujer, sino de una empresa’ (To draw her, to draw her, first of all; to draw three kinds of portraits: dressed, half dressed, and naked … And nobody would see la Pálida; she would remain confined in the brothel, while her image circulated from hand to hand, capable of exalting and overexciting the senses of even the most chaste man … Now to think of it, she was not a woman, but a business venture; 224–5). Arístides thus seeks to incite masculine desire by transforming the image of the female body into a commodity to be mass produced and circulated; Estrella’s portrait, in his mind, is no ordinary work of art, but a fetish to capture the masculine fantasy. That this portrait – a fetishized objet d’art – becomes a metaphor for prostitution itself is reinforced in the opening chapter of La Pálida, when the members of La Botica, a secret organization of syphilitic men, clamour for the prostitute’s image even before she appears physically on the scene. Elizabeth Wilson, in her discussion of Baudelaire’s and Benjamin’s writings on the flâneur, shows how women, by being equated with sexuality, were often identified as ‘the “problem” of urban space’ in the late nineteenth century’ (‘The Invisible’ 106). According to Wilson, the prostitute, as a sort of female flâneur, became a metaphor for the ‘commodification, mass production and the rise of the masses’ that defined this new urban regime, indicating ‘new fears and new possibili-

172

Marginal Subjects

ties, raising questions … as to the eroticization of life in the metropolis’ (‘The Invisible’ 105–6). In López Bago’s novel, the prostitute’s portrait raises precisely such questions, not only reflecting the fear of contagion by the deviant and diseased body, but also calling attention to the limits of artistic representation itself, which can never remain uncontaminated by desire. Significantly, at the end of the first chapter the narrator makes use of the prostitution metaphor to lament the collapse of the distinction between aesthetics and commodity, ‘pure’ and commercialized art: ‘lo bello, convertido en género de comercio, es la degradación, y establece esas diferencias que fijan los artistas entre los cuadros que se pintan para el Museo y las pinturas de venta que se exponen en los escaparates’ (beauty, transformed into a type of commerce, is degradation, and establishes those distinctions that artists make between pictures they paint for the Museum and those they display for sale in the shop windows; 131–2). As a degraded figure put to the service of commerce and mass production, the prostitute becomes a metaphor for ‘low,’ debased art, yet, paradoxically, she also represents a consciously aestheticized image constructed to seduce the bourgeois masculine gaze. Thus, just as literally as metaphorically, the prostitute is a site of contagion and contamination. The metaphor of contagion was, of course, taken literally in late nineteenth-century regulationist discourses: the prostitute, as the bearer of syphilis, represented the threat of infection to the entire social body (Corbin 212).10 As Alain Corbin notes, the modern theory of congenital syphilis was developed between 1860 and 1885 and became widely propagated during the fin de siècle: that is, syphilis was identified as a hereditary disease capable of setting in motion a process of degeneration that had the potential to annihilate not only the bourgeois family, but the entire bourgeois race (Corbin 212).11 According to Elaine Showalter, Foucault himself saw the discourse on syphilis as a part of the new technologies of sex of the second half of the nineteenth century that opened up the ‘domain of the “perversions”’ (‘Syphilis’ 89).12 In López Bago’s La prostituta, the narrator, echoing medical writings of the period, calls attention to the hereditary effects of venereal disease through the figure of Luis, the son of the Marquis of Villaperdida. Characterized by his ‘naturaleza enfermiza’ (sickly nature; 246) from the moment of his first appearance, Luis is presented to the reader as the product of a paternal heredity that predisposes him to vice and moral perversion.13 He is addicted to consumption and obsessively seeks a life of pleasure and luxuries. Moreover, the weakness of his physical

López Bago’s La prostituta Series

173

constitution and his identification with the life of the Bohemian dandy cast him as a feminized, degenerate figure. Significantly, it is the same physician who performed a verbal autopsy on Luis’s father, who ‘prohibió terminantemente todo proyecto ó idea de perpetuar la raza de los Villaperdida’ (categorically forbade any plan or idea of perpetuating the lineage of the Villaperdida family; La Pálida 111), fearing the transmission of the disease through the son to future generations and, ultimately, the degeneration of the entire human race. A prototypical Zolaesque figure characterized as a ‘gran fisiólogo y materialista de pura sangre’ (great physiologist and materialist of pure blood), Doctor Pérez appeals to scientific positivism – ’la positiva e indudable existencia de la materia’ (the positive and unquestionable existence of matter; La Pálida 119–20) – to explain all human phenomena, including desire. Like Doctor Miquis in La desheredada, Dr Pérez plays the disciplinary role of the naturalist physician who, by imposing order on a disordered life and body, seeks to contain not only the potential spread of a contagious disease but also the desire perceived to lie at the root of the disease. And like Galdós’s Miquis, who fails in his attempts to ‘discipline’ Isidora, Dr Pérez, too, fails ultimately to extirpate Luis’s ‘desórdenes’ (disorders), to contain his uncontrolled desire through ‘el trabajo profiláxico’ (a prophylactic program; La Pálida 197). Since, however, male, unlike female, desire was considered to be natural and inevitable, the prostitute with whom the man satisfied his desire came to personify disruptions to the social order, even as her role was, paradoxically, to siphon off excessive sexuality from the bourgeois family (Matlock 31). In La prostituta, it is significant that the prostitute (Estrella) serves as the medium through which venereal disease is transmitted from father to son. Estrella contracts syphilis from the Marquis when she is raped by him, later to pass on this disease to his son during her subsequent sexual contact with him. What materializes in the novel is the fear expressed by the naturalist physician that ‘el vicio de su sangre, el vicio heredado’ (the vice coming from his blood, inherited vice; 259), which had remained dormant in Luis, would be awakened by his sexual contact with women. That is, the prostitute acquires significance only in relation to the masculine desiring subject: because she represents a potential site of both pleasure and of disease for the men who desire her, she becomes the problem. The opening chapter of La Pálida reinforces, once again, Estrella’s objectification as a spectacle for the male gaze: the syphilitic members of

174

Marginal Subjects

La Botica mystify her (‘Era la poesía de la carne’ [She was the poetry of the flesh; 21]), even as they come to fear the power of her seductive body. She is transformed into the stereotypical femme fatale, embodying the image of a sexually aggressive temptress who preys on masculine fantasies and fears.14 Like Zola’s Nana, who enthralls her male spectators with her naked body and is described as a ‘man-eater’ capable of destroying with her sexuality all those who contemplate her (Zola, Nana 25), Estrella is the ‘devouring woman’ who, with her voracious appetite, drunkenness, and sexual abandon, awakens dangerous desires in the men who gaze upon her. And the narrator, at the beginning of La Pálida, focalizes his narration through the perspective of the members of La Botica who contemplate the spectacle of Estrella’s body, re-enacting the gesture of the narrator of La prostituta, who, in the opening chapter, follows the male client into Mari-Pepa’s brothel with his gaze. By the end of the orgy scene in the second chapter of La Pálida, Estrella, the exquisitely adorned femme fatale, is reduced to a naked body, a ‘montón de carne de mujer’ (heap of woman’s flesh; 35), stripped of its mystique. Unlike Galdós’s Isidora, who, by choosing the path of prostitution, acquires a certain degree of agency as a desiring subject, Estrella is denied subjectivity throughout the two novels in which she appears. Moreover, on the few occasions on which she is granted consciousness, it is a consciousness colonized by the masculine perspective through which the narrative is focalized.15 There are two emblematic moments in La prostituta when the narrator grants Estrella some degree of consciousness through the use of free indirect style. The first is when she makes her initial appearance in chapter 7, where the narrator adopts her perspective to evoke memories of her childhood. However, the entry into her consciousness, rather than allowing us to discern possible openings in her subjective space, only confines her further within the limits of the world in which she finds herself trapped. Images of confinement mark the two predominant spaces of her childhood: ‘un patio cuyas cuatro paredes […] subían muy altas, altísimas, hasta el punto de que un día propuso Estrella jugar a figurarse que eran unos niños a quienes sus padres habían tirado a un pozo’ (a patio, whose four walls … rose high, very high, to the point that one day Estrella proposed to play imagining that they were children whose parents had thrown them into a well), and the narrow street, which leave the children playing in it little space for freedom of movement: ‘la calle y el patio, éste era su mundo. Esto era todo’ (the street and the patio, this was her

López Bago’s La prostituta Series

175

world. This was everything; 230). Stasis and stagnation mark her childhood space, reinforcing the sense of fixity of time and the lack of change between the past and the present; images of filth and contamination signal the continuity between the misery of her childhood and that of her adult life. The second emblematic moment in La prostituta in which the narrator allows us access to Estrella’s subjectivity immediately follows her rape by the Marquis of Villaperdida. This scene is undoubtedly one of the most violent and disturbing episodes of the novel; the narrator clearly means to shock his audience, to elicit sympathy for the victim of sexual violation. ‘La miseria, ¡qué horror! La prostitución, ¡qué asco!’ (Poverty, how awful! Prostitution, how disgusting!; 299) are the words of explicit condemnation with which he begins the following chapter. When we are allowed entry into Estrella’s subjectivity, sensations of disgust and nausea predominate, and she feels imprisoned in her diseased body. Estrella, for the first time in the novel, becomes fully cognizant of her status as the violated woman, tainted with dishonour and disease. A consciousness of her lack of agency, likewise, remains a constant throughout La Pálida, the sequel to La prostituta. In the third chapter of the sequel, the narrator once again uses the free indirect style to enter into Estrella’s thoughts, shifting his perspective away from that of the masculine spectator to the subjective consciousness of the female protagonist. He allows Estrella to reflect retrospectively on her past, recalling the most horrific events of her life: her rape by the Marquis of Villaperdida, her infection by venereal disease, and her admission to the Hospital de San Juan de Dios, where she undergoes inhumane treatment and is subjected to medical interventions that violate her body.16 Estrella is made aware that the hospital, which serves as an institution of social control, is no different than the brothel in its treatment of women, as evinced in her comparison of ‘los abrazos del hombre’ (a man’s embrace) to ‘las operaciones del médico’ (the operations of the doctor; La Pálida 46), who penetrates her with his speculum. The voice of the narrator, who presumably sympathizes with the prostitute’s plight and condemns the public hygiene system that exploits her, only serves to reinforce the latter’s lack of agency as a subject. Thus the few moments in which Estrella gains what we might call a self-conscious subjectivity coincide with her coming to an awareness of her lack of agency. Even Estrella’s expression of her vengeful desire to infect the whole city with her body, to ‘hacer de Madrid un pueblo maldito de leprosos’ (turn Madrid into a wretched city of lepers; 303)

176

Marginal Subjects

after she is raped by the Marquis of Villaperdida in La prostituta, reflects not so much an affirmation of her agency, but a projection of societal fears as they are filtered through the masculine narrator’s consciousness. The subsequent flashback, in La Pálida, to the scene of her quarantine in the Hospital de San Juan de Dios draws attention to Estrella and the other prostitutes’ diseased bodies through graphic metaphors such as ‘repugnantes lepras de la carne’ (repugnant leprosy of the flesh; 39) and ‘la llaga viva’ (open sore; 43), which are meant to inspire fear in the (implicitly male) readers, who presumably fear contagion and even death from syphilis.17 The corpse of the woman who has succumbed to the disease and lies at Estrella’s side brings home, once again, the objectification of the female body in the hospital, where, in the narrator’s words, ‘la mujer es únicamente la hembra, en que se siente excluída de la raza humana, en que se ve tratada con el trato que recibe del hombre la animalidad’ (the woman is nothing more than a female animal, in that she feels excluded from the human race, in that she sees herself given the treatment that animals receive from men; 44). As is customary in nineteenth-century hygienists’ writings on prostitution, the diseased body of the prostitute becomes identified with the corpse and with death itself (Corbin 211). After Estrella’s rape by the Marquis in the first volume of the series, her body and subjectivity become increasingly circumscribed by masculine discourse. She becomes the target of intervention of the physicians who seek not to cure her of her disease, but to bring her body back into circulation in the prostitution market. In fact, the narrator criticizes openly the officials of the public health system who are concerned only with ‘la conservación de aquel cuerpo [de la prostituta] en estado de salud, no por atención á su vida, no por interés sentido hacia ella, sino por la vida y la salud de los demás’ (the preservation of her body in a state of health, not because of interest in her, but because of the life and health of others; La Pálida 44). He, in fact, describes the prostitute’s body as ‘la res viva’ (live animal; La Pálida 45), to be kept alive and healthy only so that the public can make use of her. The narrator’s project of social reform by launching a virulent attack on the system of regulated prostitution – quite overtly in many sections of the novel – appears to go hand in hand with the scientific claims of the naturalist writer. Yet in spite of his naturalist pretensions, the narrator invests Estrella’s illness with ‘mystery and exoticism,’ making the prostitute even ‘more attractive as her disease progresses’ (Sutherland 286). On the one hand, Sutherland accurately notes that López Bago exploits the conven-

López Bago’s La prostituta Series

177

tions of the ‘racy melodrama,’ to some extent, to appeal to his reader’s emotions. On the other, I do not believe that the naturalist author deliberately ‘romanticizes’ Estrella’s image (Sutherland 287) – after all, he explicitly rejects romanticized portrayals of the prostitute, such as that of the heroine of Dumas’s La Dame aux Camélias (La Pálida 253).18 Instead, the contradictions in this image of the diseased yet ‘exotic’ body capture the narrator’s – and the author’s (?) – own ambivalent attitude toward the prostitute, an ambivalence reflected in the figure of Luis. It is after Estrella’s rape by the Marquis of Villaperdida that Luis finds himself no longer able to contain his desire and fascination for her, and finally seeks her out in the brothel. For Luis, she represents not only the mysterious feminine other, but also the other side of life hidden from respectable bourgeois society: ¡Un lupanar! ¡Una prostituta! Sabía que los lupanares existían, que las prostitutas no eran un mito; pero jamás tuvo atrevimiento bastante para separarse de sus amigos y hacer solo un viaje por lupanares y territorios de la pornocracia, para él desconocidos. Y ahora, de pronto, era preciso sin duda penetrar en tales misterios. (269) A brothel! A prostitute! He knew that brothels existed, that prostitutes weren’t a myth; but he was never bold enough to part from his friends and to travel alone through brothels and territories of pornocracy, which were unknown to him. And now, suddenly, it was no doubt necessary to penetrate such mysteries.

For Luis, knowledge about the prostitute and her underworld becomes synonymous with the possession and penetration of her body: ‘¡La Pálida! ¡La Pálida era suya, tenía que ser suya! […] ¡Tenerla desnuda entre sus brazos! […] Por diez mil reales […] Pero entonces, ¿qué es la mujer? ¿Qué carne es la suya, y cuál es su alma y su corazón? ¡Oh misterio! ¡La mujer!’ (La Pálida! La Pálida was his, she had to be his! … To hold her in his arms! … For 10,000 reales … But, then, what is woman? What flesh is hers, and which are her heart and her soul? Oh, mystery! Woman! 311). Once again, the prostitute comes to embody the object of the masculine will to knowledge, as elusive as such knowledge may ultimately be. Here, again, the perspective of the bourgeois male character focalizes the representation of the deviant female, marginalizing her own subjectivity. What is striking about the free indirect style through which

178

Marginal Subjects

the narrator presents Luis’s desire for Estrella is the ambivalence that the Marquis’s son feels toward the feminine other, whose ‘secret’ continues to elude him. Following the passage cited above, Luis marvels at the fact that woman can be both mother and whore (311), revealing that within the masculine imaginary, the prostitute is an object of fascination and desire, precisely because she represents difference and sameness at the same time. As Shannon Bell has argued in her reading of nineteenth-century texts on prostitution, there is a constant ‘sliding between the prostitute body and the mother body,’ which is to say, between the forbidden, contaminated other, one the one hand, and the maternal ideal of the Oedipal son, on the other (42). In Luis’s own case these dichotomies constructed by the masculine imaginary are constantly threatened. Later in La Pálida, when he takes Estrella in as his paramour, he remembers her both as his first romantic love who initiates him into the mysteries of femininity and as a contaminated body that infects him with venereal disease (117). Likewise, for the members of La Botica who literally strip her body, she embodies both beauty and disease, the ‘ruined, destroyed, victimized body,’ on the one hand, and a site of mystification and voyeuristic pleasure, on the other (Bell 44). Such representations of the prostitute reveal literature’s own ambivalent role during the late nineteenth century in confronting anxieties about the sexually deviant woman. In relation to colonial discourses, Homi Bhabha shows how the strategy of stereotyping the other, as ‘an object of desire and derision, an articulation of difference contained within the fantasy of origin and identity,’ serves as ‘an ambivalent mode of knowledge and power’ (67). The ambivalence that Bhabha finds in constructions of otherness in colonial discourse is similarly evinced in figurations of the deviant and disprivileged female other in nineteenthcentury European bourgeois discourses. Like the stereotype of the colonial other, the figure of the prostitute is ‘predicated as much on mastery and pleasure as it is on anxiety and defense, for it is a form of multiple and contradictory belief in its recognition of difference and disavowal of it’ (Bhabha 75). In essence, the prostitute in López Bago’s work, not unlike the orientalized Andalusian other in Insolación, becomes a form of fetish that allows the dominating subject to gain ‘symbolic control over what might otherwise be terrifying ambiguities’ (McClintock 184). In López Bago’s work we see how the narrator, through his (perhaps unconscious) identification with the male spectator and consumer of the prostitute’s body, produces her as a fetish that represents at once a site of pleasure and destruction (Bell 44).

López Bago’s La prostituta Series

179

López Bago closes La prostituta by naming Luis the first victim of la Pálida, followed by a direct address to the readers with the following warning: ‘Si pasáis por allí, miradlo: allí se acaba, se extingue una gran familia, cuyo último descendiente muere poco a poco, como murió el marqués, víctima del fanatismo y de las prostitutas, las dos lepras de la inteligencia y del cuerpo’ (If you pass through there, take a good look: there a great family comes to an end, becomes extinct, a family whose last descendant dies gradually, like the Marquis, a victim of fanaticism and of prostitutes, the two lepers of mind and body; 337). The propagandistic undertone of the entire narration makes any irony in this heavy-handed moral unlikely, in contrast to, for example, Galdós’s highly ironic ‘moraleja’ (moral) in the final chapter of La desheredada. Needless to say, the true victim in López Bago’s novels is Estrella, who will not only be taken to the Hospital de San Juan de Dios at the end of this novel, but will eventually die violently at Luis’s hands at the conclusion of La Pálida. Notwithstanding López Bago’s project of social and ethical reform – his denunciation of those who wanted to regulate, rather than abolish, prostitution (Fernández, Introducción, La prostituta 56) – it is not so much the prostitute’s plight in itself that is the central preoccupation of his novels, but masculine anxiety over her potential to disrupt the bourgeois social order and, even more so, the authority of masculine discourse. To borrow Matlock’s words: ‘Although the prostitute is the question, she cannot be a speaking subject in the discourse that surrounds her’ (28). That is, the novel elides the question of the desire and agency of the prostitute in spite of those isolated moments when the narrator captures her subjectivity through free indirect style. Her body, in sum, becomes relegated to its role as a medium of discursive exchange between a masculine-identified narrator and an implicitly masculine readership that he addresses, to the exclusion of women. Thus, in the case of La prostituta, I find questionable Santiánez-Tió’s claim that ‘the female body becomes liberated in the pages of the naturalist novel’ (594). Although female desire is often at the centre of his works, moments of self-subjectivization of the female desiring subject are rare, since it is masculine desire – however ambivalent it may be – for the female object of desire that serves as the driving force of the narration. In La Pálida Estrella’s story runs parallel to that of Rosita Pérez, the prostitute-to-be, who first makes her appearance in the second novel of the series and becomes the protagonist of its sequel, La buscona. Unlike Estrella, who comes from a working-class background (her father is a

180

Marginal Subjects

bricklayer), Rosita belongs to a middle-class family that faces economic ruin by having lived beyond its economic means. In order to be able to maintain the appearance of a middle-class life, Rosita’s mother and brother prostitute her, transforming her into a commodity whose sexual favours are to be bought by the men in the Café Nuevo del Siglo (New Café of the Century). When Estrella, who now lives independently as a paramour of a series of wealthy men, learns of the desperate economic situation of Rosita, whose family lives above in the same apartment building, she offers her neighbour money in exchange for sexual relations with her. What appears to begin as yet another form of prostitution for Rosita soon turns into a passionate love affair between the two women. One question to be posed, in this context, is whether Rosita’s trajectory is any different from that of Estrella, who is stripped of all agency in the end – that is, whether the former is granted a certain degree of agency lacking in the latter, whose destiny appears to be sealed, in a typically naturalistic fashion, by the circumstances of her upbringing and her environment. We might also ask if the representation of samesex desire between the two women opens up new spaces of female subjectivity that challenge dominant norms of gender and sexuality. The representation of lesbian sexuality in La Pálida, of course, needs to be analysed within its historical context: in late nineteenth-century Spain literary writers and medical practitioners alike were giving increasing attention to sexual matters, particularly sexual desires and practices considered to be deviant. As Pura Fernández has shown, the publication of the works of radical naturalism beginning in the 1880s coincided with the proliferation of sex/marriage/love manuals, as well as of medical treatises on sexual pathology (‘Censura y práctica’ 74). Many of these texts linked lesbianism – often referred to as ‘tribadism,’ ‘sexual inversion,’ or ‘sexual perversion’ – to the ‘special pathology’ of the prostitute, who was perceived to be an agent of degeneration (Giné y Partagás, Curso elemental 324).19 Echoing these texts, the narrator of La Pálida pathologizes the desire between Estrella and Rosita, calling it ‘vicio que es contra naturaleza’ (vice that goes against nature; 125) and identifying it with prostitution. A few pages later, he attempts to explain scientifically the cause of the women’s ‘unnatural vice,’ attributing it, in Estrella’s case, to ‘el hastío resultante de la prostitución’ (weariness resulting from prostitution), and in that of Rosita, to ‘el histerismo de la doncellez’ (hysteria of virginity; La Pálida 129). Both conditions – prostitution and hysteria – he adds, ‘concurrían al mismo fin’ (together, brought about the same result; 129).

López Bago’s La prostituta Series

181

Jann Matlock has shown how in nineteenth-century French medical discourse the prostitute and the hysteric ‘provided opposite models against which an orderly body could be measured’ (4). That is, the two figures became collapsed into one, as a disordered body that embodied the dangers of excessive and unchecked female desire, whether in the form of continence (hysteria) or sexual indulgence (prostitution) (Matlock 4–5). Likewise, in the Spanish context, the pathologization of the sexuality of the two women in La Pálida shows that the representation of female same-sex desire conforms quite predictably to the medical paradigms of the late nineteenth century. In the case of Estrella, the seasoned prostitute, it is, according to the narrator, owing to her already ‘viciado y pervertido […] organismo’ (corrupt and perverted … organism) that she ‘entregábase con voluptuosa delicia á lo monstruoso de sus grandes arrebatos con Rosita Pérez’ (gave in with voluptuous delight to the monstrosity of her great raptures with Rosita Pérez; La Pálida 127). The ‘monstrosity’ of her desire for another woman suggests a form of pathological affliction, even a mental illness that arises from her contaminated body, her ‘carnes enfermas’ (sick flesh; La Pálida 126). From the perspective of the narrator, Estrella’s sexuality eventually spins out of control, leading to the perversion of the men around her with her disruptive desire and, indirectly, to her own death, since Luis kills her out of jealousy when he finds her with another lover. Rosita, for her part, first appears in La Pálida as a ‘virgin’ – the antithesis of the sexually incontinent Estrella – before the two women enter into a sexual relationship. It is interesting, by the way, that the narrator refers to Rosita, up to this moment, as a ‘cuerpo virgen’ (virgin body; 102) in spite of the small sexual favours she has granted to the men in the Café Nuevo del Siglo. It is implied, then, that any sexual act short of actual penetration of a woman by a man is considered not to be ‘sex’ in the popular imagination of the period. As in the cases of Galdós’s Isidora Rufete and Pardo Bazán’s Amparo, Rosita’s deviant sexuality is tied to the desire for consumption – of both literature and luxury goods. The narrator begins by blaming Rosita’s perversion on her reading of folletines, which she ‘devours’ during her childhood (95), echoing the views we have seen already of Pulido Fernández and others, who attributed mental perturbations and overexcitement, particularly of women, to the consumption of the wrong kinds of literature (Pulido Fernández 51–71).20 Rosita’s reading, as that of Pulido’s hypothetical female reader, awakens in her nervous symptoms resembling that of sexual arousal: she acquires ‘el brillo intenso de la fiebre, muy nervioso’

182

Marginal Subjects

(an intense and very nervous feverish glow) in her eyes; ‘miraba á los hombres con una mirada ansiosa, palpitábale el corazón […] lloraba por la más nimia causa’ (she looked at men with an anxious gaze, her heart throbbed … she cried for the most trivial reason); and, overtaken by ‘los extraños deseos que la atormentaban’ (strange desires that tormented her; La Pálida 95–6), she eventually confines herself in her room to seek solitary pleasures. Like Pulido Fernández’s female reader who is left ‘aniquilada por el excesivo gasto de su inervacion’ (annihilated by the excessive exhaustion of the nervous system; 63) after overindulging in autoerotic pleasures, the solitary pleasures that Rosita derives after consuming folletines lead her to a state of enervation: ‘salió siempre [de tan misteriosa soledad] con una gran sombra bajo los ojos, y tal abatimiento en su aspecto, tan suprema laxitud en todos los miembros que, rendida no acertaba á mover pié ni mano en el resto de la tarde’ (she always came out [from such mysterious solitude] with a great shadow beneath her eyes, and such despondency in her appearance, such a supreme laxness in all of her limbs that, exhausted, she could not manage to move her foot or hand during the rest of the afternoon; La Pálida 96). The parallels between López Bago’s novel and Pulido’s medical manual for women are indeed striking, demonstrating, once again, the impact that prevailing medical ideas on female sexuality had on literary fiction of the late nineteenth century. In La Pálida erotic desire and consumption subsequently become identified closely in Rosita’s mind, as the desire awakened by the luxury items she sees in Estrella’s apartment leads her to give herself over sexually to the prostitute in exchange for money. Following the pattern we have seen in Galdós’s La desheredada and Pardo Bazán’s La Tribuna, the consumer ends up becoming the object of consumption. For Rosita, desire takes on a life of its own, as it erupts spontaneously from her body, allowing her to recognize herself, at least momentarily, as a desiring subject. Significantly, the epiphanic moment in which she comes into a consciousness of her desire occurs immediately after she sees the image of her body reproduced in Estrella’s mirror. What begins as an economic transaction for Rosita turns into ‘una loca pasión, avasalladora, insaciable, frenética’ (a crazy, overwhelming, insatiable, frenzied passion; 125) that has the potential to open up new spaces of desire for the female subject. If we compare the subjectivities of the two women who are the protagonists of La Pálida, the narrator appears at first to grant Rosita a greater space of subjectivity than he does Estrella, allowing the reader

López Bago’s La prostituta Series

183

access to her thoughts and motives throughout the series, particularly in La buscona. As the novel progresses, Rosita, like Isidora and Amparo, becomes increasingly aware of the beauty of her body and of its potential value in the marketplace, a knowledge that empowers her to a certain extent. At one point the narrator, in his typically voyeuristic role, closes in his gaze on Rosita, who, like Zola’s Nana, contemplates her naked image every night in front of the mirror, ‘para estudiar sus carnes, para complacerse en el enorgullecimiento que la inspiraban las curvas de su cuerpo’ (to study her flesh, to take pleasure in the pride that the curves of her body inspired in her; La buscona 57), delighting in the beauty of her own body. Later the narrator enters, through free indirect style, more directly into Rosita’s interiority as she looks desiringly, ‘con un afán, con anhelo tan grande’ (with eagerness, with such a great longing), at her own reflection in the mirror: ¡Era hermosa! ¡Hermosísima¡ ¡Irresistible! Estaba en la plenitud de su desarrollo, como una flor completamente abierta; desplegábanse las curvas de su cuerpo en rodondeces incitantes, brillaban sus ojos con las pupilas húmedas, negras, fascinadoras, y bajo los ojos la pasión dejaba á su paso una estela azulada que aumentaba la sombra y misterio encantador de la mirada. Los labios de encendido color, la boca empequeñecida por el hábito de fruncirse para el beso, y un tono cálido en la tez, el mismo que tenía toda su carne, igual, uniforme, como si bajo la epidermis hubiera fuego. Hermosa, sí. (La buscona 121–2) She was beautiful! Very beautiful! Irresistible! She was in the plenitude of her development, like a completely open flower; the curves of her body spread out in provocative roundness, her eyes shone with humid, black, fascinating pupils, and under her eyes her passion left in its path a bluish trail that magnified the shadow and the enchanting mystery of her gaze. Her bright red lips, her mouth, made small by the habit of puckering up for a kiss, and a warm shade in her complexion, the same as all of her flesh, alike, uniform, as if there were fire underneath the epidermis. Beautiful, yes.

If we look beyond the narrator’s voyeuristic gaze, the autoeroticism implicit in Rosita’s perception of her own body is difficult to ignore, especially in connection to the earlier scene where she delivers herself to solitary pleasures after devouring her folletines (11). The desire awakened in Rosita by the image of her own body in the mirror recalls a

184

Marginal Subjects

similar scene in La desheredada, where Isidora, too, acquires a consciousness of the beauty and market value of her body as she contemplates herself in the mirror. As in the case of Isidora Rufete, Rosita’s deviant sexuality poses a threat to the social order. For Nil Santiánez-Tió, Rosita emblematizes the female characters of naturalism, whose ‘self-conscious and privileged bodies’ awaken masculine desire in such a way as to alter ‘the precarious social balance’ (594). Between prostituting herself with strangers, she awakens the carnal desire, respectively, of another woman (Estrella) and a priest (el padre Lasoga) and, finally, becomes the paramour of a young, uninitiated novelist, Miguel, while continuing to seek out her former lover, the Duke of Tres Estrellas. In La buscona, it is she, like Estrella before her, who now lives in a luxurious apartment, having prostituted herself to be able to maintain a ‘middle-class’ lifestyle. True to the fears of the social commentators of the period, by succumbing to both ‘lujo’ and ‘lujuria’ (luxury; lust), Rosita’s own place in the social structure is no longer certain; as a prostitute, she traverses – and transgresses – social and economic barriers.21 A narrative that constantly pathologizes her, as it has her counterpart, Estrella, however, undermines the agency that Rosita appears to have gained through an awareness of her body and desires. The masculine narrator, and the society that he represents, reduces the desiring woman, time and again, to a hysterical body. In La Pálida, Father Lasoga, yet another male voyeur who visually stalks Rosita in the café, measures her progress toward prostitution, observing ‘los síntomas cada vez más crecientes del estado histérico’ (increasing progression of the symptoms of hysteria; La Pálida 133–4). While Estrella satisfies her carnal desire with Luis in order to arouse Rosita’s jealousy, the latter, abandoned to the priest, suffers a hysterical attack, ‘una convulsión nerviosa que la producía enérgicas y espantosas contracciones’ (a nervous convulsion which produced strong and frightening contractions; La Pálida 145). No longer a ‘virgin,’ Rosita is overtaken by unchecked desire – ’estos anhelos y arrebatos sensuales que dominan y vencen mi voluntad, que esclavizan mi organismo’ (these sensual desires and raptures that dominate and overcome my will, that enslave my organism) – that she herself describes as ‘una enfermedad’ (an illness; La Pálida 217). Later in La buscona the narrator, who enters into the thoughts of Rosita, now a full-fledged prostitute, to retrace retrospectively her downward trajectory from ‘una senorita honrada’ (an honourable young lady; 11) to sexual deviant, affirms that her illness ‘ya traspasaba los límites del

López Bago’s La prostituta Series

185

histerismo y entraba en los primeros grados de la ninfomanía’ (now went beyond the limits of hysteria and entered into the first stages of nymphomania; La buscona 13). Throughout the novel, the narrator makes repeated references to her nymphomania as an organic disorder (‘su organismo viciado,’ 11; ‘vicio orgánico,’ 146), as an ‘enfermedad casi incurable’ (almost incurable disease; 156) that borders on madness. Francisco Vázquez García has shown that the emergence of the notion of ‘nymphomania’ in the medical discourses of nineteenth-century Spain was key to the construction of a new feminine subjectivity during this period (‘Ninfomanía’ 127). The medicalized notion of nymphomania as a form of madness, a mental illness toward which all women were predisposed, undermined the normative model of chaste bourgeois femininity that prevailed in the nineteenth-century cultural imagination; the implication was that ‘the chaste woman [would] always be “unsatisfied,” pathologized in the forms of “hysteric” or “nymphomaniac”’ (Vázquez García, ‘Ninfomanía’ 131). Moreover, according to the medical literature of the period, nymphomania was far more dangerous than satyriasis – its masculine counterpart – since women were considered to be, by nature, more prone to exaltation and excess than men, particularly in the realm of sexuality. The medical category of nymphomania, like that of hysteria, then, served to pathologize female sexuality and to deny woman her identity as a desiring subject. Yet, in the end, medical discourse only revealed its own futility in allaying masculine fears of an unrestrained and self-sufficient female desire beyond the control of patriarchal ‘reason’ (133–5). In La Pálida, while Rosita begins to emerge as a desiring subject, her subjectivity, like that of Estrella, ultimately remains the product of a masculine discourse that seeks to pathologize the female other who is simultaneously desired and feared. Although the author does not literally kill off Rosita as he does Estrella, the former is cast as the deviant female other who, in the masculine imagination, holds the power to undermine and even to annihilate masculinity.22 In the final two novels of the series, the narrator, who becomes increasingly identified with Miguel’s perspective, especially in La querida, pathologizes Rosita’s desire as a ‘neurosis’ (251). At the conclusion of the series Rosita is reduced to a collapsed body of ‘una mujer enferma’ (a sick woman; 254), who, after having brought moral and economic disorder into Miguel’s life, becomes responsible for his murder. The logical consequence of her ‘madness,’ according to the vision of the narrator, is the transformation of the sexual deviant into a criminal. Significantly, the

186

Marginal Subjects

final image of Rosita with which we are left is that of her ‘delirando’ (raving deliriously; 254), at which point she disappears completely from the novel. Her loss of language is tantamount to the erasure of her subjectivity. In view of these representations of the prostitute, we return, once again, to the question of how the deviant woman is transformed discursively into the object of knowledge. In confronting this question, it is important to make some distinction between the political agenda of the biographical author and the discursive positioning of the literary narrator, whose attitude toward his subject of representation is much more ambiguous. Clear are the moments in which the narrator takes on the role of the author’s spokesperson, denouncing, in an overtly propagandistic fashion, the system of legalized prostitution that promotes the abuse of socially marginalized women and the spread of disease, both physical and moral, through the social body.23 Through his ‘case studies’ of Estrella and Pálida, the narrator repeatedly impresses on his readers the havoc that prostitution can wreak on the bourgeois family and race. At the same time, we have seen that the naturalist writer’s ‘medical-social’ study finds itself in constant tension with the titillating and melodramatic nature of his narrative. Such narrative art betrays the writer’s voyeuristic investment in the prostitute’s eroticized body and could easily be (and has been) considered pornographic. As Gabriela Nouzeilles explains in another context, in spite of its claims to eradicate desire, naturalism, in fact, encourages the representation of illicit desires, often entering into greatly detailed descriptions of every act of sexual deviance: ‘From there would arise the paradox that the medical fictions of naturalism sometimes offer the reader a spectacular display of the pornographic’ (85).24 A question posed by López Bago’s own narrator drives home this point: ‘“¿Pero la medicina sigue siendo un cuento pornográfico?”’ (‘But medicine is not a pornographic story?’ La buscona 156). The question of whether López Bago’s novels constitute ‘pornography’ depends on how we define this ambiguous term;25 however, by the author’s own account, when he was seeking a publisher for La prostituta, ‘no encontraba editor para una novela naturalista, pero sí para un libro pornográfico’ (I did not find an editor for a naturalist novel, but I did for a pornographic book; qtd in Fernández, Introducción, La prostituta 64). Lynn Hunt notes that the term ‘pornography,’ which was first coined by a French writer in the late eighteenth century to refer to writing about prostitution, became expanded in the nine-

López Bago’s La prostituta Series

187

teenth century to include not only books that were considered obscene in sexual terms, but all those ‘that disturbed the social order and contravened good morals’ (14). According to Hunt, pornography’s emergence in the nineteenth century as a ‘separate genre of representation’ – and, by extension, as a ‘regulatory category’ – coincided with the democratization of print culture. That is to say, pornography as a distinct category was invented in response to the fear that the masses might gain access to printed material that was limited previously to the social elite (13, 12). As we have seen in chapter 3, the second half of the nineteenth century in Spain marked a period of exponential growth in urban readership, which came hand in hand with the development of the publishing industry and the professionalization of novel writing. While it is difficult to document with certainty the exact composition of the reading public who might have read the works of López Bago and his contemporaries, common knowledge about literacy and about the economic and material factors that determined readers’ access to literature during the period suggests that this readership included a very broad middle class, consisting not only the cultural elite familiarized with the most recent theories of science and positivism, but also a sizeable group of the petty bourgeoisie (Fernández, Eduardo López Bago 140). Moreover, women readers comprised a significant sector of this middle-class readership by the end of the century. What is clear, as Pura Fernández has shown, is López Bago’s awareness of his status as a member of an emergent class of professional writers, and of the demands of the reading public to which he consciously marketed his novels as commodities, as objects of consumption (Fernández, Eduardo López Bago 125–40). In fact, in the appendix of a subsequent novel, El cura, he explicitly defends ‘un movimiento literario realizado por literatos de profesión’ (a literary movement carried out by professional men of letters; 283) with the claim that ‘Nosotros [los naturalistas] somos comerciantes, cierto’ (We [naturalists] are merchants, true; López Bago, El cura 281, qtd in Fernández, Eduardo López Bago 136). López Bago’s commercial success, to a large extent, was due to his notoriety as a writer of scandalous fiction, characterized by lurid depictions of deviant sexuality that, in the popular imagination, would likely have been considered pornographic. Moreover, we know that the prohibition of the ‘obscene’ only heightened the desire of the reading public. López Bago’s notoriety – particularly after he was prosecuted for ‘ofensa á la moral y á las buenas cóstumbres’ (affronts to morality and to decency; La buscona 262) – led to an even greater popularity of

188

Marginal Subjects

his works, making him, by the end of the century, the most widely read author in Spain (Fernández, Introducción, La prostituta 60). As Peter Brooks has observed, in much of the popular literature of nineteenth-century France – and this observation, I believe, can be extended to the writings of the Spanish radical naturalists – what comprises the ‘narratable’ are the deviant and the criminal, that which lies outside of the social norm (155). López Bago clearly stretches the limits of the ‘narratable’ through his representations of the sexually deviant, the scandalous, and the obscene, by appealing to the strategies of the folletín, which shares many of the features of the ‘new’ commercial pornographic literature; in this way, he creates new desires in his readers.26 What the folletín has in common with pornography is its endeavour to represent the social concerns of its times, particularly as regards sexual relations between men and women, even as it [pornography] tends, in Stephen Marcus’s words, ‘toward the elimination of external or social reality’ (qtd in Hunt 39). Just as pornography renders the ‘social’ through gender/sexual stereotypes – often demeaning to women and other sexual minorities – and other coded forms of representation, the folletín, in Fernández’s words: ‘[offers] a stereotype that allows the public to recognize it, to identify its actions in the fixed and stable universe of the serial tradition’ (Eduardo López Bago 141–2).27 In both cases, powerful fantasies – sexual or otherwise – predominate over the realist, or naturalist, claims of the genre. Prostitution, pornography, and the commercialization of literature thus all come together in López Bago’s works. Similar to the case of the French roman-feuilleton that is the subject of Peter Brooks’s analysis, the success of López Bago’s popular fiction depended on the commercialization of the narrative plot, for which the prostitute was both a central theme and metaphor (P. Brooks 147). That is, he sought to cater to the demands of the market by exploiting the narrative of desire to generate the desire for narrative.28 What Brooks fails to consider, however, in his discussion of desire is its circumscription within a social discourse bound by gender. The social context in which López Bago’s narrative of desire was generated and consumed was hardly gender-neutral; it was, in fact, marked strongly by sexual difference. Like pornography, which ‘projects phantasmatic versions of sexual domination’ (Zavala 157), the novels of the La prostituta series centre almost exclusively on the representation of the female (prostitute) body by a male author who addresses an implicitly male reader through the voyeuristic gaze of a masculine narrator with whom he is identified closely.29 That the figure

López Bago’s La prostituta Series

189

of the prostitute constitutes a projection of masculine fantasies and anxieties at the heart of the unconscious has already been demonstrated. Yet one question remains in relation to these novels. That is, what is the role of the female reader, if the novel assumes a complicity between the male author/narrator and reader? Does this type of ‘popular’ literature – a hybrid of naturalism, pornography, and folletín – ultimately transgress the boundaries that establish gender difference, by seducing readers of both genders in the same way? On the one hand, López Bago claims, perhaps tongue and cheek, in one of his essays that ‘no escribo libros para entretener doncellas’ (I don’t write books to entertain maidens; qtd in Fernández, Eduardo López Bago 139). On the other, a fundamental characteristic of ‘commercial’ literature is to collapse differences – again, through the reification of sexual stereotypes that are presented as universal – to seduce readers of both genders, as well as across social classes, into sharing the masculine author/narrator’s voyeuristic investment in the prostitute figure. Pura Fernández, citing Martínez Martín, shows the consumption of these popular novels to be an ‘“inter-class phenomenon,” in which the female public predominates’ (Eduardo López Bago 138).30 It is not difficult to miss the contradictions inherent in exposing the presumably delicate nervous sensibility of women readers to plots of scandalous desire that lead to the downfall of, precisely, women like them. And even more ironical is the fact that popular literature intends to awaken women’s desire for literary consumption, even as it exhorts them to avoid dangerous readings and, instead, to accept proper moral education to avoid the fate of its female characters. The female reader, then, is placed in a similar position as the male reader/voyeur who is seduced into finding pleasure in the act of gazing upon the forbidden.31 The lessons of the naturalist writer and his scientific authority, to all appearances, have been undermined entirely. A focus on the discursive strategies of López Bago’s novels has allowed us to analyse the conditions through which knowledge of the deviant female other was produced in late nineteenth-century literature. As we have seen, the naturalist narrator seeks to impose knowledge on deviant female sexuality in order to contain and to control the disorder generated by it; yet this will to knowledge, as Foucault might say, led paradoxically to the incitement of masculine desire and fantasy, thus undermining the authority of scientific discourse. While the prostitute herself is unable ultimately to come into being fully as a speaking subject in López Bago’s narrative of radical naturalism, the ‘fantasy

190

Marginal Subjects

of seduction’ that she evokes in the men who attempt to circumscribe her identity represented a constant menace to the masculine social order and discourse (Matlock 7). It is to this potential space of resistance that María Magdalena, the female-authored novel of prostitution and the subject of the following chapter, will stake out a claim.

7 Female Subjectivity and Agency in Matilde Cherner’s María Magdalena1

In our analysis of the tension between desire and knowledge in the representation of the prostitute in López Bago’s works, we have seen how the controlling masculine gaze imposes a presumably scientific knowledge system on the prostitute, medicalizing and pathologizing her, even as this desire for knowledge is driven by the male subject’s voyeuristic investment in the deviant female body. Therefore, the question of the prostitute’s own subjectivity – that is, the deviant woman’s potential for agency through self-subjectivization – is inevitably elided in a discourse which is really about the authority of the bourgeois masculine subject, whose place in the social order has come to be perceived, rightfully or otherwise, as increasingly insecure. Without risking the danger of essentialism, we might ask how (or if) the representation of the deviant female subject, and her relationship to the masculine gaze that seeks to control her, might differ when the author and the narrating subject are gendered female. To answer this question, I focus my discussion on Matilde Cherner’s María Magdalena, the only prostitution novel authored, to the best of my knowledge, by a woman in nineteenth-century Spain. The novel was published in 1880, shortly before the proliferation, starting in the mid-1880s, of the prostitution novels of the male ‘radical naturalists.’ As Pura Fernández has shown, the social reformism of the postrevolutionary period gave rise to an increasing interest in issues pertaining to women’s sexuality, independence, education, and morality and, in particular, to the social and scientific polemic surrounding prostitution, divided between those who defended legalized prostitution and others who favoured its abolition (‘Escritura maniatada’ 141). The works of the British abolitionist Josephine Butler, translated into Spanish in the

192

Marginal Subjects

1870s and finding defence in Concepción Arenal’s La voz de la caridad (Voice of Charity), had an enormous impact on the debate on prostitution and, in the literary realm, on the radical naturalists, as did the works of reformist thinkers, such as Enrique Rodríguez Solís, who were already championing the cause of the prostitute in the 1870s (Fernández, ‘Escritura maniatada’ 141). As the historian María de los Ángeles Rodríguez Sánchez suggests, it is in the context of the social debate on prostitution that Cherner’s work needs to be considered (372). According to Rodríguez Sánchez, little is known about Cherner. She was born in Salamanca in 1833 and was known for her progressive ideas and for her staunch support of the Republic. She began her career as a journalist, publishing her work in periodicals of both Salamanca and Madrid under a masculine pseudonym, Rafael Luna. She cultivated various literary genres, including theatre, poetry, biography, and novels – among the latter, are María Magdalena and a historical novel, Ocaso y Aurora (1878) – and also published articles, under her real name, addressing women’s social condition in general and, in particular, their education. With the publication of María Magdalena, an ‘estudio social’ (social study) as Cherner herself would call it, she inserted herself into the public debate on prostitution. This debate had been dominated by public hygienists and men of letters alike, who sought to control the prostitute and prostitution by transforming them into the subject of their ever proliferating ‘medical-social studies’ (Rodríguez Sánchez 372). Given that Cherner was the lone female voice in this debate, she was undoubtedly conscious of the need to position herself strategically to give legitimacy to her discourse. While Rodríguez Sánchez observes that there are no direct references in María Magdalena to the contemporary debate surrounding prostitution, she maintains that Josephine Butler’s abolitionist ideas find echo in the words of the novel’s female protagonist (378). Pura Fernández, furthermore, makes note of Cherner’s direct engagement with the work of the progressive Rodríguez Solís, who championed women’s causes in Spain (‘Escritura maniatada’ 142). Rather than seeing the novel as a direct projection of the author’s political ideas, however, my intention is to analyse the discursive tactics used by her in an attempt to negotiate new spaces of subjectivity for the deviant woman who has traditionally been the object of masculine desire and knowledge. The extent to which the novel succeeds in creating a space of resistance and agency for the prostitute remains open to question. To address this question, we first turn to the narrative structure of the work, which presents a complex

Matilde Cherner’s María Magdalena

193

interplay of gendered perspectives. An ‘introduction’ narrated by a masculine voice frames the rest of the narration, titled Memorias íntimas, which consists of a prostitute’s self-representation in the form of a memoir. A brief prologue entitled ‘Palabras al lector’ (Words to the Reader), in which the author addresses her readers directly, precedes the introduction. Additionally, the fact that the male pseudonym of the author already predisposes the readers to hear a masculine voice in the prologue adds yet another layer of complexity to the text. In her prologue, Cherner anticipates the negative reaction, ‘los furores de la crítica’ (uproar of the critics; 5), that the subject matter of her work – that is, prostitution – is likely to provoke in her readers. On the one hand, she declares that her narrative is ‘esencialmente realista’ (essentially realist), suggesting that it could even be a naturalist work avant la lettre: ‘naturalista diríamos sino [sic] hubiera sido escrita antes que Zola bautizara con este nombre un género de literatura’ (naturalist, we would say, had it not been written before Zola baptized a genre of literature with this name; 6). On the other, she offers an apology for the idealist atmosphere in which the novel’s plot unfolds, attributing this idealism to ‘el diferente punto de vista desde el cual hemos podido estudiar […] la llaga social’ (the different point of view from which we have been able to study … the social ulcer; 5). By transforming the heroine of her work, a prostitute, into ‘un sér superior, muy superior, á la situacion triste en que la desgracia y los vicios sociales la habian colocado’ (a superior being, very superior, to the sad situation in which her misfortune and social vices had placed her; 6), Cherner acknowledges the influence of the idealist writers who sought to elevate the ordinary to a superior status. In her by now well-known work on George Sand, Naomi Schor has argued that the literary mode of idealism came to be gendered as feminine in the late nineteenth century and valorized negatively in relation to the ‘masculine’ representational mode of realism (59–66). Catherine Jagoe takes Schor’s work as her point of departure to show that in Spain, as in France, before the cultural tide turned to favour the realist aesthetic and idealism became engendered as feminine, the latter was ‘seen as the nobler mode’ (‘Disinheriting’ 232).2 We might, therefore, argue, as Schor has done in Sand’s case, that Cherner’s defence of idealism constitutes, implicitly, a vindication of a different, ‘feminine’ aesthetic capable of competing with the dominant representational mode of realism/naturalism, and of imagining reality otherwise. It would be appropriate to clarify our use of the term ‘feminine’ here, not as an essentialistic and transhistorical category, but as a

194

Marginal Subjects

demonstration of how literary genres were gendered in the late nineteenth century, in Spain, as well as in France. Schor has observed that ‘the stereotypical association of women artists and the ideal is the obverse of an equally long and powerful tradition that condemns woman to the servile imitation of the nature with which she is so closely identified, that views her as congenitally incapable of transcending immanence to attain the ideal’ (65). Cherner seeks to challenge such a predominant sexual stereotype of her times, even while she enacts the gesture of appealing strategically to them. At the end of her prologue, after describing her heroine as a superior being, she adds that her work ‘no es una novela, propiamente dicho’ (it is not a novel, strictly speaking; 6), but it addresses questions that perhaps demand the attention of philosophers and that ‘otra pluma más autorizada que la nuestra debia de ser la llamada á tratarlo’ (another pen with more authority than ours should have been called to deal with it; 6). Although she appears to undermine her authority, ‘feminizing’ her discourse through an appeal to idealism, she in fact elevates her work to the status of the ‘masculine’ by asserting the gravity and transcendence of the topic it treats. Like Emilia Pardo Bazán in her prologue to La Tribuna, Cherner adopts a rhetoric of apology identified traditionally with women writers, even as she affirms her authority implicitly by assuming a masculine persona through her pen name and, by extension, a naturalist mode of writing gendered as masculine. The prologue is followed by an introduction, narrated in a masculine voice. This anonymous narrator recounts, in a Cervantine fashion, how he has come across the memoirs of the prostitute – the protagonist of his narration – and has brought her story to light through its publication. The narrator, who coincidentally returns to his native Salamanca on the day the bawd Celestina is being tried for a crime, runs into an old friend; this friend evokes the memory of Celestina’s victim, the prostitute Aspasia, who has died a horrific death in the hospital, ‘consumida por el dolor y la fiebre’ (consumed by pain and fever; 11).3 It is implied that the cause of death is venereal disease. The friend, having heard Aspasia’s story only second hand, refers the narrator to their mutual acquaintance, the physician Benavides, who has cared for Aspasia in her last days and presumably holds her original manuscript in his hands. Having his curiosity awakened, the narrator seeks out the physician, who, in turn, urges him to read the memoirs and to publish them in order to make known the story of this ‘víctima inocente’ (innocent victim; 23). A critic and writer by profession, he becomes so profoundly moved

Matilde Cherner’s María Magdalena

195

by her narration that he publishes ‘aquel importante manuscrito, y sin alterar en él ni una coma’ (that important manuscript, without altering even a comma; 24). The narration that follows, Memorias íntimas (Private Memoirs), is presumably a faithful transcription of Aspasia’s memoirs. The narrator’s own sense of mission in bringing Aspasia’s memoir to light establishes the framework for the representation of the prostitute and the reception of her narration. At the same time, the narrator appears to have no direct connection to the prostitute, except to hold a vague memory of her from his student days, and is no more than a casual bystander who happens to witness the punishment of the bawd responsible for Aspasia’s death. It is only through his contact with a third party that the narrator becomes interested in seeking out the physician who holds the prostitute’s memoir in his hands. This friend, who admits to being acquainted with the beautiful Aspasia, having frequented Celestina’s brothel in the past, acts as the first intermediary between the prostitute and the narrator who publishes her story: he evokes her memory and brings her tragic death to his compatriot’s attention. By representing her as a ‘martyr’ and a ‘saint’ worthy of public mourning (12), he predisposes the narrator and, by extension, the novel’s potential readers sympathetically toward her. Benavides serves as yet another intermediary between the narrator’s third-person account and Aspasia memoirs. He represents a source of knowledge about the prostitute’s life, not only as a physician who witnessed first hand her suffering in the General Hospital where he attended her in the final moments of her life, but also as a legal trustee of the memoirs that she leaves in his hands. It is noteworthy that Benavides plays a very different role from other physician figures, such as Augusto Miquis in Galdós’s La desheredada and Dr Pérez in López Bago’s La prostituta series, who are a frequent presence in the naturalist novels of the period.4 Unlike the naturalist physician who typically assumes a disciplinary role vis-à-vis the diseased, pathologized female body, seeking to impose scientific knowledge on it, here the physician all but idealizes the prostitute figure, coming to identify with her pain: ‘algunas veces el médico no puede vencer su debilidad de hombre y se identifica, como me sucedió a mí, con los dolores de Aspasia, con los que aquejan á sus enfermos’ (sometimes the physician is unable to overcome his human weakness and identifies, as it happened with me, with Aspasia’s pain, with the pain that afflicts his patients; 17). In fact, feeling such compassion for Aspasia, Benavides confesses to having

196

Marginal Subjects

lost the scientific distance of the physician, whose obligation is to ‘aliviar antes de pensar en compadecer’ (to relieve [the pain] before thinking of feeling compassion; 17). Perhaps this loss of distance is attributable, in part, to the fact that Benavides was an occasional client of Aspasia’s in the past, having seen her ‘media docena de veces en mi vida, cuando asistiamos por las noches en casa de la Celestina á hacerla la tertulia’ (a half-dozen times in my life, when we attended the social get-togethers at night in Celestina’s house; 18). Even as he refers, from the physician’s viewpoint, to ‘los terribles estragos de la funesta enfermedad’ (the terrible ravages of the fatal disease, 18), he spares the reader the medical details, choosing to draw our attention to Aspasia’s spiritual condition, ‘aquel alma, altiva, ardiente, amante y generosa, torturada, quebrantada, destrozada por la decepcion y el sufrimiento’ (that proud and passionate soul, loving and generous, tortured, broken, destroyed by disillusionment and suffering; 20). The ‘fantasy of seduction’ (Matlock 7), which we have seen in the masculine narrator of López Bago’s novels, is all but absent. In fact, rather than transforming the prostitute’s body into the object of the scientific gaze, or of masculine spectacularization, or both, there seems to be a genuine desire, on Benavides’s part, to create a space for the self-subjectivization of the prostitute in order to drive home his condemnation of legalized prostitution. The ‘idealism’ of the physician figure implicitly genders him and his narration as feminine, mirroring the author’s own vindication of her aesthetic in her prologue. When the narrator asks the physician whether Aspasia’s memoirs are publishable owing to the ‘delicate’ nature of its subject matter (23), Benavides leaves the narrator with the following words: La pluma que ha escrito esa obra, aunque ingeniosa, era una pluma femenina, y… no desciende nunca a ciertas torpezas. En las memorias de Aspasia, que son un poema de dolor y sentimiento, un libro horrible y bello á la vez, se reproduce un fenómeno ya más veces observado en los fastos de la literatura femenina. Y es que la intuicion sola lleve á una mujer, no solo á desentrañar los más hondos misterios psicológicos, sino á elevarse á las más sutiles deducciones metafísicas. (23) The pen that has written this work, though clever, was a feminine pen, and … it does not lower itself to certain blunders. In Aspasia’s memoirs, which are a poem of pain and sentiment, a horrible and beautiful book at once, we see repeated a phenomenon observed many times already in the an-

Matilde Cherner’s María Magdalena

197

nals of women’s literature. It is that intuition alone can lead a woman not only to unravel the deepest psychological mysteries, but also to reach the most subtle metaphysical deductions.

That is to say, Cherner, through the mouthpiece of her masculine intermediary, gives legitimacy to a form of narration that she genders explicitly as ‘feminine’ and, in fact, privileges the unique perspective that this gendered mode of representation has to offer. Thus the author is able to have it both ways: Aspasia’s and, by extension, Cherner’s ‘feminine’ literature remains within the parameters of social expectations, yet it attains transcendence by seeking to represent the ideal, rather than merely imitating social reality in all its crudeness, as would a typical naturalist novel. The exchange between the two men at the end of the introduction raises the question of ownership and authority over the narration. While Aspasia has authored the memoirs, it is only through the intervention of Benavides, her legal trustee, that they can be brought to the eyes of the public. Not only must the physician grant authorization to allow the publication of these memoirs, but he also holds the power to dictate the terms on which they are to be published. Although his intent is to ‘arrancar del olvido las desgracias de esa mujer tan digna y víctima inocente de nuestros vicios’ (rescue from oblivion the misfortunes of this very praiseworthy woman who is an innocent victim of our vices) and to expose the inefficacy of the existent laws to ‘protejer al desvalido’ (protect the helpless; 23), it is, nevertheless, a male authority figure who holds the key to the female protagonist’s autobiographical account, and another male figure – a writer and critic, no less – who takes charge of publishing it. The extent to which the novel enables female self-subjectivization, therefore, cannot be separated from the question of how her narration is framed, produced, and authorized. In spite of Cherner’s evocation of ‘naturalism’ in her prologue to characterize her work, to read the novel strictly from within the naturalistic paradigm would not only be to cast the female protagonist as a victim of deterministic forces beyond her control, but also to limit her to woman’s conventional status as an object of masculine scientific knowledge and discourse. Chener’s rhetorical positioning in her prologue, the use of Benavides as her mouthpiece, and, finally, the interpolation of the prostitute’s own account from a first-person perspective complicate such a reading. The act of self-creation implicit in the production of her own memoirs suggests the female protagonist’s desire to become a

198

Marginal Subjects

subject who is able to produce knowledge through her own discourse. As Susan Hekman has noted, since ‘only subjects can constitute knowledge,’ women are deemed capable of knowledge production only when they are granted status as subjects (94). Furthermore, she goes on to suggest that even when women do become subjects, they are considered, within the Western (post-)Enlightenment episteme that genders knowledge as masculine, incapable of producing ‘objective knowledge’ (103). We have seen in our reading of López Bago’s work how female subjectivity can be (and, in fact, has been) represented in the naturalist novel. However, we must ask whether, or to what extent, such representations translate into spaces of resistance and agency for the female subject facing a social and discursive structure that constantly seems to reduce her to the passive object of masculine knowledge and desire. Although María Magdalena asserts her own voice in her memoirs, the tone of her narration is decidedly fatalistic from the beginning. She begins by highlighting the image of her diseased body – ‘mi pobre cuerpo no lavara [sic] nunca las manchas que le cubren’ (mi poor body will never clean the stains that cover it; 27) – that faces imminent death and oblivion. Moreover, she calls attention to the precarious status of her memoirs, suggesting that they may be cut short by her death before they are completed. Following the naturalist paradigm to a certain extent, she presents her own life as a product of her heredity and social environment. Not unlike Galdós’s Isidora Rufete, whose deviant sexuality is linked to heredity, María Magdalena appears to inherit her nervous and melancholic temperament – ’mi carácter reflexivo y melancólico, y la extremada susceptibilidad de mis sentimientos’ (my reflexive and melancholic character, and the extreme susceptibility of my feelings; 29); ‘mi genio dominante y altanero’ (my domineering and arrogant disposition; 30) – from her mother, who suffered from ‘irritacion nerviosa’ (nervous irritation; 42) and ‘débil cabeza’ (feeble mind; 43) at the end of her life. At first, the connection between female pathology and sexual deviance – that is, the idea of the former as a trigger, if not a determinant, of the latter – might appear merely to echo the medical and cultural discourses of the period, such as those authored by Pulido Fernández and others. Based on María Magdalena’s account, her mother’s addiction to luxury and to a life of dissipation, and her lack of preparation to fend for herself and her daughter, appear to lead almost inevitably to the latter’s fall into prostitution.5 Furthermore, the female protagonist’s narrative links her love of reading and her constant yearning for

Matilde Cherner’s María Magdalena

199

knowledge during her adolescence implicitly to the awakening of erotic desires: ‘vagas y tiernas aspiraciones, que yo ni sabia ni podia definir, súbitos é infundados temores, dulces esperanzas, pasajeras y ardientes enajenaciones que parecian querer iniciarme en futuros y desconocidos goces’ (vague and tender aspirations that I could not and did not know how to define, sudden and unfounded fears, sweet hopes, fleeting and passionate distractions that seemed to want to initiate me into future, unknown pleasures; 31). Such a passage could come from any number of literary and medical texts of the period, which we have already seen, that linked female reading to dangerous desires. Yet, rather than seeing her reading retrospectively as a vice, or a form of pathology, María Magdalena perceives it as a positive stimulus for her imagination during her childhood (significantly, her favourite novel was the Quijote), and as a source of faith and knowledge, as ‘la luz […] para no perderse en un cáos de horribles negacianes [sic]’ (light … in order not to get lost in a chaos of horrible denials; 74).6 She thus transforms imagination and desire into a source of education and knowledge. Not unlike Pardo Bazán in her later works of fiction, Cherner editorializes through her narrator on the consequences of an education that ill prepares women for economic independence and survival.7 Even as the female narratorprotagonist, commenting retrospectively on her past, blames her fate on her mother’s inaction, she mitigates the latter’s guilt by presenting her as a ‘víctima de su educacion y sus costumbres, no pudiendo soportar ni aun la idea de sujetarse al trabajo, á la servidumbre’ (victim of her education and her habits, being unable to tolerate even the thought of subjecting herself to work and to servitude; 37). Education and knowledge, she suggests, are key to women’s agency. Yet the protagonist’s self-representation as a victim of her physiology and her social environment undermines her struggle for agency through the pursuit of education and knowledge. Throughout most of her autobiographical account, María Magdalena seems to represent no more than an inert, passive, and objectified body, stripped of agency. We might recall the conversation of the two men in the introduction, in which the physician characterizes the prostitute precisely as a ‘victim,’ in order that the masculine narrator may immortalize her tragedy as a lesson to society. In the protagonist’s own words, after her mother’s death she succumbs to ‘delirio’ (delirium) and to her ‘débil imaginacion’ (feeble imagination; 54) – characterizations that, once again, exemplify contemporary medical discourse’s hysterization of the woman’s body – leading to her suicide attempt. Yet she is denied

200

Marginal Subjects

the power to carry through with even this arguable act of agency: in a state of hunger, pain, and delirium, she loses consciousness near Celestina’s brothel, leaving her ‘desfallecido cuerpo’ (unconscious body; 62) at the mercy of the procuress. The image of her inert body recalls that of Estrella in La prostituta, yet another female body who enters a brothel in a state of near collapse from inanition. In the chapter that follows, the female body is not merely objectified, but also violated, as María Magdalena is raped during her first night in the brothel. Although her rape occurs between chapters, while the protagonist is unconscious, thus sparing the readers the crude details of the act, this scene is no less violent than that of Estrella’s rape in La prostituta, perpetrated while she is blindfolded but fully conscious. Like López Bago’s protagonist, whose consciousness, we might recall, is filtered through the colonizing gaze of the masculine narrator of the novel, María Magdalena’s sensibility traps her further by forcing her to relive the violent rape scene and its aftermath. Cherner’s protagonist awakens, after being sexually violated, to an awareness of her degradation, of her fall into ‘[e]l más vergonzoso abismo de degradacion en que puede caer la mujer más criminal y miserable’ (the most shameful abyss of degradation in which the most criminal and wretched woman can fall; 64). Even her language suggests her own complicity in accepting her situation without active resistance: ‘me dejé hundir sin resistencia en aquel asqueroso lodazal. Por espacio de un año, no fuí más que una máquina, un cuerpo inerte, entregado al desenfreno de los hombres, que iban a buscar el placer en aquel ántro de horrores’ (I let myself sink without resistance into that disgusting quagmire. During a period of a year, I was no more than a machine, an inert body, handed over to the debauchery of men who came to seek pleasure in that den of horrors; 69). In essence, she denies herself agency. The female body is reduced to a machine, ‘una vil mercancía’ (vile merchandise; 66), an ‘autómata sin voluntad’ (automaton without will; 84) that serves only as the passive receptacle of masculine desire. The adolescent protagonist remains silent throughout the ordeal, powerless even to give expression to her thoughts and feelings. Six years later, when the adult narrator retrospectively allows us to enter into the consciousness of the adolescent, she does so, not as one who has transcended her circumstances, but as ‘un cadáver ya en putrefaccion’ (an already rotting cadaver; 83) impotent to change the fate to which she perceives herself to be condemned since the day in which she was stripped so violently of her innocence.

Matilde Cherner’s María Magdalena

201

At the same time, there are moments in her narration where María Magdalena makes a conscious effort to exercise agency through her writing. In Part Two of the novel, after a year of life as a prostitute in Celestina’s brothel, she decides one day to ‘abandonar el pasivo papel que hasta entonces me habian impuesto’ (abandon the passive role that had been imposed on me up to that point; 70). Like López Bago’s Estrella, who, following her rape by the Marquis of Villaperdida, seeks consolation in thoughts of revenge by infecting the entire city with venereal disease, María Magdalena similarly fantasizes about the idea of ‘devolver al mundo el daño que me habia hecho’ (giving back to the world the damage that it had done to me; 70). That is, she visualizes her diseased body as a site of resistance and agency. While the desire for revenge remains a mere fantasy, and a small consolation for the prostituted woman, it is at this point in her life that she begins a diary in which she jots down the reflections that her experience has inspired: Por este tiempo me acostumbré á llevar una especie de diario ó memorandum de aquellos hechos que más me sorprendian y de las reflexiones que me inspiraban; y como él describirá mejor que yo lo haria ahora aquellas [sic] época de mi vida, me voy á permitir extractar aquí todo aquello que crea digno de atencion. (72) Around that time I became accustomed to carrying around a kind of diary or memorandum of those events that most surprised me and of the reflections that these events inspired in me; and since the diary will describe, better than I can, that period of my life, I am going to allow myself to summarize here what I believe worthy of attention.

That is, the last two chapters of Part Two are presumably extracted from María Magdalena’s diary, narrated from the perspective of the adolescent prostitute in the moment of living the experience, rather than from that of the dying woman in the present. On the one hand, these chapters give expression to the personal sufferings of the author of the diary, who finds no escape from her circumstances. On the other, these same pages also contain some of the most explicit passages of political denunciation against legalized prostitution and those who defend it; in fact, these sections of the work could be considered pure panfletismo (propaganda). Through the act of writing, the author of the diary – and, by extension, we might argue, that of the novel – transforms the personal into the political, the pri-

202

Marginal Subjects

vate into a matter of import to the public. María Magdalena’s rhetorical tactics recall what Josefina Ludmer, in her famous work on Sor Juana, has called ‘las tretas del débil’ (tricks of the weak).8 Like Sor Juana, Cherner’s protagonist seeks to claim a discursive space – in her case, the traditionally ‘feminine’ space of the diary – from which to articulate what would otherwise be forbidden to her as a woman. Furthermore, María Magdalena, like Sor Juana, may not speak publicly (the genre of the memoirs suggests its private nature, unlikely to be written for the public eye), but she too defends self-education and private study through the acts of reading and writing.9 Thus, while she enunciates her political denunciations from within the space that was considered to be ‘proper’ for a woman in the late nineteenth century, she seeks to transform, through her very discursive act, the meaning of what constitutes the proper space for women. In the process, the divide between the personal/private and the political/public becomes increasingly blurry, sustaining Ludmer’s point that those regional spaces that the dominant culture has extracted from the realms of the daily and the personal and has constituted as separate fields (politics, science, philosophy) exist for women precisely in the realm of the personal and are indissociable from it. And if the personal, the private, the quotidian are included as points of departure and perspectives in other discourses and practices, they cease to be merely personal, private, and quotidian. (‘Tricks’ 93)

The potential collapse of the division between the public and the private is a crucial issue in literary works about prostitution, as it is in the larger social debates on the status of deviant women in late nineteenthcentury Spain. Pura Fernández has shown in her recent study, Mujer pública y vida privada, that the deviant female subject, whom the figure of the prostitute exemplifies, assumes a public status (she is, after all, the ‘public woman’ par excellence) in defying the feminine domestic ideal (22). As the prostitute’s diseased body threatens the health of the social body, she becomes the target of medical intervention through the discourses of public hygiene (28–9). In Fernández’s words: Discourse on the borders between private and public life can be analysed in parallel with the emergent discipline of sexual hygiene that connects both spheres and aspires to legitimize systems of social control of private behaviour, as Michel Foucault has theorized so well: systems built on

Matilde Cherner’s María Magdalena

203

taxonomical criteria to classify private conducts, which thus gain public visibility. (29)

The private life of the deviant woman, even if she does not choose it freely, can no longer be separated from its potential impact on public life; her moral life, perceived to be connected closely to the health of her body, is deemed to be in need of regulation. It is in such a context that the protagonist of Cherner’s novel seeks a space for knowledge and expression, in the face of social forces that threaten to crush her agency as a subject, reducing her to a diseased and pathologized body in need of medical intervention. The conclusion of Part Two marks the end of the diary written in the adolescent protagonist’s voice during her stay in Celestina’s brothel. Parts Three through Five present, from the perspective of the adult narrator, a seemingly clichéd love story modelled on the conventions of French romanticism and, in particular, on Dumas’s hugely successful novel, La Dame aux Camélias (1848), which was rewritten by the author as a play and later transformed by Verdi into the famous opera La traviata. While Cherner’s novel belongs to a different literary period and national context from that of Dumas, there are a number of notable parallels between the two works, which suggest Cherner’s conscious effort to appropriate a literary prototype that was well known to her readers in Spain.10 Aspasia finds momentary happiness in her love for the student Ciro La Sierra, who, captivated by rumours of her beauty and intelligence, seeks her out in the brothel and eventually frees her from Celestina’s clutches by taking Aspasia to the countryside to live with him as his mistress. The story takes a decidedly tragic turn in Part Five when her lover must abandon her to marry another woman to fulfil a family obligation, at which point she willingly sacrifices her own happiness for the sake of love. Dumas’s heroine, Marguerite Gautier, also leads a blissful, albeit brief, existence as Armand Duval’s mistress in the countryside, until she chooses to sacrifice her own happiness to save the reputation of her lover’s respectable family. In the end, confined to her bed in her humble apartment, Marguerite, like María Magdalena, dies a horrible death, her body wasting away with consumption, a condition believed to be exacerbated by her lifestyle.11 The fate of Cherner’s protagonist thus evokes the popular myth of the ‘fallen woman’ exemplified in the figure of Dumas’s heroine, who finds redemption through love and self-sacrifice. In addition to the obvious thematic resemblances between the two

204

Marginal Subjects

works, it is noteworthy that both novels have embedded within them the private journals of their respective protagonists, which make their most intimate thoughts and sentiments known to their readers. And in both cases the private life of the ‘fallen woman’ is brought to public light through the mediation of a male writer figure, whose voyeuristic role makes the story possible. Just as the narrator of Dumas’s novel is ‘seized with an urge to write this story [of Marguerite Gautier’s life]’ and later transcribes, ‘without adding or deleting a single syllable,’ the courtesan’s journal given to him by her lover (Dumas 19, 181), the masculine narrator of Cherner’s introduction, no sooner than he devours the protagonist’s memoirs, publishes them ‘sin alterar en él ni una coma’ (without altering even a comma; 24). In both novels, there is yet another masculine intermediary – Armand himself in La Dame aux Camélias and Dr Benavides in María Magdalena – who introduces the prostitute’s first-person account in such a way as to present her in a favourable light to the writer who is to reproduce her account. On the one hand, Cherner appropriates, very consciously, the popular romantic myth of the noble courtesan who ‘remains “virginal” in the midst of vice’ and whose suffering and self-sacrifice transform her into a saint and martyr (Coward xvii). On the other, even Dumas’ original work was, according to one critic, ‘engaging the reader as though it were a social document as well as a romance’ (John 4); in the words of another, the French author was moving away from ‘Romantic excess towards a more restrained presentation of social and psychological realities’ (Coward xvi). Cherner, for her part, exploits the Romantic myth popularized in Dumas’s work through the idealization of the prostitute figure, even as she dismantles this ideal, exposing the inevitable destruction that the deviant woman’s transgression will bring upon her mind and body. In her memoirs, Aspasia imagines a ‘marriage of equals’ between herself and her idealized lover, evoking the relationship between her namesake and the Athenian statesman Pericles. Like the hetaera who bears her name, Cherner’s Aspasia is no ordinary prostitute, but an ‘educated’ courtesan whose understanding of worldly matters transcends that of the conventional woman. Ciro, too, acknowledging María Magdalena’s talent and intelligence, overcomes his misogyny, his conviction that all women are ‘séres inferiores, incapaces é indignos de interesar nuestro [de los hombres] corazón, y mucho ménos nuestro pensamiento’ (inferior beings, incapable and unworthy of awakening interest in our heart, and much less in our thought; 88). Her intellect

Matilde Cherner’s María Magdalena

205

notwithstanding, María Magdalena seems ultimately unable to overcome her pathology, which reduces her repeatedly to a diseased, hysterical body. The nervous ailment that she suffers during her greatest moment of misery in Celestina’s brothel, provoking in her ‘horrorosas palpitaciones’ (horrific palpitations) alternated with a ‘doloroso y prolongado desmayo’ (painful and prolonged fainting spells; 81), recurs in the form of a dangerous ‘friebre [sic] que consumia mi cuerpo’ (fever that consumed my body; 100) owing to the intense passion she experiences upon meeting Ciro. An implicit association might also be drawn between the prostitute’s feverish passion and the hectic fever that is said to consume syphilitics during the later stages of the disease, as we have seen in the portrait of Marquis of Villaperdida’s diseased body in López Bago’s La prostituta. Cherner’s novel links female desire to disease once again, echoing the medical discourses of the period that pathologized female sexuality. Therefore, as much as feminist readers might wish to see the prostitute as a desiring subject capable of recreating her identity through her writing, she is ultimately unable to escape (self-)inscription within the dominant medical discourses that pathologized the prostitute’s body. Unlike Galdós’s Isidora and Pardo Bazán’s Amparo, whose deviant subjectivities transform the spaces they traverse, threatening to undermine social norms and boundaries, Cherner’s prostitute aspires to return to the space of social respectability, yet finds herself unable to escape her enclosure in spaces of marginality. The deviant woman’s incursions from the margins into the centre seem all but impossible in María Magdalena’s case. Images of her physical and symbolic confinement predominate in her account, from her isolation in the ‘desmantelada sala’ (stripped room) in Salamanca where, as a young adolescent, she helplessly watches her mother die away (38), to her imprisonment in Celestina’s brothel, to her solitary confinement in a country house where she lives as Ciro’s mistress, and, finally, to the anonymous hospital room where she writes her memoirs as she anticipates a lonely and horrible death. Even when she abandons Celestina’s brothel to accompany Ciro to an isolated house in the countryside, she remains his ‘kept woman’ who aspires to a life of domesticity. The window by which she spends her days awaiting her lover’s return evokes painful memories of her past when, ‘encerrada con mi madre en aquella casa triste y sombría’ (confined with my mother in that sad and sombre house; 128), she looked out of the window of her childhood home in search of light and open space. Finding no hope, she imagined jumping to her death

206

Marginal Subjects

through this very window after the loss of her mother. It is as if, for the narrator of the memoirs, both time and space remained static: she provides no opening toward the future through narrative movement, but only a return to a past from which she is unable to escape. In the end, María Magdalena negates completely her identity as a desiring subject through her act of self-sacrifice, which seals her tragic fate as a sick and abandoned woman who is unable to survive on her own. Rather than choosing to transgress social laws by continuing to live as Ciro’s mistress after he marries his cousin, she sacrifices her own happiness so that her lover is able to lead a respectable life. If Isidora Rufete asserts her agency by wilfully embracing a life of deviance, pursuing the course of desire, María Magdalena seeks to reinsert herself within the social norm, negating her subjectivity. A life of social respectability, however, has never been and will never be within reach of Cherner’s protagonist, as society will never erase the mark of dishonour from her deviant body. In the end, her act of self-sacrifice fails to redeem her socially or spiritually; instead, she finds herself trapped, as during her childhood, in a physical and symbolic space on the fringes of society. In the concluding chapter of the novel, entitled ‘Desconsuelo’ (Despair), María Magdalena travels from Salamanca to the capital to catch a glimpse of Ciro without being seen. Whereas in other works, such as La desheredada, Fortunata y Jacinta, and La Tribuna, we have seen how the city represents a space of pleasure and of transgression of limits for the female protagonist, allowing her to imagine new spaces of subjectivity, here it becomes a ‘confuso laberinto’ (confusing labyrinth; 201) that threatens to annihilate María Magdalena’s subjectivity, leaving her without agency. Upon her return to Salamanca, with her body already ravaged by the syphilis she has contracted in the brothel, she settles into ‘un reducido y pobre cuartito’ (a small and shabby little room; 214), where she begins to write her Memorias. As she faces impending death in the final chapter of her memoirs, she leaves us an image of herself as a helpless victim – ‘la desdichada Magdalena’ (the unfortunate Magdalena), ‘la infeliz Solita’ (the unhappy Solita), ‘la desventurada Aspasia’ (the unfortunate Aspasia; 215) – who has no other choice but to resign herself to her fate. There are no words of overt protest or political denunciation at this point, but only those of self-negation. We, of course, are aware, having read the introduction to the novel, that María Magdalena spends her last days confined in the hospital, where she eventually dies an agonizing death.

Matilde Cherner’s María Magdalena

207

Images of physical enclosure, which predominate in the protagonist’s self-presentation in her Memorias, become a metaphor for the confinement of her subjectivity within a discursive space that the adult narrator defines for her (the narrated self). After all, it is the adult narrator who recreates her younger self in her memoirs: the first-person voice shifts constantly between the present and the past, the act of telling and the story told, identifying herself alternately with the adult narrator and the adolescent protagonist. She calls attention to her authorial presence by inserting retrospective commentaries into her autobiographical narration from the standpoint of the present moment, the moment of its writing. While the narrated self in María Magdalena’s memoirs, as we have seen, appears to be deprived of language and agency (in fact, we are struck by the character’s passive silence throughout most of the novel), we return to the question of the extent to which the act of writing allows the narrating self a space of subjectivity that she might call her own – and through which Cherner herself, by extension, is able to legitimize her discourse on prostitution. We may ask why, throughout her Memorias íntimas, the adult narrator intrudes constantly on her own narration with her authorial commentaries, thus calling attention to the presence of the narrating self. On the one hand, the temporal distance between the narrating ‘I’ and the narrated self might allow for the creation of a discursive space through which the subject can (re)shape her past, reflect philosophically on her condition, and even carry out a political denunciation. Thus memory has the potential to serve as a space of agency for the writer who reconstructs her past. In her own words, the memories captured in her writing represent ‘el único alimento de mi vida’ (the only nourishment of my life; 92). On the other hand, the narrator of the memoirs affirms that the acts of remembrance and writing represent a form of penitence, of self-flagellation, which brings her nothing but ‘un nuevo tormento’ (new suffering; 72). Ultimately, her own words trap her in a past from which she is unable to escape, just as she is trapped, physically and symbolically, in the space of the present from which she attempts to distract herself by writing her Memorias. Thus, although Pura Fernández suggests that the protagonist’s writing grants her a certain degree of ‘moral freedom’ through her access to ‘the space of personal privacy, a consciousness of individuality’ (‘Escritura maniatada’ 137), I sustain that her subjective consciousness does not, in and of itself, lead to greater agency for herself, either as the prostitute-character or as the narrator of her autobiography. María Magdalena constantly interrupts her

208

Marginal Subjects

memoirs with references to her present state, ‘presa de la enfermedad y la miseria’ (victim of disease and misery) in her ‘miserable cuartucho’ (wretched hovel; 154), thus imbuing her narrative with a sense of determinism and inescapable destiny from the start. The narrator’s continual imprecations against the tragic fate she anticipates for herself, even as she writes her memoirs, adds to the sense of foreclosure of any space of resistance that might have been opened up by the act of writing. And what does this mean for the female author who seeks to negotiate a discursive space for herself through the literary representation of the prostitute? It is crucial that we address this question by returning, once again, to the framing technique of the novel, which, as we have seen, allows the author to position herself strategically to address a readership hostile to women’s participation in public discourse, particularly on an issue as controversial as prostitution. On the one hand, readers might have been inclined to consider María Magdalena as a direct spokesperson for Cherner herself, who undoubtedly felt that she could not assert her views directly given her lack of authority in the public sphere on account of her gender. We cannot deny that there are moments in the novel when the author appears to speak directly through her protagonist, particularly when the latter presents a denunciation of the government that she holds responsible for the exploitation of prostitutes like herself. On the other, the way in which Cherner frames the protagonist’s narration suggests that only through the intervention of masculine figures – significantly, a physician and a literary critic – can the prostitute’s voice and story be heard at all. That is to say, the public’s access to the prostitute’s subjectivity is made to hinge on the masculine intermediaries’ willingness to ‘read’ her memoirs in a way that validates her selfrepresentation. It is, therefore, a strategic move on Cherner’s part to appeal to the prototype of the physician, who represented the figure of scientific authority in the naturalist works of the 1880s, to legitimize the prostitute’s narration, even though he responds emotionally to the text, identifying with its protagonist, as might be expected typically of a female reader. Thus it is, ironically, the reading of the prostitute’s discourse by a male scientific authority figure in a manner gendered as ‘feminine’ that lends this discourse legitimacy and, ultimately, leads to its publication by the male writer/critic figure in the novel. Given this context, we can see, retrospectively, that Cherner’s own rhetorical strategies in her prologue are crucial to giving voice to the prostitute’s subjectivity. María Magdalena’s Memorias íntimas consti-

Matilde Cherner’s María Magdalena

209

tutes an expression of her most private thoughts and feelings, evoking the conventions of the sentimental genre (Fernández, ‘Escritura maniatada’ 139). While it may seem that the author is merely seeking to ‘humanize’ the prostitute by bringing her back to the conventional feminine space of the private and the sentimental, what is potentially subversive about Cherner’s work is her appropriation of naturalist discourse within this sentimental, or idealist, genre to assert publicly her political views on prostitution. Through the prostitute’s subjectivity, she brings the ‘private’ out into the ‘public,’ blurring the separation between these two spheres. She implicates all men in the exploitation of young women like María Magdalena, and calls the public’s attention to the potential impact of the spread of prostitution – and, by extension, of venereal disease – on the entire social structure.12 Although the development of the concept of privacy in nineteenth-century Europe restricted sex to the interior of the bedroom (Corbin 214–15), Cherner exposes, through the prostitute’s own consciousness, the potential menace that deviant sexuality posed to the public sphere, in spite of the government’s efforts to maintain this sexuality under surveillance and control, and out of the public eye. Aurora Rivière Gómez notes that the abolitionist campaign, begun in Great Britain by Josephine Butler and brought to Spain in 1887 via France, was somewhat slow in making its impact in Spain. Rivière Gómez observes, furthermore, that of those who embraced the abolitionist movement a majority were men, and, in particular, male physicians. In contrast to the situation in Britain, there was virtually no participation by Spanish women in this movement. As a consequence, among Spanish abolitionists, arguments based strictly on hygienic considerations predominated over those based on juridical-moral ones that focused on women’s rights and equality under the law (Rivière Gómez, Caídas 76–7). Cherner’s denunciation of legalized prostitution through the voice of her female protagonist, however, closely echoes the feminist discourse of the British repealers who challenged the gender and class bias of the Contagious Disease Acts introduced in the 1860s to regulate prostitution (Bell 62–3; Rodríguez Sánchez 378). Like the British repealers, Cherner, through the figure of María Magdalena, stridently condemns the sexual double standard of punishing women for engaging in sexual commerce while tolerating the same act in men, as well as the inherent classism of a regulation system based largely on the control and punishment of lower-class women (Bell 61; Rivière Gómez, Caídas 80–3). In María Magdalena’s diatribe against the gov-

210

Marginal Subjects

ernment that tolerates prostitution, she decries that ‘los gobiernos se ven obligados á tolerar la prostitución, como una salvaguardia de la virtud de las demás mujeres’ (governments are forced to tolerate prostitution, to safeguard the virtue of other women; 74). Her protest notwithstanding, such a discourse, rather than granting agency to the prostitute, merely inverts the dominant discourse that blames women for the transmission of the moral and sexual disease that prostitution embodies. In this respect, Cherner’s position was not so different from that of the British feminist repealers who, according to Shannon Bell, ‘wrote the prostitute body as the victim of male pollution, a female body “invaded by men’s bodies [and] men’s laws.” Female Repealers thus denied the prostitute any identity other than passive victim’ (61). As the lone female participant in the public discourse on prostitution in Spain in the 1880s, we have seen how Cherner disguised herself behind a masculine name and voice, even as she asserted the need for ‘el diferente punto de vista’ (a different point of view) from which to embark on the study of ‘la llaga social’ (social ulcer; 5). To be able to participate in the debate on prostitution as practitioner of literary fiction, she finds herself negotiating the precarious balance, or tension, between ‘idealism’ and ‘naturalism,’ with their gendered implications. While her ‘idealism’ allows her to create a space of expression for the prostitute’s subjectivity, granting transcendence to the social outcast, Cherner’s appropriation of naturalist discourse, identified with the ‘masculine,’ permits her entry into a public debate considered to be the exclusive domain of men. In this sense, Cherner faced a situation not so different from that of her much better-known female contemporary, Emilia Pardo Bazán, who, only a few years later, used the prologue to La Tribuna to assert her authority as a practitioner of this controversial aesthetic. Cherner’s ‘diferente punto de vista’ (different point of view; 5) might allow for the representation of the subjective consciousness of a ‘deviant’ woman; however, it is another matter to claim that such a consciousness translates into agency for the female author or for the prostitute to whom she seeks to give voice through the character’s first-person narration. There is an uneasy disjuncture between the representation, in the naturalist mode, of the prostitute’s diseased and objectified body, apparently stripped of all agency, on the one hand, and the idealized image of the noble courtesan who is elevated through her suffering and self-sacrifice, on the other. And nowhere is the clash between idealism and naturalism more apparent than in the last chapter of María

Matilde Cherner’s María Magdalena

211

Magdalena’s Memorias, where she struggles to give expression to her inner consciousness, even as ‘la ardiente fiebre’ (the burning fever; 216) of her unnamable disease threatens to devour her being and extinguish this consciousness. While any facile identification between the author and her protagonist must be rendered problematic, it would not be inaccurate to suggest that, based on her prologue to the novel, Cherner’s own agency as a female writer depends, in large part, on her ability to bring her protagonist’s subjective consciousness to light, to transform the account of the prostitute’s private life into a public issue. She is fully aware of the obstacles she faces in carrying out her literary agenda: ‘Un libro de tal índole no puede salir á la luz más que á la sombra de un gran nombre literario’ (A book of this kind cannot come to light except in the shadow of a great literary name; 5), she states, indicating that she has waited for the most opportune moment to bring to public light a theme as controversial as the plight of a prostitute. Even then, she fears, she must publish this work ‘sin esperar tal vez recompensa de ningún género’ (perhaps without hoping for a reward of any kind; 7). Were her novel to be published in France, she suggests, perhaps it would receive the attention it deserves; however, she is well aware of the opposition that a literary work on prostitution would face in late nineteenth-century Spain. As we know, even men, such as López Bago, who later in the same decade wrote naturalist novels on prostitution, were prosecuted and censured for offence to public morality.13 Yet in the case of María Magdalena, the paradox, or perhaps the tragedy, was the total silence with which the novel was received (Rodríguez Sánchez 377). Neither her masculine pen name nor her strategic self-positioning in her prologue seemed to have saved her from the indifference she feared from her public, nor from the near oblivion of her work. She did not even reap the benefit of commercial success that her male contemporary, López Bago, enjoyed due to the scandal created by the publication of his La prostituta series. Ultimately, we ask, was Cherner reduced to no more than a ‘voice in the desert’ completely lost to critics and the general readership alike? Clearly, Cherner did not have anywhere near the public presence or the impact that her female contemporary Pardo Bazán had on Spanish literary culture in the1880s. The latter soon became a public figure with whom her male contemporaries had to contend, albeit unwillingly; even the controversy and scandal provoked by the publication of her naturalist manifesto were a testament to the widespread influence of

212

Marginal Subjects

her ideas. As we have seen from the example of La Tribuna, even in her early naturalist work Pardo Bazán was able to negotiate a space of agency for female subjects who deviated from the social norm; while she may never have been able to escape the cultural mark of gender, she strategically positioned her discourse and the subjectivities defined by it in order to articulate her tactics of resistance. In doing so she, not unlike many of her female protagonists, deviated from her assigned and accepted place, exploding the boundaries that separated the centre from the periphery, the public from the private. Cherner, too, as we have seen, sought to stake out a claim to a potential space of resistance for the deviant female subject through what discursive tactics she had at her disposal as a little-known woman writer in the late nineteenth century. Yet we are left doubtful as to the extent to which she is able to translate the deviant woman’s subjective consciousness into agency, so as to transform and to resignify the physical and symbolic spaces that delimit her. While the female protagonist of Cherner’s novel might be unable to escape entirely her circumscription within the dominant naturalist discourse on prostitution, the author’s self-conscious presence and rhetorical manoeuvrings open up a space for imagining a ‘different point of view’ that challenges dominant cultural constructions of deviant female subjectivity.

Conclusion

A critical re-examination of late nineteenth-century Spanish literary texts, in light of the cultural debates on gender deviance both within and outside of Spain, elucidates the extensive points of convergence between these texts and those of other Western European nations in configuring deviant subjectivities. The intellectual exchange in literature, science, and politics across national boundaries shows that the obsession with gender deviance was part of a broader European trend during this period. At the same time, Spain’s belated and uncertain status relative to the ‘modernity’ of the rest of Western Europe exacerbated the anxieties provoked by challenges to established notions of social identity, particularly gender identity. As the Galdosian narrator has put it so succinctly in Las novelas de Torquemada, late nineteenth-century Spanish society saw the disappearance of ‘clases, grupos, categorías morales’ (classes, groups, moral categories), with the result that ‘ahora nadie sabe quién es nadie’ (nobody knows who anyone is any longer; 304) – an uncertainty that Galdós and other fellow intellectuals found to be nothing short of cataclysmic. Given this context, we have seen how the privileging of the trope of gender – and ‘femininity’ in particular – to represent deviant subjectivities in Spanish fiction of this period is intimately connected to broader anxieties about social and national identity. The literary text has always been a space of desire and fantasy. Such is the case even of realist (or naturalist) fiction, which is presumably modelled on ‘the real,’ however this notion might be defined by existing social and cultural conventions. On the one hand, there is the fantasy through which the dominant culture gives expression to its anxieties and desires, especially in the face of social, political, and economic dis-

214

Marginal Subjects

order. As we have seen in many late nineteenth-century literary texts, the representations of gender deviance in the cultural discourses of Restoration Spain, as elsewhere in Europe during the same period, not only reflected bourgeois masculine fears and fantasies about women and their changing role in a society in transition, but also generated deviance as a gendered trope, feminizing acts and identities that lay outside of the social norm. It is not surprising that masculine fears and fantasies about the deviant woman found expression in the controlling masculine gaze of the naturalist narrator, or of a character acting as his or her spokesperson, albeit in an ironic fashion, in some cases. Dr Miquis in Galdós’s La desheredada, the naturalist physician Dr Pérez in López Bago’s La prostituta, Gabriel Pardo in Pardo Bazán’s Insolación, and even the ‘idealist’ Dr Benavides in María Magdalena personify, with varying degrees of irony, the disciplinary project of nineteenth-century naturalism. (Again, realism and naturalism can be considered interchangeable in this context, reflecting the literary convention of nineteenth-century Spain.) As we have shown, however, desire and fantasy often unwittingly invade the discourse of male writers, ultimately undermining the ideal of scientific distance and objectivity that presumably forms the basis of the naturalist project. In female-authored works, on the other hand, there is a self-conscious questioning of the masculine naturalist paradigm, as we have observed in the narrator’s parody of Gabriel Pardo in Pardo Bazán’s Insolación, or Dr Benavides’s loss of distance from the prostitute’s memoirs in María Magdalena. These women writers’ attempts to distance their authorial personas from the diegetic world are often more explicit and self-aware than in the works of their male counterparts. Again, my intention is not to make any essentialistic or universalistic claims about women’s relationship to naturalism, or to literary representation in general; however, women writers’ awareness of their marginality within the dominant culture often requires them to make use of different rhetorical strategies to legitimate their discourse. These strategies, in turn, have the potential to bring about the revision of dominant cultural paradigms, allowing the female subject to forge new spaces of subjectivity previously denied her. At the same time, these works of literary fiction allow for the imagination of a different space of desire for marginalized subjects, who challenge the dominant cultural ideal of a stable hetero-normative bourgeois male subjectivity. For the socially marginal, fantasy is not merely a compensatory fiction, a form of disavowal of difference, or a

Conclusion

215

way of channelling collective anxieties into socially acceptable form; in addition, it has a productive and, in fact, foundational role, allowing marginal subjects to generate new spaces of subjectivity and desire. Judith Butler’s definition of fantasy in Undoing Gender is quite apropos in this context: Fantasy is part of the articulation of the possible; it moves us beyond what is merely actual and present into a realm of possibility, the not yet actualized or the not actualizable … Fantasy is not the opposite of reality; it is what reality forecloses, and, as a result, it defines the limits of reality, constituting it as its constitutive outside. The critical promise of fantasy, when and where it exists, is to challenge the contingent limits of what will and will not be called reality. Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home. (29)

Butler envisions the potential for new configurations of gender through the ‘promise of fantasy’ – through a questioning of established gender norms and categories. In the nineteenth-century Spanish novel, deviant figures such as the adulteress in Fortunata y Jacinta, the seduced woman in La Tribuna and Insolación, and the prostitute in La desheredada, María Magdalena, and even La prostituta, while they differ in the degree of agency they exercise over their own bodies and identities, produce significant fissures in Restoration society’s dominant structures of power and knowledge. They allow readers a glimpse into the subjectivities that these deviant figures have the potential to forge through their discourses of desire. This being said, my argument is not that all of these authors seek to challenge or undermine prevailing gender norms through their representations of the deviant subject. Some of these works – Clarín’s Su único hijo being the most salient example – show that the anxieties provoked by challenges to existing gender norms and categories give rise to (often impossible) attempts to reinstate these norms. In other texts, the novelistic project is much more ambivalent, as what appears to be the author’s politically progressive agenda in the context of the times often comes up against unconscious desires and fantasies that end up by reinscribing deviant subjects within dominant patriarchal paradigms. López Bagos’s La prostituta series is a case in point. Still other novels, such as Galdós’s La desheredada and Fortunata y Jacinta,

216

Marginal Subjects

play out the author’s fundamental ambivalence toward gender (and class) transgression without resolving this tension in an unequivocal fashion. These works of fiction, therefore, point to the fundamental ambivalence of the realist/naturalist project in defining its relation to the deviant subject. Yet the fact remains that, regardless of the author’s gender ideology – or attitude toward the deviant subject represented in his or her work – gender deviance remains an insistent trope in the fin de siècle. The recurrence of this trope signals a widespread cultural crisis, while heralding the possibility of epistemological shifts in the social, as well as the cultural, arena. The representations of the crisis of gender in the writings of Spanish realist/naturalist authors in the final decades of the nineteenth century paved the way for a more sustained questioning of the category of gender and its representation by early twentieth-century ‘modernist’ and avant-garde writers of both genders (Kirkpatrick, Mujer 7–28). Many of these texts, perhaps surprisingly for those who have privileged the normalizing rather than the contestatory function of the realist genre, also anticipate the more sustained challenges to sexual, as well as gender, norms in the discourses of the early twentieth century and beyond. Representations of subjectivities that transgress the ‘limits drawn between masculinity and femininity,’ as Richard Cleminson and Francisco Vázquez García suggest, would eventually make way, in the 1910 and 1920s in Spain, for discourses foregrounding deviance of a specifically sexual nature, beyond the broader categeory of gender transgression (62). Thus, ultimately, whether the writer is male or female, or more or less ‘progressive’ or ‘reactionary’ in his or her gender ideology, is less the issue than their aesthetic responses to the general crisis of category at the turn of the century through the troping of gender deviance in their works. Regardless of the way in which these works resolve the crisis of gender – whether in the realm of private subjectivity or of public discourse –the gaps and fissures produced by deviant subjectivities give rise to the foundational possibility not only of realist and naturalist literature, but also of the modernist literature it anticipates.

Notes

Introduction: Discourses on Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Spain 1 For a representative sampling of scholarly works on female sexual deviance in the British and French contexts, see Anderson on the ‘fallen woman,’ Tanner on adultery, and Bell, Bernheimer, Matlock, and Walkowitz on prostitution. 2 See, for example, Blanco (‘Spain’), Charnon-Deutsch (Fictions), Kirkpatrick (‘Gender’), Labanyi (Gender), and Martin-Márquez (Disorientations). 3 By ‘trope,’ I refer to the use of ‘gender deviance’ as a rhetorical figure to represent every other aspect of social and cultural relations, including, but not limited to, those of class, race, and nationality. 4 Visual culture is another important venue for exploring the various modes of gender deviance in nineteenth-century Spain. López Fernández examines representations of the prostitute in Spanish paintings of the turn of the century, contextualizing these images within prevailing notions on prostitution (158–98). Charnon-Deutsch, in her Fictions of the Feminine makes reference to images of deviant women (such as that of Isabel II in the Bécquer brothers’ Los Borbones en pelota) in the nineteenth century; however, her emphasis is on how the popular Spanish press helped to naturalize conventional significations (either positive or negative) of the female body, and of femininity in general, in the visual culture of the period. 5 See Álvarez Junco for a historical analysis of Spain’s response to its imperial crisis, especially in chapters 10–12. 6 For a discussion of the cultural discourses from abroad that had a significant impact in Spain, see Campos Marín and Labanyi (Gender 78–80). 7 By the Restoration, I refer to the period following 1875, when the Bourbon Alfonso XII was restored as monarch of Spain. Alfonso’s mother, Isabel II,

218

8

9

10

11

12

13

Notes to pages 10–13 was toppled from the throne in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1868, being forced into exile in France, leading to the proclamation of the short-lived First Republic (1873–4). While, technically, the Restoration period lasted until the beginning of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship in 1923, for the purposes of this study, which focuses on the fin de siècle, I refer to the period between 1875 and the turn of the century. Foucault provides the example of society’s response to a village lad who received a few caresses from a little girl: ‘this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration’ (History 31). For a more extensive discussion of these disciplinary measures and institutions, see Bahamonde Magro and Toro Mérida, Iglesias Rodríguez, Trinidad Fernández, and Varela. As Trinidad Fernández shows in his work, the cárcel-modelo of Madrid (constructed 1876–84), popularly known as El Abanico, was modelled on Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon to enable a more efficient control of its prisoners through the technique of generalized surveillance. A similar prison for women, constructed in Moncloa, was inaugurated in 1883. Other cárceles-modelo were constructed all over the country. Historians Bahamonde Magro and Toro Mérida provide an account of the measures that were imposed by the mayor of Madrid to control vagrancy during the Restoration period. For a more detailed account of the techniques of social control imposed by science and medicine during this period, see Álvarez-Uría’s Miserables y locos and Rodríguez Ocaña. With regard to literary naturalism in Argentina, Nouzeilles states: ‘it imitated the meticulous work of a vigilant power whose aim was to control all social activity and all “abnormal” desire. The result were typologies that divided and normalized fictional characters, classifying them into the healthy and the sick, the normal and the pathological’ (84). In fact, feminist critics have found fissures even in the most apparently seamless representations of normative bourgeois femininity – or masculinity, for that matter – in genres such as the earlier novela costumbrista and the domestic novel, considered traditionally to uphold the most conservative gender ideology (Charnon-Deutsch, Narratives; Jagoe, ‘María del Pilar Sinués de Marco’; Kirkpatrick, ‘On the Threshold’). Outside of narrative fiction, other forms of popular culture, such as the romancero (ballad), reflected Restoration society’s obsession with deviance. These ballads transmitted narrative accounts of horrific crimes, particu-

Notes to pages 15–17

14 15

16

17

18

19

20

219

larly those motivated by carnal passion, to arouse the public’s fear of the ‘maximum aberration’ to which the human being could descend: the delinquent is represented as a ‘perverse subject,’ as ‘pure aberration’ (Segura x; Fernández, ‘El estatuto’ 95). While I will not be addressing the ballad genre in this study, it represents a fruitful ground for future work on the problem of deviance. For a discussion of these romances, see Segura’s prologue to Romances horrorosos and Fernández (‘El estatuto’). In her commentary on France of the 1880s, Shapiro makes note of the tendency in popular and social scientific writing to depict the transformation in modern urban life in terms of ‘a specifically feminized problem of disorder’ (23). See also White’s analysis of feminine political allegories in nineteenth-century Spain, particularly as they apply to Isabel II, and Delgado’s study of Galdós’s La de Bringas (La imagen 55–69). In France, as well, anxieties about a new experience of ‘cultural anarchy’ (including ‘sexual anarchy,’ to borrow Elaine Showalter’s term) found their clearest expression in the figure of the female criminal, according to Ann-Louise Shapiro (13), leading her to a critique of Foucault, who, in her view, ‘misses the convergence of anxieties about social disorder and cultural anarchy in the figure of the female criminal, the quintessential unruly woman of the fin-de-siècle’ (20). With regard to the manifestations of deviance in the Spanish realist novel, Labanyi notes: ‘the incidence of adultery, prostitution, or crime in the realist novel is an index not of its occurrence but of the anxiety it caused’ (Gender 65). The nature of the education that was promoted for women was another matter, as seen in Pardo Bazán’s criticism of the differences between men and women’s education; the latter, whose focus was religious, rather than intellectual, amounted to her domestication (‘La educación’). See Jagoe, Blanco, and Enríquez de Salamanca on women’s education in the second half of the nineteenth century (105–217). For women’s education during Isabel II’s reign, see Rivière Gómez (La educación). In her analysis of turn-of-the-century texts published in Spain on the African question, Martin-Márquez also shows the identification that has been made between non-normative masculinities and theories of (racial and national) degeneration prevalent at the time (Disorientations 161–219). By this I do not wish to imply that, prior to this period, there was no difference between sex and sexuality, or that there were no bodies that challenged heterosexual norms. Foucault’s point is that the medical category of (homo)sexuality was constituted, at least in France and Germany, in the

220

21

22

23

24

25 26

27

Notes to pages 18–27 late nineteenth century, with the emergence of the new sciences; that is, what was seen previously as mere acts now became a category of being, a ‘species’ (History 43). Cleminson and Vázquez García show that, in Spain, gender deviance acquired an explicit sexual dimension only after around 1915 (96). See Delgado, Mendelson, and Vázquez, and Ginger for a critique of some of the dominant accounts of Spain’s history and of the nation’s relationship to modernity. Critics have traditionally considered La desheredada to mark Galdós’s shift toward naturalism (Willem 41) and toward a less tendentious and more complex representation of contemporary Spanish life. Others have approached this novel as Galdós’s first meditation on modernity, confronting issues such as the role of the market, of women and marginals, and of art in the modern age (Labanyi, Gender 103–26; Jagoe, ‘Disinheriting’; Andreu 111-30; Sieburth, Inventing 27–99). Fortunata y Jacinta, as Galdós’s masterpiece, has been seen as representing the culminating point of his literary realism in all its complexity, from an aesthetic as well as socio-political perspective. The word señorito, a diminutive of señor (gentleman), carries a pejorative connotation, which might be translated as ‘a rich and idle (or spoiled) young gentleman.’ As we will see in this chapter, many of these images showed the female reader in a state of exaltation and, oftentimes, sexual arousal, oblivious to the world around her and, especially, to the male gaze that sought to penetrate her subjectivity. For a brief discussion of masculine sexual deviance in La Regenta, see Krauel (33–49). While free indirect discourse creates the impression that the character is enunciating her thoughts directly in the first person, there is always the controlling presence of the third-person narrator in the background. The notion of marginality is undoubtedly relative, as we must consider not only the author’s gender and social status, but also his or her place within the literary canon, which is a function of multiple variables based on social, historical, and even personal circumstances. Although a woman writer such as Pardo Bazán came from a background of social and cultural privilege and had the means to get her works published, she struggled constantly to break away from nineteenth-century cultural expectations for the woman writer, consciously setting herself apart from other literary women and striving to enter into male intellectual circles (Bieder, ‘Literary Women’). She was subjected to relentless attack by her male contemporar-

Notes to pages 30–2

221

ies, particularly after the publication of her naturalist manifesto, La cuestión palpitante (1883), not only because of the controversial content of her writings, but also because naturalism was identified as a masculine genre. As Bieder shows, Pardo Bazán was marginalized from both female and male literary circles of her times, often being perceived as a disruptive figure by both groups (‘Literary Women’ 28). Thus the rhetorical manoeuvres to which she resorted to defend and justify her (naturalist) writings are crucial to analysing her attitude toward gender deviance. 1: The Deviant Female Body under Surveillance: Galdós’s La desheredada 1 I have based my English translations on Lester Clark’s The Disinherited, modifying his rendition when necessary. 2 O’Byrne-Curtis notes the fluidity of the borders between ‘what’s included and excluded,’ reason and madness, in the opening scene of the novel, which reflects, in her view, the instability of the narrative discourse that seeks to demarcate these borders (79). 3 Critics have taken divergent positions vis-à-vis Isidora’s relationship to popular literature. In her foundational study of Galdós and popular literature, Andreu views Isidora as an uncritical consumer of popular literature, ‘victim of an excess of fantasy and false illusions to which her reading of literary works has contributed,’ that is, ‘“bad literature”’ (111), as does Bauer, who sees the novel as challenging Isidora’s ‘delusions of grandeur’ and belief in class privilege (‘Isidora’s’ 49–50). Catherine Jagoe, in contrast, has questioned what she considers to be the narrator’s condemnation of Isidora’s reading from a ‘phallocentric and classbound’ perspective (‘Disinheriting’ 238), as does Sieburth, who also interprets the narrator’s discourse as a product of his class, gender, and cultural capital (Inventing 45). While these two groups of scholars present divergent responses to what is presumed to be the narrator’s critical attitude toward the protagonist, the narrator’s position toward the protagonist is not as unequivocally negative or anti-feminist as these critics (particularly, Jagoe) make it seem. It is true that La desheredada exposes the cultural anxieties surrounding female reading, or more generally speaking, female consumption, particularly of texts that have the potential to unleash female desire and agency. At the same time, I do not believe that we can interpret Isidora to be a mere product (or victim, much less) of the dominant consumer ideology; nor we can err on the other extreme, viewing her to be totally resistant to this ideology. A more productive approach would be to consider the extent to which she is

222

4

5 6

7

8

9

10 11

Notes to pages 33–48 able to redefine, through her ‘tactics’ of deviation (de Certeau xviii–xx), the limits of subjectivity imposed on her by the norms of bourgeois patriarchal society and, ultimately, to resignify these norms. Daniel Frost examines the role of public gardens in adapting ‘nature’ to the demands of social discipline in the nineteenth-century city. In particular, see his commentary on how Isidora’s stroll through the Paseo de la Castellana in La desheredada ‘provides the backdrop for the grand spectacle of nineteenth-century metropolitan culture,’ allowing us to observe, through the female protagonist’s eyes, ‘the incorporation of nature into the city’ (108–9). In reference to the same scene, Delgado notes that the Retiro Park, ‘far from being a place of authentic “recreation,” is domesticated nature, a microcosm of the urban space of Madrid’ (‘Subjetividades’ 113). Sieburth also notes: ‘The fear of woman’s sexual voracity was displaced into theories of woman’s innate voracity in the marketplace’ (Inventing 155). Ràfols observes, likewise, that: ‘Homeless when we meet her, homeless in the end, Isidora’s abodes along the way are provisional dwellings that are no match for her dreams of finding more permanent quarters in the Aransis palace’ (77). In Delgado’s words: ‘external and internal spaces are imbricated, with the geographical tropes translating the subject’s deviations’ (‘Subjetividades’ 111). The loan shark Torquemada is another example of a Galdosian character who wanders out of his social milieu – in his case, through marriage into the ‘alta burguesía’ (haute bourgeoisie) – and suffers a similar consequence. The product of his union with Fidela, a member of the fallen nobility, is a monstrous child, whom Torquemada’s brother-in-law calls ‘este muñeco híbrido, este monstruo’ (this hybrid doll, this monster; 416). In the context of the Torquemada series, this child, too, exemplifies the degeneration of the race. For a discussion of Valentín’s ‘monstruosity’ in relation to contemporary discourses on disease and degeneration, see T. Fuentes (Galdós’s Torquemada 60–83). Interestingly, among the main reasons degenerationist theorists in the early twentieth century provided to explain the birth of ‘sickly, malformed or depraved children’ was women’s work (Campos Marín et al. 174). For an excellent analysis of Miquis’s disciplinary function in chapter 28 of the novel, see Sieburth (‘The Dialectic’ 37–9). Miquis’s own words to Isidora, ‘Estás enferma, estás llagada’ (You’re ill, you’re deeply wounded; 357), echo the frequent references made to prostitution, in both literary and scientific texts of the same period, through the medical metaphor of the wound.

Notes to pages 49–55

223

12 The sewing machine is an important symbol in this context, as it represents woman’s subjection both to the ideology of domesticity and to the machinery of capitalist production. 13 Isidora’s self-contemplation in front of the mirror recalls the famous scene in Zola’s Nana, published a year earlier, although Isidora, in contrast to Zola’s courtesan, is clothed. 14 For a discussion of panopticism and the modality of power it exemplifies, see Foucault (Discipline 195–228). Trinidad Fernández shows how the proliferation of the ‘cárceles Modelo’ in Restoration Spain reflected the transition from a strictly negative (punitive) role of the penitentiary system to a more productive one that rendered docile and useful bodies through education and work. Galdós himself has commented on the efficiency of the new Modelo prison, whose construction was begun in 1876 and completed in 1884. Referring to its ‘forma panoscópica’ (panoptical form), he affirms: ‘Toda la construcción acusa, en su bien compartido conjunto, la higiene, la solidez, la economía, la seguridad’ (The entire construction displays, through its well distributed space, hygiene, strength, economy and security; qtd in Shoemaker 46–7). 15 The lawyer Nones attributes Mariano Rufete’s assassination attempt against the king to his ‘desorden cerebral’ (mental instability; 457), echoing late nineteenth-century psychiatry’s view of criminality as a form of organic anomaly – a view based, in turn, on notions of degeneration prevalent at the time. Mariano, too, is reduced to a victim of his pathology, of a ‘criminal instinto’ (criminal instinct; 450) that reduces him to a state of degeneracy. For a discussion of degenerationist theories in the Spanish context, see Campos Marín et al.; and, in Europe in general, see Pick. 16 Peter Brooks shows, in reference to the prostitute figure in the nineteenthcentury French serial novel, that ‘the bodily experience of certain markings is indeed ineffaceable’ (150). That is, once the prostitute – the deviant woman par excellence – has descended into the ‘lowest of the social depths’ she will forever bear ‘the indelible trace of misery, crime, and the sold body’ (P. Brooks 150). 17 The narrator’s characterization of Mariano as a savage with a ‘natural’ inclination for the low life of the vagabond echoes, once again, nineteenthcentury notions of degeneration through which the image of the ‘habitual criminal’ was conceived (Pick 5). In fact, according to Lombrosian theory, the figure of the anarchist terrorist exemplified the link between degeneration and criminality (Pick 131). 18 I agree with Ràfols’s interpretation that Isidora ‘nullifies her social identity and re-invents herself’ (80).

224

Notes to pages 55–8

19 Diane Urey also suggests that Isidora comes closest to ‘having an identity’ when she ‘loses her illusions at last’ (27). However, what Urey sees as a ‘totality of her absence,’ even within Isidora’s own fiction, can be considered in a more positive light, as an attempt to fashion new spaces of subjectivity for herself (27). 20 Clarín decries the lack of a clear ‘conclusion’ in Galdós’s novel and imagines the reaction of the ‘lector idealista’ (idealist reader): ‘falta el marco del cuadro; no hay límites, la novela no termina’ (the picture frame is missing; there are no limits, the novel does not end; ‘La desheredada’ 112). La desheredada is, indeed, a novel that unsettles our notion of conventional limits and questions the idea of a ‘frame’ that maintains a clear separation between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside.’ 21 For an extensive discussion of narrative technique, particularly of ‘interiorization devices,’ in La desheredada, see Willem (41–67). For an analysis of irony in the presentation of Isidora’s portrait, see Urey (6–27). 2: ‘Las Micaelas por fuera y por dentro’: Discipline and Resistance in Fortunata y Jacinta 1 The function of the Dirección General de Seguridad was twofold: first, security, ‘to maintain public order and the observance of laws’; and, second, vigilance, ‘to ascertain public and practical crimes, and the procedures necessary to find proof for them and to find the delinquents’ (Trinidad Fernández 171). The creation of this body allowed for the centralization of various measures of social control, such as civil registers, in order to facilitate the identification and isolation of ‘deviants.’ 2 I borrow and, in some instances, modify Agnes Moncy Gullón’s translations of the novel Fortunata and Jacinta. 3 Mesonero Romanos, in his widely read Manual de Madrid (1831), describes three such convents, destined toward the ‘encierro y corrección a mugeres de mala vida’ (confinement and correction of women of the streets; 188). Fernández de los Ríos’s Guía de Madrid (1876), published later in the century, presents a catalogue of many other charitable institutions established in the nineteeth century, among which was ‘el de Desamparadas, adoratrices del Santísimo Sacramento […] para recogimiento de jóvenes extraviadas ó en peligro próximo de perderse por falta de instrucción’ (the Desamparadas, of the order of Santísimo Sacramento … for the seclusion of young women who have gone astray or who are in imminent danger of being dishonoured due to the lack of education; 618). Vicente de la Fuente’s text explains the origins of ‘Las adoratrices,’ making clear his advocacy for this

Notes to pages 59–65

4

5

6

7

8

9

225

type of institution – intended specifically for ‘jóvenes desamparadas’ (abandoned young women) in need of therapeutic, rather than repressive, measures – to enable their eventual reintegration into society (13). The founder of ‘Las adoratrices’ was the Viscondesa de Jorbalán, Doña Micaela Desmaisières, presumably the real-life model for Guillermina Pacheco, according to some critics (Pérez Baltasar 114). See Teresa Fuentes for a more extensive discussion of the functioning of the panoptical scheme in the Micaelas scene, in specific relation to Bentham’s original essay on the panopticon (Visions 58–78). According to Foucault: ‘A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved’ (Discipline 136); it is one that submits itself easily to discipline. In their commentaries on Mauricia, modern-day critics continue to echo nineteenth-century social attitudes toward deviant femininity. For Ricardo Gullón, for example, ‘Mauricia is the demonic force, somber, mysterious, like a swelling river unleashed by storms far away. She lives possessed by Evil; she is a demon who can’t be stopped by anything’ (160). Braun’s view of Mauricia similarly reproduces society’s contempt toward marginal female subjects: ‘Mauricia la Dura’s life is not very different from the standard image of the drunken, quarrelsome prostitute heading toward a miserable death in the hospital. She is the rough-speaking, violent sort of woman one would expect to find in Modelo prison’ (‘The Novelistic’ 277). Romero Pérez’s analysis also conforms to this general line of thinking. Even as he celebrates the character’s ‘grandiosity,’ he condemns her rebelliousness as ‘mental derangement’ and ‘abnormal behavior’ (107). In the medical discourses of the period, women’s mental illnesses, such as hysteria or nymphomania, were considered to be linked to her sexuality. What seems particularly noteworthy are the similarities between the description of Mauricia’s ‘mental disorder’ and that of the nymphomaniac in contemporary medical discourses, according to which female desire generates ‘el paroxismo erótico’ (an erotic paroxysm; Fontanet, qtd in Aldaraca, El ángel 80) responsible for disorderly conduct. Severiana would also have Jacinta believe in Mauricia’s rejection of what was considered to be woman’s most important social role at the time: motherhood. Having presumably given birth to Adoración out of wedlock, Mauricia, according to Severiana, neglects her daughter’s moral education, raising her ‘entre mujeres malas’ (around bad women; 1: 366) and later abandoning her altogether after beginning to drink. However, as Fuentes suggests, Severiana’s account must be taken with a grain of salt, given what is obviously Mauricia’s forcible confinement in the Micaelas

226

10

11

12 13

14

Notes to pages 66–75 (Visions 102). Later, as Mauricia lies on her deathbed, Severiana informs Fortunata that Adoración has been sent away to a boarding school for ‘señoritas’ (young ladies), to which Mauricia replies: ‘Sí … más vale que esté … allá … desapartada de mí’ (Yes … She’s better off … there … away from me; 2: 176). Thus, she not only has endured forced separation from her own daughter, but also has come to internalize bourgeois society’s view of herself as a diseased body from which her offspring needs to be kept away. Ricardo Gullón, among others, virtually sanctifies Guillermina as a figure antithetical to the deviant Mauricia la Dura (Gullón 159; Braun, ‘Galdós’ Re-Creation’ 45). J.L. Brooks takes exception to this interpretation: ‘Guillermina who, however well-intentioned she may be, can never fully shake off the preconceptions on society and religion which she has absorbed from the class in which she was brought up and in which she still lives … Galdós … sets her in a carefully defined section of society, and shows that, however different she may be from the normal members of society, she is still very much a part of it’ (88). On the one hand, Guillermina might be seen as a champion of institutional discipline, in her monomaniacal devotion to the founding and maintenance of her orphanage and other charitable institutions. On the other, as a bourgeois woman she is quite atypical in her rejection of privacy, which manifests itself in her ‘masculine’ activities in the public sphere. As Labanyi suggests, Guillermina is not too different from Mauricia in her ‘lack of respect for the law and her “streetwalking”’ (Gender 197). Fortunata’s confusion of Guillermina and Mauricia in her mind undermines the opposition that the novel appears to have set up between the two characters. Interestingly, the narrator of Nazarín portrays the prostitute Ándara in very similar terms, referring to her ‘falda roja, un cuerpo endeble, del cual salían dos brazos que se agitaban como aspas de molino’ (a red skirt and lanky body with two arms sticking out on either side, flapping like windmill sails; 110). I borrow Labanyi’s translation here. Parsons later adds: ‘Fortunata personifies a traditional and simple Madrid, passively moulded and destroyed by bourgeois society’ (56). Labanyi, in several of her studies, draws on Tanner’s definition of adultery to examine its significance in the Spanish realist novel. See ‘Adultery and the Exchange Economy,’ ‘City, Country and Adultery,’ and ‘The Problem of Framing.’ See Delgado’s discussion of ‘errant subjectivities’ in relation to several of Galdós’s other novels (‘Subjetividades’).

Notes to pages 76–8

227

3: Consuming Subjects: Female Reading and Deviant Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Spain 1 For studies that examine the impact of the emergence of a new female reading public on the publishing industry and on women’s reading practices, see P. Fernández (‘Lecturas’), Hibbs-Lissorgues, Servén Díez, and Simón Palmer. Hibbs-Lissorgues’s work focuses on the changing reading habits and practices of women who, after 1850, moved away from the reading of religious texts exclusively to include a wider range of texts, including novels, magazines, and the periodical press in general (653–4). The secularization of women’s reading practices, in turn, led the publishers – with the strong influence of ecclesiastical authorities – to create an industry of morally edifying recreational literature marketed to women. 2 See Hibbs-Lissorgues on the role of the ecclesiastical institution in producing religious literature for the ideological control of women readers. 3 See Servén Díez for a discussion of other texts of the period, classified as medical literature, which identified female sexual depravation – particularly onanism – with the reading of novels. 4 Such exhortations on the dangers of women’s reading were common; many were published under the guise of a ‘social-medical’ study, including Spanish translations of texts of a similar tenor published originally in England or France (Servén Díez). Interestingly, many prominent Spanish women writers and intellectuals shared a similar line of argument with the male authorities, including feminists who wrote in defence of women’s right to education – and to literary education, in particular. Concepción Arenal, for example, argued for women’s need for greater access to the right kinds of books – ’libros del saber’ (books of learning) – in order to counteract the deleterious effects of ‘novelas inmorales’ (immoral novels) that encouraged ‘extravíos de su imaginación’ (straying of the imagination) to which she believed women were prone (97). Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer also divides novels into two broad categories, ‘benéfica ó nociva’ (beneficial or harmful; 134), realist versus romantic, with the latter presenting a potential danger for the female reader who, ‘por la gran excitabilidad de su sistema nervioso […] es muy susceptible de recibir múltiples impresiones que suelen perturbar su entendimiento’ (because of the great excitability of her nervous system … is very susceptible to receiving multiple impressions that can perturb her mind; 149). 5 Shapiro also notes that, in nineteenth-century France, criminologists in

228

6

7

8

9 10

11

12

13 14

Notes to pages 79–97 search of a ‘social hygiene’ for modern urban society perceived ‘private acts of reading’ to have ‘grave public consequences’ (26). For a more detailed discussion on the readership of these illustrated periodicals, see Charnon-Deutsch (Fictions 11–12). She argues that these illustrated magazines were largely male enterprises that most likely included among their readership a larger percentage of men than women, as well as a large proportion of those who belonged to the cultural elite. While the sociology of readership in the nineteenth century is an inexact art, there is evidence to suggest that these periodicals had a solid economic base and were widely disseminated among those who could afford to buy a subscription (11–12). Many of the images in these illustrated periodicals were accompanied by a title and a caption or, more frequently, by a lengthier explanatory text which appeared not alongside the images, but as a part of an entirely separate section of commentaries. What is interesting, as Charnon-Deutsch has also noted, is to see how these ‘external referents’ served as a guide for the consumption of the images (Fictions 6). The reference to Zola is significant, as naturalism was often identified with decadence in the writings of the period. See, for example, Prof. MaxBembo, who includes Zola’s naturalist novels among the ‘literaturas perversas’ (perverse literatures), and one of the causes of prostitution (218–20). See Jaffe for an illuminating analysis of reading practices in La Regenta. In La buscona (1885), the third novel of the La prostituta series (1884–5), the narrator describes Rosita as a ‘literata de afición’ (amateur woman of letters; 197) and a reader of romantic literature who seeks to imitate consciously the heroine of La Dama de las Camelias (Lady of the Camellias). It is no coincidence that Margarita Gautier, the protagonist of Dumas’s novel, is a courtesan who dies of tuberculosis in the end. See Pura Fernández for a useful account of Vega Armentero’s literary production and his place in late nineteenth-century Spanish political and cultural life (Introducción, ¿Loco o delincuente? 27–40). Even Palacio Valdés’s works are not as monolithic as they seem, but as Bauer notes, this was how critics throughout the centuries generally received his works (‘Spain’s’ 348–9). Cristina Patiño-Eirín suggested this reference to Palacio Valdés’s work in her discussion of female reading in Pardo Bazán’s work. Such a view of literatas was widespread in the late nineteenth century, as evinced in Eduardo Saco’s piece on ‘La literata,’ included in Roberto Robert’s Las españolas pintadas por los españoles (Spanish Women Sketched by Spanish Men, 1871). In Saco’s opinion, the modern literata, overtaken

Notes to pages 97–8

229

by her passion, ‘sin fuerzas para contenerse en los límites de lo justo y lo natural […] se hizo escritora para ser luego propagandista, y desbarró en la propaganda como habia desbarrado en la poesía’ (without strength to restrain herself within the limits of what is right or natural … became a writer to then be a propagandist, and launched herself in propaganda as she had launched herself in poetry; 72). In addition, her literary activity led her to neglect her family obligations, ‘dando al olvido los calzoncillos de su esposo’ (neglecting her husband’s underwear; 72). The suggestion is that women writers lose their condition as women – that is, their femininity – by engaging in literary activity. In Clarín’s words, ‘la literata como el ángel y mejor, como la vieja, carece de sexo […] ese derecho [a escribir] sólo se ejercita con una condición: la de perder el sexo’ (the lettered woman, like an angel, or like an old woman, lacks a sex … that right [to be a woman writer] is exercised only on one condition: on losing her sex; ‘Las literatas’ 231). Such ways of thinking were not limited to male authors; the conservative female writer Faustina Sáez de Melgar also insinuated that literatas were not women and that, in fact, they ‘solían tener barba y otras características propias de los varones’ (usually had a beard and other characteristics common among men; qtd in López Fernández 108). 15 Sereñana y Partagás’ La prostitución en la ciudad de Barcelona exemplifies such elision of sexuality and textuality in a passage where one of the prostitutes describes how she was seduced as a result of her immoral readings: ‘algunos libros estaban plagados de las láminas más obscenas y en sus páginas se aplaudia el más desenfrenado libertinaje. Puedo asegurarle que si en medio de aquella voluptuosa lectura, cualquier hombre se hubiese acercado á mí con intenciones seductoras, me tenia á su completa disposicion; lo que fatalmente no tardó en suceder’ (some books were plagued with the most obscene illustrations and in these pages the most unbridled licentiousness was applauded. I can assure you that if in the middle of such voluptuous reading any man had approached me with seductive intentions, he would have had me at his complete disposal; which, unfortunately, did not take long to happen; 170). Also interesting are the metaphors of eating to characterize women’s reading, which, according to Felski, has been perceived as ‘a quasi-mechanical satisfaction of instinctual appetite’ (81). In Sereñana y Partagás’s work, the case of the prostitute Luisa M., who gives in to her seducer only when he brings her rich and sweet foods to tempt her (166), exemplifies the close connection between deviant sexuality and all forms of consumption tied to the satisfaction of instinctual desires. 16 I thank Cristina Patiño-Eirín, whose article brought this early novel of Pardo Bazán to my attention.

230

Notes to pages 101–8

17 My English translations of La Tribuna are modifications of Walter Borenstein’s. In many instances, I adopt his translations without changing them. 18 Scanlon makes a similar observation, noting: ‘the street is portrayed as the location not only of physical but also of psychological freedom’ (147). 19 In Sereñana y Partagás’s words: ‘El lujo en el vestir, infiltrándose con insidiosa persistencia, ha concluido por invadir y confundir todas las clases sociales … ya no existen clases (Luxury in dress, infiltrating with insidious persistence, has ended up invading and confusing all social classes … classes no longer exist; 138). Cleminson and Vázquez García, in their commentary on the gender anxieties created by ‘the rise of an incipient culture of consumption’ in the late nineteenth century, also note: ‘The tastes and excesses once reserved for the aristocracy seemed to have reached the “middle classes,”’ thus threatening to ‘democratize’ consumption (68). 20 As Germán Gullón observes: ‘the narrative structure of La Tribuna is based on the politics/love dialectic’ (50). However, for this critic, La Tribuna falls short of being a ‘social novel’ for its failure to move beyond a focus on individual characters and social types, to foreground a critique of society as a collectivity (44, 53). 21 See Huyssen’s now classic analysis of the feminization of mass culture, which goes hand in hand with the masculinization of ‘high’ (modernist) culture. 22 This unusual status of the female cigar maker undoubtedly provoked collective anxieties, giving rise to gendered and sexualized representations of this group of women. For example, Bernaldo de Quirós and Llanas Aguilaniedo, a pair of prominent sociologists of the time, suggested that, among this group of women, there was a high percentage of ‘parejas sáficas’ (lesbian couples), attributing this ‘perversion’ to nicotine inhalation (Bernaldo de Quirós 286, qtd in López Fernández 156). 23 Dupláa shows how Amparo’s ‘small access to education’ allows her to become a spokesperson for the collective community (195). 24 McKenna maintains that Amparo ‘is punished for her haughty transgression of class and gender boundaries’ (563). For Sánchez Reboredo, the novel takes an unequivocally conservative stance with regard to class issues. According to this critic, Pardo Bazán ‘has an elitist concept of politics’ and ‘was unable to see the political implications of working class life’ (576). Similarly, Bieder notes: ‘no matter how much the author was interested in feminism, she shows little inclination toward the other social movement [the worker’s] that takes on steam at the end of the nineteenth century’ (‘Emilia Pardo Bazán y la emergencia’ 85–6). For Vásquez, the novel presents a ‘narrative subversion of sociopolitical hopes’ through a parody

Notes to pages 109–10

25

26

27

28

231

of Amparo’s role in the public sphere (683). For his part, Víctor Fuentes suggests that, in spite of the ideologically conservative premises of Pardo Bazán, the novel belies the author’s ‘intention’ by reflecting ‘the growing social and revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat’ (91). See Bieder’s excellent study showing how Pardo Bazán constantly (re)negotiated her discursive position within ‘the gendered boundaries of language’ in order to establish her authority as a writing subject within a masculine culture (‘Gender and Language’ 100). See Scanlon for a cogent analysis of the rhetorical strategies employed by Pardo Bazán in her prologue to establish her legitimacy as a (female) naturalist writer (144–5). Germán Gullón also makes note of the importance of the prologue for anticipating and defending herself against objections to her ‘sin of naturalism, a literary school that seemed to bring with it a whiff of obscenity’ (48). Clarín was certainly not the only writer of the period to masculinize women’s writing in this fashion; in fact, the masculinization of women’s writing was a common strategy at the time. As Bieder has shown, such practices were applied not only to Spanish women writers of the nineteenth century, most notably Pardo Bazán and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, but also to women writers outside of Spain (George Sand being the best example of such masculinization) (‘Gender and Language’ 102–3). Such a view of the naive and impressionable ‘mujer de pueblo’ (woman of the common people) coincides with the image of the cigarette maker presented in Pardo Bazán’s other writings. In her ‘Apuntes autobiográficos,’ she describes the cigarette maker in the following way: ‘parecióme curioso estudiar el desarrollo de una creencia política en un cerebro de hembra, a la vez católica y demagoga, sencilla por naturaleza y empujada al mal por la fatalidad de la vida fabril. De este pensamiento nació mi tercera novela, La Tribuna’ (It seemed curious to me to study the development of a political consciousness in a female brain, at once Catholic and demagogic, simple by nature and driven to evil by the fatality of factory life. My third novel, La Tribuna, was born from this idea; 725). In ‘La cigarrera,’ published in Las mujeres españolas, americanas y lusitanas pintadas por sí mismas (Spanish, American, and Portuguese Women Sketched by Themselves, 1886), she likewise affirms: ‘No profesa la cigarrera un cuerpo de doctrinas enlazadas y coherentes, pero conoce esas ideas que se transmiten por eléctrico modo en los talleres, en las asociaciones trabajadoras todas […] Si á la condicion de jornalero se une la de mujer, y mujer impresionable, resultará un republicanismo efervescente como la magnesia, pero en el fondo bastante inofensivo’ (The cigar maker does not profess a body of interrelated and coherent

232

Notes to pages 112–13 doctrines, but she knows these ideas that are spread electrically through shops, and all the associations of workers … If you put together the condition of the day labourer with that of the woman, an impressionable woman, the result will be a republicanism as effervescent as magnesium, but at bottom rather harmless; 801, emphasis mine).

4: Gender Trouble and the Crisis of Masculinity in the fin de siglo: Clarín’s Su único hijo and Pardo Bazán’s Memorias de un solterón 1 While feminism did not yet exist as a concrete social and political movement in Spain at the end of the nineteenth century, there was a growing feminist consciousness among many bourgeois women intellectuals, including prominent feminists such as Pardo Bazán and Concepción Arenal, who mobilized resistance to the dominant gender ideology through their writings and, in some cases, through their political participation in the public sphere (Blanco, ‘Teóricas’ 447–8). 2 In reference to the rest of fin-de-siècle Europe, George Mosse maintains: ‘The enemies of modern, normative masculinity seemed everywhere on the attack: women were attempting to break out of their traditional role; “unmanly” men and “unwomanly” women … were becoming ever more visible. They and the movement for women’s rights threatened that gender division so crucial to the construction of modern masculinity. At the same time this opposition to the norms of society found support in a literary and artistic avant-garde, itself in rebellion against the establishment’ (78). The relationship between literary modernism/avant-garde and gender falls outside of the scope of this study. For an extensive and useful discussion of this issue in the Spanish context, see Johnson and Kirkpatrick (Mujer). 3 See Showalter’s chapter on ‘Decadence, Homosexuality and Feminism’ for a more extensive analysis of these issues in the British context (Sexual 169–87). For a discussion of feminism and the ‘woman question’ in fin-desiglo Spain, see Jagoe (Ambiguous 120–6). 4 It is important to stress that few, if any, subjects embodied the normative ideal of masculinity (or femininity, as a matter of fact), yet as Mosse argues, ‘the myth, not reality, mattered, as it had throughout the construction of modern masculinity’ (105). In a more contemporary context, R.W. Connell coins the term ‘hegemonic masculinity’ to refer to a similar construction, which, he notes, ‘is not a fixed character type, always and everywhere the same. It is, rather, the masculinity that occupies the hegemonic position in a given pattern of gender relations, a position always contestable’ (76). In spite of the many challenges posed to clear divisions of gender and

Notes to pages 114–18

5

6 7

8

9

10

11

233

sexuality during the fin de siècle, hegemonic notions remained intact as long as there was ‘some correspondence between cultural ideal and institutional power’ (77). Both political and cultural institutions continued to bolster these normative ideals in spite of those subjects who did not meet these ideals, or who mobilized active resistance to them. Felski’s study centres on three works outside of the Spanish context: J.K. Huysmans’s Against the Grain (1884), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Venus in Furs (1870) by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Translations of Clarín’s novel are from Julie Jones’s His Only Son, but I have modified them when necessary. Interestingly, the narrator attributes Emma’s deviance to much more than the ‘pendantesca vanidad de mujer extraviada por lecturas disparatadas’ (pedantic vanity of a woman misled by foolish books; 162); he suggests that it is a case of innate perversion. I am in agreement with Oleza, who questions the typing of Bonis as a decadent; at the same time, this critic also hesitates to characterize him unqualifyingly as a ‘romantic,’ noting that Bonis’s ‘exalted individualism’ is checked by his bourgeois interests, in particular, by his desire for paternity (74–5). The connection between hysteria and performance is also worthy of note, as what often characterized this disease as a specifically ‘feminine’ illness was predicated on the presumption of the woman’s essential fickleness, duplicity, and inauthenticity. Yet, as Charcot’s own staging of hysteria in the Salpetrière Hospital in his famous leçons illustrates, the illness, in fact, represented a gendered performance of identity (Matlock 132–40), although it is unclear to what extent the women themselves participated in the conscious acting out of the hysteric’s identity. Other critics have also made note of Emma’s lesbian tendencies (Feal Deibe 262; Oleza 184n58; Six 202). Serafina is an opera singer with whom Bonis has an adulterous affair, transforming her into his romantic ideal. Marta is the daughter of the German engineer Körner, who immigrates to Spain to seek fortune managing a factory; father and daughter befriend Emma, believing her to be a potential source of capital. Marta has been seen as yet another female aesthete, in whom Emma’s character finds reflection (Valis, Decadent 144). Cultured and well-read, Marta, too, constantly seeks ‘perverse’ sensual pleasures – ’los extravíos lúbricos’ (sensual transports; 369) – that defy social conventions. Her greatest pleasure, the narrator states, is to be tickled on the bottom of her feet, a ‘favor sibarítico’ (sensual favour; 371) to which Emma, for her part, gladly consents. The relationships she cultivates with Emma and with

234

12

13

14 15

16

17 18

19

20

Notes to pages 119–27 Nepomuceno, both with erotic overtones, ultimately serve to satisfy her ‘necesidades estéticas, que cuestan caras, toda vez que en la estética entraría el confort, los muebles de lujo, de arte, el palco en la ópera, si la hay etc., etc.’ (aesthetic needs, which are expensive, the moment the notion of comfort – luxurious pieces of furniture, a box in the opera, and so forth – comes into play; 372). Here, again, the link between aestheticism and eroticism becomes apparent. Interestingly, on the few occasions in which Clarín focalizes the narration through Emma’s perspective, it is to call attention to her deviant sexuality. Another such moment is when Emma experiences an intense emotion of pleasure upon first meeting Minghetti’s gaze at the opera, awakening in her fantasies about the possibility of having an adulterous relationship with the opera singer. The representation of this triangular relationship in which the masculine subject is excluded from the homoerotic bond between two women is an inversion of the traditional homosocial paradigm in which the woman symbolically mediates, but is excluded from, the bond between two men (Sedgwick 21–7). Such a myth is recycled over and over again in psychoanalytic feminist theory, from Cixous and Kristeva to Benjamin and Chodorow. As Feal Deibe notes, this basic feminine duality – ‘a good mother, pure and bad at the same time’ – is obviously a projection of masculine fantasy (257). As Gold has shown, Clarín’s intertextual use of the opera genre is in itself significant, as it represents a ‘hybrid form’ that reflects the novel’s own generic instability (82). I owe much of my discussion of the male aesthete to Rita Felski’s chapter on ‘Masking Masculinity: The Feminization of Writing’ (91–114). The metaphor of abortion also describes appropriately the novel’s hermeneutic structure, as Bauer has observed: ‘On the proairetic level, nothing concludes definitively … the sensation of continuity is enhanced by this impression of suspended action, of a plot abruptly cut off’ (‘Su único hijo’ 74). Valis, for her part, compares Clarín’s treatment of paternity to representations of Flaubertian reproduction, which she views as ‘a series of abortions’ (‘The Perfect Copy’ 865). For an excellent study of ‘male-voiced strategies’ in Pardo Bazán’s novels, particularly in Doña Milagros and Memorias de un solterón, see Bieder (‘Engendering’). In Feldman’s words: ‘The dandy is … artificial in dress and deportment, always elegant, often theatrical. He creates “la mode,” style itself. He re-

Notes to pages 128–30

21

22

23

24

25

26

235

quires an audience in order to display his hauteur, his very distance from that audience’ (3). See Chauncy and Weeks for an excellent overview of the history of homosexuality and, in particular, of the end of the nineteenth century as a crucial transitional period in the conceptualization of homosexuality. Bieder, too, notes: ‘The narrator’s androgyny blurs normative male and female gender identification and suggests an overt rejection of sexuality’ (‘En-gendering’ 484–5). Mauro himself uses this derogatory term to characterize Feíta: ‘A mi parecer, ni se me importaba un bledo del marimacho, ni al marimacho se le daba de mí un ardite. ¿Yo querer a semejante mascarón; a una chica que gasta calzado de hombre y lleva el pelo hecho un bardal? Si eso es el sexo femenino, ¡malhaya por siempre jamás amén!’ (As far as I’m concerned, I couldn’t care less about the butch, nor could the butch care less about me. How could I love such a scarecrow?; a girl who wears men’s shoes and whose hair is a mess. If that’s the female sex, let it be cursed forever, amen! 194). When Feíta is in the library on the other side of the wall to his room, Mauro confesses to himself: ‘Chafaba también mi amor propio masculino que tabique por medio se encontrase una mujer dedicada a un serio trabajo, a una labor intelectual, sin acordarse de mí más que de la primera camisa que vistió. Nunca una soltera disponible se había manifestado tan despreocupada de mi vecindad […] Para ellas [las solteras] yo existía como hombre. Para la extravagante engolfada en su lectura a diez pasos de mí, no existía’ (My male pride was chafed by the fact that, on the other side of the wall, there was a woman dedicated to serious work, to intellectual labour, without taking any more notice of me than of the first shirt that she put on. Never had an available unmarried woman been so indifferent to my presence … For them, I existed as a man. For the extravagant woman absorbed in her reading ten steps from me, I didn’t exist; 192–3). The Spanish words cursi and cursilería have an entire series of cultural connotations that are not easily translatable into English. Cursi connotes, in everyday discourse, a whole range of meanings, including ‘tacky,’ ‘in bad taste,’ ‘affected,’ ‘pretentious,’ and ‘fake.’ It refers to one (usually a woman) who pretends to be something she is not, oftentimes, through a conscious ostentation of a class status that she does not hold. For a study of the cultural phenomenon of cursilería in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain, see Valis (The Culture). In one of the few published reviews of Memorias by a contemporary of Pardo Bazán, the critic E. Gómez de Baquero notes that Feíta herself rep-

236

27

28 29 30

31

32

Notes to pages 130–1 resents ‘a case of reaction against the inclination of her sisters. The excess of feminine qualities in them, that is, of qualities that ordinarily determine woman’s social condition, leads Feíta, on the contrary, to want to be less feminine, to rebel against male supremacy’ (112). Mauro calls attention to the fact that when he peruses literature in the Casino de la Amistad, ‘La de Ambos Mundos, decadente y todo, sigue siendo mi predilecta; devoro sus novelas interesándome mucho en la ficción’ (The journal Ambos Mundos, decadent and all, continues to be my favourite; I devour the novels, taking great interest in fiction; 98). On Oscar Wilde’s impact in Spain at the turn of the century, see Cardwell (‘Oscar Wilde’) and Davis. See Kirkpatrick for an analysis of gendered discourses on the Spanish nation in the fin de siglo (‘Gender’). See Kronik for a discussion of the many interesting contradictions in Pardo Bazán’s attitude toward decadentism: on the one hand, she condemns it on moral grounds, identifying it with a nefarious individualism and a defiance of established social mores; on the other, she celebrates the ‘pure’ and ‘sincere’ aestheticism of writers such as Verlaine and Gautier, who, in her view, formed a part of this movement (‘Emilia Pardo Bazán’ 421). In Kronik’s words: ‘the realm in which the Countess was willing to grant the decadents the most concessions was in the matter of form’ (‘Emilia Pardo Bazán’ 420). Critics have identified the decadent sensibility with Pardo Bazán’s later novels, published after the turn of the century, especially La Quimera (1905), La sirena negra (1908), and Dulce dueño (1911) (Henn; Kirkpatrick, Mujer 85–127; Whitaker). For Daniel Whitaker, Silvio Lago, the protagonist of La Quimera (1905), reflects ‘both the decadent hero and the fin de siècle dandy’ (747). David Henn also sees in Lago’s quest for artistic expression symptoms of decadence, of ‘fin-de-siècle malaise’ (401). Susan Kirkpatrick, for her part, argues for the centrality of gender in Pardo Bazán’s exploration of aesthetic issues in her later novels, highlighting the role of the female aesthete, such as Espina Porcel in La Quimera and Lina Mascareñas in Dulce dueño (Mujer 85–127). As Kirkpatrick has shown, in her later novels Pardo Bazán uses the figure of the female aesthete to critique conventional representations of the ‘feminine’ in modernist literature, that is, the notion of an artistic identity founded on the exclusion and objectification of the ‘feminine’ (Mujer 104). In these novels, the female aesthete occupies simultaneously the masculine position of the artistic subject and the feminine one of ‘object and sign,’ thus undermining gender dichotomies (116).

Notes to pages 132–6

237

33 The gendered subtext of Feíta’s relationship to her father is also significant, as her commanding authority stands in sharp contrast with don Benicio’s complete ineffectualness as the patriarch of the family. In Doña Milagros, the first part of the ‘Adán y Eva’ series to which Memorias de un solterón forms the sequel, Benicio Neira is the weak-willed father of twelve children who allows himself to be controlled by two domineering women: first, by his tyrannical wife who wrests authority from him, relegating him to his position as ‘esclavo consorte’ (enslaved spouse; 22); and, after her death, by his meddling neighbour, doña Milagros, who slowly takes on the maternal role and eventually adopts his twin children, for whom he is unable to care. Although don Benicio lacks the same level of self-consciousness that Mauro evinces in his narration, gender role inversion is also a central motif in Doña Milagros, as it is in Memorias. Benicio constantly calls attention to his own emasculation – ‘no estaba seguro de mi virilidad […] ¿habría yo sido en mi casa el hembro?’ (I wasn’t sure about my masculinity … could I have been a male wife in my own home? 194) – and later confesses to himself that ‘tú tienes de varón sólo la forma: tu espíritu es pasivo, dócil’ (you are a man only in form: your spirit is passive, docile; 207–8). 34 Colloquially, ‘estar sobrado’ or ‘andar sobrado’ refers to one who has desirable qualities – physical attraction, strength, and self-assurance – and goes around flaunting an awareness of such traits. In this case, the expression refers to the character’s unquestionable masculine beauty and strength. I thank the anonymous reader of my manuscript for this comment. 35 As Galdós has captured so aptly in his famous speech, ‘La sociedad presente como materia novelable’ (‘Present Society as Material for a Novel,’ 1897), the end of the century in Spain was a moment of chaos and confusion in which the old class structures were disintegrating, and the socalled middle class was, as of yet, an ‘enorme masa sin carácter propio, que absorbe y monopoliza la vida entera’ (enormous mass without its own character, which absorbs and monopolizes everything in life; Ensayos 178). Given the lack of a solid bourgeoisie in Restoration Spain, the very notion of the ‘middle class’ was bound to remain amorphous and indeterminate, thus giving rise to both ‘insecurity and acute class consciousness’ about one’s social standing (Valis, Culture 9). 5: Gender, Orientalism, and the Performance of National Identity in Pardo Bazán’s Insolación 1 Fernández Cifuentes notes: ‘Any attempt to analyze Spain’s modernity … would have to pay some attention to the role of Andalucía in the construc-

238

2

3

4

5

6

Notes to pages 136–8 tion of Spanish national identity, and confront, in the process, a series of nagging questions’ (‘Southern Exposure’ 133). Even within Peninsular Hispanism, Alda Blanco notes that Spain’s identity as an imperial nation has often been elided in historical studies on nineteenth-century Spain (‘Spain’). As of late, literary scholars, such as Blanco herself, Luisa Elena Delgado, Jo Labanyi, and Susan Martin-Márquez, among others, have been remedying this omission. Outside of Peninsular Hispanism, Said’s concept of orientalism has been subjected to critique from a variety of angles. Feminists such as Reina Lewis have undermined, from the perspetive of gender, the notion of a ‘potentially unified, and paradigmatically male, colonial subject’ implicit in Said’s orientalism (3), proposing the need for an analysis that considers diverse positionalities of gender, as well as race, within orientalist discourse. Lewis’s critique may be extended more generally to any binaristic and unidirectional analysis of the power relationship between the colonizer and colonized based on Said’s model of orientalism. I am indebted to Hooper for a number of theoretical references on orientalism cited in this chapter. She succinctly lays out the state of interdisciplinary scholarship on the representations of Orient and Empire in the Spanish context, including in her study a discussion of Pardo Bazán’s Una cristiana (1890). Martin-Márquez stresses the importance of acknowledging the ambivalence in the Spaniards’ own perception of their nation’s Africanness, depending on historical moment and context: ‘Spaniards could choose strategically to “color” themselves as more African or more European, in accordance with the ever-shifting backdrop of local and global contexts’ (60). The notion of ‘race,’ which crystallized in Spain during the late nineteenth century with the emergence of the new scientific disciplines such as anthropology and criminology, was subject to constant questioning and revision between 1865 and the end of the century. According to historian Joshua Goode, the debate in the 1870s over the origins of the races oscillated between those who believed in the simultaneous emergence of a mixture of various races through different parts of the world, on the one hand, and, on the other, those who argued for the original existence of ‘pure races’ that could still serve as the basis for scientific definitions of present-day human populations, in spite of the subsequent mixing of these ‘races.’ Yet, by the 1880s Spanish anthropologists began to question even the possibility making a claim to the notion of ‘pure races’ in Spain and, instead, shifted toward claiming the nation’s superiority based on their

Notes to pages 138–41

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

239

racial mixture (Goode, ‘Racial Alloy’ 37–55). Goode elaborates further on these ideas in his groundbreaking book Impurity of Blood: Defining Race in Spain, 1870–1930, which appeared in print after I had already submitted the initial version of my manuscript. For example, in La piedra angular (1890) Pardo Bazán enters into dialogue with the new anthropological theories of Lombroso and his disciples, raising questions as to the responsibility of criminals. Interestingly, according to Gilfoil’s reading, this novel offers a critique on the limits of scientific determinism, in spite of the Spanish writer’s naturalist philosophy (92). La cristiana (1890) and La prueba (1891), published during the same period, also echo contemporary theories of racial heredity and its effect on the individual’s temperament. In the latter case, we see how the author appropriates scientific theories of race to serve her anti-Semitic ideology (Dendle). Gómez Madrid, for his part, suggests that the novel breaks down these dichotomies by presenting Asís’s identity as a ‘hybridization between her traditionalist tendencies and her modernizing inclinations and represents the tension between the two poles of the binary order that opposes north and south of Spain and that Pardo de la Lage and Pacheco symbolize’ (157). In Raymond Carr’s words, Galicians, along with Asturians and montañeses from the province of Santander, ‘were the waiters, water carriers, wetnurses, and porters of the Spanish towns, and the Galician domestic servant was a stock theatre character’ (11). ‘Casticismo,’ refers to the idea of the purity of Castilian heritage and language promoted by imperial Spain and which, in the nineteenth century, translated into attempts to define Spain’s ‘authentic’ character through the costumes, music, and speech typical of the Madrid populace. Tertulia, in this context, is a social gathering similar to a salon, regularly scheduled in the living room of a member of the social elite, such as the Duchess of Sahagún. See Zecchi for an analysis of Pardo Bazán’s intertextual dialogue with Zorrilla’s romantic version of the Don Juan myth (299–300). See also Scarlett, who approaches the transposition of the Don Juan Tenorio legend in Insolación from a psychoanalytic perspective (38–41). The ceceo is a linguistic phenomenon found in the dialects of southern Spain whereby the s, c, and z are pronounced with a sound resembling the English th. This way of speaking, particularly with an exaggerated ceceo, is associated with the lower social strata of the rural south and has, therefore, been subjected to stigmatization by those from other regions of Spain, particularly Castile.

240

Notes to pages 142–4

14 For a useful history of the impact of French degenerationist theories on Spanish thinkers of the late nineteenth century, see Campos Marín et al. Of particular interest is the section entitled ‘La ‘raza’ en peligro. La dimensión colectiva de la degeneración’ (161–5). 15 We see Pacheco’s association with Englishness later in the novel, once again, when he leaves behind his ‘tarjetero de piel inglesa’ (wallet made of English leather; 115) in Asís’s living room. Through these associations Asís/the narrator highlights Pacheco’s refinement and cosmopolitanism, undermining her own stereotypical image of Andalusians. 16 Significantly, the image of Pacheco’s ‘ojos azules’ (blue eyes; 82) recurs each time the protagonist commits an act of social transgression. When she begins to feel the initial effects of inebriation following their midday meal in the merendero, she finds the gaze of his blue eyes on her, as in the scene immediately afterward, when she awakens after losing consciousness temporarily. Upon first opening her eyes, she describes her impressions in the following way: ‘Entreabrí los ojos, y con gran sorpresa vi el agua del mar; pero no la verde y plomiza del Cantábrico, sino la del Mediterráneo, azul y tranquila … Las pupilas de Pacheco, como ustedes se habrán imaginado’ (I opened my eyes half way, and with great surprise I saw the water of the ocean; but not the green and grey water of the Cantabrian, but the blue and peaceful water of the Mediterranean … Pacheco’s pupils, as you may have imagined; 90). Once again, Asís’s characterization of Pacheco reflects the north/south, ‘European’/Mediterranean dichotomy at the basis of the novel. 17 Mayoral refers to an episode in Pardo Bazán’s Doña Milagros in which the protagonist, according to ‘malas lenguas’ (gossip), presumably had an illicit relationship with a Valencian whom the narrator describes as ‘de las razas semiafricanas’ (of semi-African race; qtd in Mayoral, ‘De Insolación’ 133). Of course, we need to question what is meant by characterizations such as ‘el tipo árabe.’ The often interchangeable use of terms such as árabe, semítico, africano, and musulmán (Arab, Semitic, African, Muslim) in Spain to mark the other is in itself telling, as it represents yet another orientalizing gesture that reduces religious, national, and racial differences to one homogeneous other categorizable under a single rubric. 18 Anne McClintock, for her part, analyses the colonial experience in more explicitly psychoanalytic terms. For McClintock, the colonial subject displaces onto a ‘fetish’ the ambiguities and contradictions that he or she is unable to resolve: ‘The fetish marks a crisis in social meaning as the embodiment of an impossible irresolution. The contradiction is displaced onto and embodied in the fetish object, which is thus destined to recur

Notes to pages 144–7

19 20

21

22

23

24

241

with compulsive repetition … By displacing power onto the fetish, then manipulating the fetish, the individual gains symbolic control over what might otherwise be terrifying ambiguities’ (184). It could be argued, from this perspective, that Asís in Pardo Bazán’s novel fetishizes Pacheco by reducing his identity to the sign of Andalusianness, toward which she remains ambivalent. A fonda is a cheap restaurant, which frequently forms part of a boarding house; a merendero is also a cheap restaurant with a limited range of foods. At the same time, it must be noted that it is precisely her social position and her status as a widow that allow Asís to enjoy a certain degree of freedom, especially given the economic resources (her inheritance from her late husband) at her disposal. Her private life can be more her own, unlike that of the single or married woman who is under the legal authority of her father or husband and, most probably, under their constant vigilance as well. Asís herself acknowledges this fact when she characterizes herself as ‘una viuda, que al fin y al cabo era libre y no tenía que dar a nadie cuenta de sus actos’ (a widow, who after all was free and didn’t have to give an account of her actions to anyone; 127). The fact that Asís’s aristocratic standing has allowed her to represent the ‘national’ through the romaticization of the popular classes, as she does with the racial other, goes to show how both race and class are imbricated in the construction of national identity. The zarzuela is a form of Spanish musical theatre, which combined spoken scenes with operatic and popular songs, choruses, and dance. Although it originated in the seventeenth century as a form of aristocratic entertainment, the genre went through a revival in the nineteenth century, beginning with Romanticism through the end of the century, adapting itself to the popular taste of the times. Cuadros de costumbres were short essays, or literary ‘sketches,’ which depicted the customs, habits, traditions, and social types characteristic or representative of a society, oftentimes with a moralizing or satirical end. This genre developed in Spain in the early nineteenth century during Romanticism with Serafín Estébanez Calderón, Ramón Mesonero Romanos, and Mariano José de Larra being its most important practitioners, but this form was also assimilated into the works of realism and naturalism later in the century. In her original work Butler, of course, is referring more specifically to the performance of gender (‘Imitation’). By implication, it can be and has been argued that all identity is performative, although this does not mean that categories such as ‘race’ and ‘nationality’ are interchangeable with gender.

242

Notes to pages 147–64

25 For a comprehensive study of the gypsy in the European cultural imaginary throughout the centuries, see Charnon-Deutsch’s The Spanish Gypsy. Charnon-Deutsch shows how, by the end of the nineteenth century, representations of the gypsy in Spanish literary and visual culture were in sync with the image of Andalusian gypsies popularized abroad (186). 26 Gitanismo and flamenquismo are related phenomena, whereby the members of the upper classes of Madrid society sought to imitate the dress, customs, and traditions of gypsy and flamenco cultures. The two were, in fact, often conflated in the cultural imagination. Flamenquism originated in the midnineteenth century and, as Charnon-Deutsch has noted, became ‘a cohesive force in Spain’s growing nationalism’ during the Restoration period (The Spanish Gypsy 204). That is, Spaniards sought to ‘authenticate’ their national and cultural identities through an appeal to their idea of the ‘typically Spanish’ embodied in gypsy and flamenco cultures. 27 Paradoxically, it is Pardo who, in the end, seeks to reclaim Asís’s ‘racial’ distinction from the Andalusian, affirming that she is ‘de otra raza muy distinta’ (of another very different race; 167), when, in fact, her actions seem to provide evidence for his naturalistic theory that challenges such distinctions. 28 The slippage of the metaphor of the sun is interesting, as the heat of the south (Andalusia) evokes an association with the Castilian sun (recalling Asís’s dream of traversing the Castilian steppes), which becomes a synecdoche of Spain itself. As already noted, Pardo Bazán thus imitates the gestures of European orientalist discourse that casts Spain as the barbaric southern other. 29 Pacheco’s words quite literally imitate the phonetics and grammar of popular discourse and are, hence, difficult to translate into English without losing the original flavour. 6: Taming the Prostitute’s Body: Desire, Knowledge, and the Naturalist Gaze in López Bago’s La prostituta Series 1 For an extensive discussion of the theory and practice of ‘radical naturalism’ in Spain, see Fernández (Eduardo López Bago 62–98). Fernández also provides a detailed account of López Bago’s commercial success and of his relationship to the literary market in general (Eduardo López Bago 125–52; Introducción, La prostituta 57–60). 2 Rivière Gómez examines the specific disciplinary measures targeted toward the control of prostitution in nineteenth-century Spain (Caídas 55–94). 3 La prostituta, the first novel of the series, recounts the story of a young

Notes to page 164

243

woman, Estrella, abused and abandoned by her family, who, out of financial desperation, comes to Mari-Pepa’s brothel, set up by her lover, the entrepreneur-pimp Arístides, with the help of the Marquis of Villaperdida. In the meantime, the Marquis’s son Luis, having returned from a boarding school in France sick from having inherited his father’s venereal disease, goes to the brothel and becomes enchanted with Estrella. Not knowing that his father ‘owns’ the brothel, he offers Arístides 10,000 reales to purchase Estrella. Arístides consults the Marquis, who denies the request, deciding, instead, to seek out the prostitute in the brothel for himself. The Marquis rapes Estrella, infecting her with his disease, after which his son comes to see her in the brothel again. When Luis returns home, he discovers that his father is dying. In the meantime, Estrella’s former beau comes to the brothel and, when he finds out about her rape, determines to kill Arístides, the man responsible for her prostitution; however, Arístides murders him instead. The novel closes as Arístides receives news of the Marquis’s death, fantasizing about the brothels that will now belong to him. Luis falls ill with syphilis and Estrella wants to be taken to the hospital. The sequel to La prostituta, La Pálida (the nickname that Estrella acquires in the brothel), continues Estrella’s story. Having been in and out of the Hospital de San Juan for syphilitics, she now earns a living independently as a prostitute who is no longer tied to the brothel. She has been transformed into a Nana-like figure who attracts a cult of male followers, as the centrepiece of La Botica, a secret society of syphilitics. Estrella, in the meantime, offers money to the decadent bourgeois Rosita, in exchange for sexual favours, at the same time as she earns money prostituting herself with the Duke of Tres Estrellas. A chance encounter with Luis leads her to formalize arrangements to become his ‘kept woman,’ allowing her to lead a life of luxury. In the meantime, Rosita becomes overtaken with nymphomania, maintaining relations with both Estrella and the priest, Father Lasoga. Estrella, for her part, becomes increasingly obsessed with the Duke of Tres Estrellas, not realizing that his desire is for Rosita. The Duke tries to force the two women to participate in a menage à trois, at which point Luis enters with a gun and murders Estrella. In the Epilogue, the crime is covered up as a suicide, Luis dies after suffering a convulsion, and Arístides is appointed governor of Madrid. La buscona, the third novel of the series, opens by narrating the beginnings of Rosita’s life as a prostitute, who now lives off the money given to her by the Duke of Tres Estrellas, at the same time as she becomes the mistress of a failed writer, Miguel. Even as Rosita and Miguel are over-

244

Notes to page 166

come by carnal desire (with the narrator describing Rosita as stricken by an incurable nymphomania), they seek to live a life of fantasy modelled on the clichés of romanticism. The final novel of the series, La querida, centres on Miguel’s increasing disenchantment with his life with Rosita; his recognition that he could never love a dishonoured woman provokes his nervous crises. Miguel falls in love with another woman, Estefanía, proposes marriage to her, and writes a letter to Rosita abandoning her. Although Estefanía refuses Miguel’s proposal at first, after hearing the story of his life, she decides to become an honourable woman by accepting his offer of marriage. Rosita, on receiving news of Miguel’s abandonment, tries to convince him to stay with her. When he refuses, she pays her brother to kill her former lover, and when the deed has been accomplished she takes responsibility for the crime. The narrator ends with a cryptic line stating that he needed to tell this story to explain why Miguel’s novel was never written. 4 Needless to say, the implied reader cannot necessarily be equated with the real readers of the novel. 5 All subsequent quotes from La prostituta will be from Pura Fernández’s edition. 6 Specular images of the prostitute predominate throughout La prostituta and its sequel, La Pálida. In the latter, the narrator calls attention to ‘la profusión de espejos’ (profusion of mirrors; 86) in Estrella’s apartment, focusing his gaze on the now-seasoned prostitute, who contemplates her body in front of the mirror before her first meeting with her neighbour and future lover, Rosita. For her part, Rosita sees the image of her own body multiplied in this profusion of mirrors: ‘se veía de cuerpo entero en todas partes, y su graciosa figurilla se multiplicaba de uno en otro espejo, reproducida hasta lo infinito’ (she saw her whole body everywhere, and her attractive little figure was multiplied from one mirror to the next, reproduced infinitely; 86). Soon afterward, Rosita prostitutes herself with Estrella and, later, with other men. On the one hand, these images of specularity suggest the mass reproduction of the female body through its commodification, evoking, once again, Elizabeth Wilson’s vision of the prostitute as a metaphor for the new consumer society (‘The Invisible’ 105). On the other, these images call attention to the female character’s increasing selfawareness of her sexuality through the act of self-contemplation. We might recall Zola’s Nana, who contemplates admiringly the image of her naked body in the mirror, oblivious to the world around her, as well as Manet’s visual rendition of the courtesan, albeit clothed, who stands in front of a mirror (López Fernández 91). The question is, to what extent, if any, their

Notes to pages 167–72

7

8

9

10 11

12

13

245

self-consciousness grants these women any degree of agency over their own bodies. In fact, in relation to Mari Pepa’s peculiar pathology, López Bago’s novel makes direct reference to the famous French physician and regulationist Parent-Duchâtelet’s scientific taxonomy of the prostitute in De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris (1836). See Fernández, Introducción, La prostituta (142n31). In a specular fashion, at the end of La Pálida, we see the physician tending once again to ‘el cuerpo del marquesito de Villaperdida […] desfallecido y postrado’ (the weak and prostrate body of the son of the Marquis of Villaperdida; 234), soon to become an actual corpse after suffering ‘una convulsión horrorosa’ (a dreadful convulsion; 247). Pura Fernández has shown that, while the naturalists sought to appeal to ‘a normativity protected by scientific criteria,’ they were, nevertheless, unable to distance themselves entirely from the dominant moral-theological discourse in their representations of deviant sexuality (‘Scientia sexualis’ 234). In the literary context, Elaine Showalter also notes the central symbolic role that syphilis played in Victorian fin-de-siècle fiction (‘Syphilis’ 88). This theory, which arose out of the influence of Morel’s Traité des dégénérescences (1857) (López Fernández 169), was widely accepted in Spain as well. Prominent Spanish physicians who saw syphilis as a disease leading to the degeneration of the race include Hauser (214–15), Pulido Fernández (138), and Sereñana y Partagás (179–80). ‘The analysis of heredity was placing sex (sexual relations, venereal diseases, matrimonial alliances, perversions) in a position of “biological responsibility” with regard to the species: not only could sex be affected by its own diseases, it could also, if it was not controlled, transmit diseases or create others that would afflict future generations’ (Foucault, History 118). Later in the novel, the narrator characterizes Luis, through the Marquis’s consciousness, as ‘raquítico y enfermizo, lleno de costras, aquejado de todas las impurezas transmitidas a la sangre’ (rachitic and sickly, full of scabs, afflicted with all the impurities transmitted to the blood; 289). In La Pálida, Luis’s physician states to him in no uncertain terms, ‘usté mismo cayó enfermo, con una enfermedad nada limpia, que yo curé, y que, sin embargo volverá á reproducirse al menor exceso, porque el virus está en terreno perfectamente preparado para recibirlo. La sangre de usté es la de su padre’ (you yourself fell ill, with a disease that’s none too clean, which I cured but will nonetheless recur with the least bit of excess, because the virus is in a breeding ground that’s perfectly prepared to receive it. Your blood is your father’s; 111), in an attempt to prevent him from contami-

246

14 15

16

17

18

19

20

Notes to pages 174–81 nating others with his disease. See Fernández’s edition of La prostituta (289n137). For more on the figure of the femme fatale in European fin-de-siècle culture, see Dijkstra (especially 250–2). I owe the notion of ‘colonized consciousness’ to Jo Labanyi, who made reference to La prostituta in a roundtable discussion she led at Washington University in St Louis in February 2007. The Hospital de San Juan de Dios was founded in Madrid in 1522 to serve patients of venereal disease who lacked access to private medical care. See Fernández for an account of the often inhumane treatment given to prostitutes in this hospital, a situation that captured the literary imagination of writers such as F. de S. Mayo and Pío Baroja, in addition to López Bago (La prostituta 304n142). By ‘male readers’ I refer to the implied audience to which the narration is addressed; that is, the novel constructs female representations (especially, representations of the female body) for the male gaze. This is not to suggest that the historical readers of the novel were exclusively male. I broach the issue of the novel’s real readership at the end of this chapter. In fact, in La buscona, the third novel of the series, the narrator illustrates the dangers of misguided imagination through the figure of Miguel, an avid reader of romantic works of the genre of La Dame aux Camélias. For a man like Miguel, ‘Rosita Pérez era una mujer peligrosa’ (Rosita Pérez was a dangerous woman; 48), because he sees her not as she really is, but as a fantasy modelled on Dumas’s Margarita Gautier, a prostitute who finds redemption through love. The narrator of the novel suggests that there is no such redemption in the ‘real world’ in the case of Rosita. In addition to Giné y Partagás, see, for example, Koch (114–15), MaxBembo (22, 27, 61 passim) and Rodríguez Solís (242), all of whom equated lesbianism and prostitution as forms of deviant sexuality that signalled the degeneration of the race. The views of these Spanish thinkers undoubtedly arose from the widespread influence of the work of the French regulationist Dr Alexandre Jean Baptiste Parent-Duchâtelet, who characterized the prostitute as a ‘somatic type’ and identified lesbianism as a phenomenon closely associated with prostitution (Bell 48–9). Later in the century, Lombroso and Ferrero, in their La donna delinquente (1893), took Parent-Duchâtelet’s argument further, attributing both prostitution and lesbianism to degeneration, which ‘induces confusion between the two sexes’ (178). See also Bernaldo de Quirós and Llanas Aguilaniedo (230–318, esp. 286–9). See chapter 3 for a discussion of the connection between female reading and prostitution (or sexual incontinence in general) in many nineteenth-

Notes to pages 184–8

21

22

23

24 25

26

247

century literary and medical texts. Prof. Max-Bembo, for example, cites ‘las lecturas irritantes’ (irritating readings; 32) – the novel, among them – as well as hereditary factors, as possible causes of sexual inversion. It should be noted, however, that based on literary and medical writings of the period, women were not the only sex believed to suffer from nervous symptoms resulting from the over-stimulation of the imagination through reading. Miguel Loitia, who becomes Rosita’s lover in La buscona, also suffers from ‘sobrexcitación nerviosa’ (nervous overexcitement; 47), presumably as a consequence of excessive reading. The narrator, in fact, begins the novel by comparing Miguel’s temperament to that of Don Quixote. Peter Brooks notes, in his discussion of Balzac, that prostitutes ‘have a special capacity to cross social barriers, to exist in all milieux, to make it to the top but through a kind of demonstration that the top is in essence no different from the bottom’ (156). The narrator, significantly, portrays Miguel as a feminized figure who manifests nervous symptoms resembling those of hysteria, an illness normally associated with women. In contrast, Rosita is a masculinized figure who, albeit unsuccessfully, seeks to become an agent of her own actions and desires; in fact, at one point, she expresses her desire to be a man (La querida 18). Rosita, then, is cast as the dangerous ‘nymphomaniac,’ a femme fatale, who sexually devours the feminized man, whose nervous condition leaves him vulnerable to her aggressions. Although in the early years of the Restoration López Bago defended the monarchy, collaborating as a journalist on publications in its defence, in the 1880s he became a fervent champion of the Republican cause and of liberalism in general. His political shift coincided with his espousal of a combative radical naturalism in his literary works. For a more detailed discussion of López Bago’s political ideology in relation to his work, see Fernández (Eduardo López Bago 11–61). Nouzeilles’s study focuses on the relationship between the naturalist novel and the medical body politics of late nineteenth-century Argentina. The attempt to come to a definition of this term is beyond the scope of this study. See Charnon-Deutsch for a summary of recent feminist debates on the definition of pornography (‘The Pornographic Subject’ 278). However, it goes without saying that any definition of ‘pornography’ is historically and culturally contingent and ‘cannot be separated from its emergence as a category of thinking, representation and regulation’ (Hunt 11). Hunt argues that around the Enlightenment, there was a shift from political pornography to a new form that became a more ‘commercial, “hard core” business,’ devoted entirely to sexual arousal (42–3).

248

Notes to pages 188–95

27 According to Zavala, this is also the characteristic of sensationalistic fiction – akin to both pornography and the folletín – whose rhetoric ‘is aimed at a popular imaginary of prototypes and exclusions’ (163). Pornography, in her definition, is a monologic discourse that reflects and reinforces the totalizing structure of a bourgeois society that ‘marks the boundaries of social, spatial, and temporal exclusions’ (170). 28 I adopt Peter Brooks’s play on the term ‘narrative desire’ as ‘the conjunction of the narrative of desire with the desire of narrative’ (48). 29 Although I question Zavala’s idea that there exists a separate category of erotic discourse distinguishable from ‘pornography’ and characterized by a plurality of meanings and pleasures, that somehow lies outside of (gender) power relations, she, of course, has a point in presenting the widely accepted feminist argument that ‘pornography is conceived as a systematic practice of exploitation and subordination based on sexual differences that affects the woman very directly’ (165). My interest is not so much in identifying the ‘pornographic’ elements of López Bago’s work but in showing how sexual difference, located within a structure of power and domination, translates discursively into a hierarchical structuring of the narrative gaze. 30 At the same time, by ‘inter-class’ Fernández refers to the literate, middleclass public, ranging from the educated haute bourgeoisie with impressive private libraries, to those belonging to the petty bourgeoisie, with much scarcer economic resources. 31 Needless to say, the individual responses of real female readers to the representation of prostitution in these novels need to be distinguished from the assumptions about the audience implicit in the textual construction. 7: Female Subjectivity and Agency in Matilde Cherner’s María Magdalena 1 I thank Pura Fernández for bringing this novel to my attention. 2 See Jagoe, who argues that the ‘masculinization’ of the novel in Spain occurred in the 1870s and 1880s, when the realist representational mode came to be privileged over the idealist one (‘Disinheriting’ 230–1). 3 The name Aspasia was given to María Magdalena by the students who sought her out in Celestina’s brothel. (With regard to the figure of Aspasia, see note 9 below.) 4 The number of physician figures in the novels of this period is in itself significant, given their role in the construction of social normalcy through the medical control of bodies and sexualities.

Notes to pages 198–202

249

5 The stereotypical image of the woman who squanders the family capital through her love of luxury is abundant in the novels of the late nineteenth century, among which Galdós’s Rosalía de Bringas is the most salient example. As suggested in chapter 3, uncontrolled consumption by a woman is deemed threatening in its potential to undermine masculine authority, in both cultural and economic terms. 6 According to Pura Fernández, María Magdalena is able to transcend the medical typology of the prostitute, the ‘mental enervation’ to which contemporary physicians have found her prone, by educating herself through her reading (‘Escritura maniatada’ 138). 7 I am thinking, for example, of Pardo Bazán’s short story ‘Náufragas’ (Castaways 1909), in which a widow and her two daughters move to Madrid from a small town after the death of her (petty bourgeois) husband in search of jobs that conform to their bourgeois ideals. In the end, the women have no choice but to abandon these ideals in order to survive in the city. Through the women’s experience of disillusionment, the narrator criticizes women’s lack of access to a formal education that would enable them to be self-sufficient in the absence of a male provider. The deficiencies of women’s education, of course, is a problem that Pardo Bazán reiterates in many of her writings, including essays such as ‘La mujer española.’ 8 Ludmer’s concept recalls de Certeau’s discussion of the ‘tactic’ as ‘an art of the weak,’ which is ‘determined by the absence of power.’ According to de Certeau, the ‘weak’ must use ‘tactics’ in order to make incursions into the ‘space of the other’ (37–8). 9 In fact, her talent and dedication to the pursuit of knowledge inspire the admiration of the students of Salamanca so greatly that they name her ‘ Aspasia,’ after one of the most educated, influential, and independentminded women of ancient Greece. A further parallel could be drawn between the two women, as Aspasia was also known as the courtesan, or hetaira, of the Athenian statesman Pericles. While there is uncertainty surrounding Aspasia’s historical role in both the domestic and political spheres, writings about her suggest the threat the ambiguity of her social position posed to the separation between the public and the private. Since Aspasia, as a foreigner, was not allowed to marry an Athenian citizen, she came to live with Pericles as his concubine, taking over the province of the legitimate wife, asserting her authority on domestic matters, as well as exerting her influence, through her lover, on the political policies of the state (‘Aspasia’). In essence, as Pericles’ hetaira, she was seen as usurping the role of both the domestic woman in the private sphere and the public man in the political one.

250

Notes to pages 203–11

10 Dumas’s novel was translated into Spanish in 1859 (Coward 7). 11 According to Nicholas John, Marguerite’s consumption in Dumas’s novel ‘is associated with the feverish quality of her life in the city, and hence with her transgression’ (5). Similarly, the fever that consumes María Magdalena in Cherner’s novel comes to represent the inevitable consequences of her sexual deviance. 12 Cherner’s views find echo in Dr Benavides’s characterization of prostitution in the novel’s introduction as ‘esa asquerosa llaga, esa hedionda gangrena que corroe el cuerpo social’ (that disgusting sore, that foul-smelling gangrene that corrodes the social body; 22). Again, the physician’s commentary lends authority to María Magdalena’s own condemnation of legalized prostitution in the memoirs that we are about to read, by predisposing the readers to share his reaction to her account. 13 For further details on this case, see Fernández (Eduardo López Bago 37–55).

Works Cited

Alas, Leopoldo (Clarín). ‘La desheredada.’ Obras completas: Galdós. Vol. 1. Madrid: Renacimiento, 1912. 95–113. – His Only Son. Trans. Julie Jones. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1981. – ‘Las literatas.’ Clarín político. Ed. Yvan Lissorgues. Vol. 1. Barcelona: Lumen, 1989. 231–5. – La Regenta. Ed. Gonzalo Sobejano. Vol. 2. Madrid: Castalia, 1984. – Su único hijo. Ed. Juan Oleza. Madrid: Cátedra, 1998. – ‘La Tribuna.’ Sermón perdido. Madrid: Librería de Fernando Fé, 1885. 111– 19. Aldaraca, Bridget A. El ángel del hogar: Galdós and the Ideology of Domesticity in Spain. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1991. – ‘The Medical Construction of the Feminine Subject in Nineteenth-Century Spain.’ Cultural and Historical Grounding for Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Feminist Criticism. Ed. Hernán Vidal. Minneapolis: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature, 1989. 395–413. Álvarez Junco, José. Mater dolorosa: la idea de España en el siglo XIX. Madrid: Taurus, 2001. Álvarez Junco, José, and Adrian Shubert, eds. Spanish History since 1808. London: Arnold, 2000. Álvarez-Uría, Fernando. Miserables y locos: medicina mental y orden social en la España del siglo XIX. Barcelona: Tusquets, 1983. – ‘Políticas psiquiátricas: medicina mental y control social en la España de los siglos XIX y XX.’ Historia ideológica del control social (España-Argentina, siglos XIX y XX). Ed. Roberto Bergalli and Enrique E. Mari. Barcelona: PPU, 1989. 239–84. Amann, Elizabeth. ‘Nature and Nation in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s Insolación.’ Bulletin of Spanish Studies 85.2 (2008): 175–92.

252

Works Cited

Anderson, Amanda. Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993. Andreu, Alicia. Galdós y la literatura popular. Madrid: Sociedad General Española de Librería, 1982. Arenal, Concepción. La mujer del porvenir. Madrid: Castalia, 1993. ‘Aspasia of Miletus.’ http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_ romana/greece/hetairai/aspasia.html. Bahamonde Magro, Ángel, and Julián Toro Mérida. ‘Mendicidad y paro en el Madrid de la Restauración.’ Estudios de Historia Social 7 (1978): 353–84. Bartky, Sandra. ‘Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.’ Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance. Ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1988. 61–86. Baudrillard, Jean. ‘Fetishism and Ideology: The Semiological Reduction.’ For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Trans. Charles Levin. St Louis: Telos Press, 1981. 88–101. Bauer, Beth Wietelmann. ‘Isidora’s Anagnorisis: Reading, Plot, and Identity in La desheredada.’ Anales Galdosianos 24 (1989): 43–52. – ‘Narrative Cross-Dressing: Emilia Pardo Bazán in Memorias de un solterón.’ Hispania 77.1 (1994): 23–30. – Rev. of Spain’s Forgotten Novelist: Armando Palacio Valdés, by Brian Dendle. Hispanic Review 65.3 (1997): 348–50. – ‘Something Lost: Translation, Transaction, and Travesty in Clarín’s Su único hijo.’ Revista Hispánica Moderna 48.1 (1995): 92–105. – ‘Su único hijo: La conclusión imposible.’ Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 20.3 (1986): 67–79. Beizer, Janet. Ventriloquized Bodies: Narrative of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. Bell, Shannon. Reading, Writing and Rewriting the Prostitute Body. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Bernaldo de Quirós, C., and J.M. Llanas Aguilaniedo. La mala vida en Madrid: estudio psico-sociológico. Madrid: B. Rodríguez Serra, 1901. Bernheimer, Charles. Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. Bhabha, Homi K. ‘The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism.’ The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. 66–84. Bieder, Maryellen. ‘Emilia Pardo Bazán y la emergencia del discurso feminista.’ Breve historia feminista de la literatura española (en lengua castellana). La literatura escrita por mujer, desde el siglo XIX hasta la actualidad. Ed. Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz and Iris M. Zavala. Vol. 5. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1998. 75–110.

Works Cited

253

– ‘Emilia Pardo Bazán and Literary Women: Women Reading Women’s Writing in Late Nineteenth-Century Spain.’ Revista Hispánica Moderna 46.1 (1993): 19–31. – ‘En-gendering Strategies of Authority: Emilia Pardo Bazán and the Novel.’ Cultural and Historical Grounding for Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Feminist Literary Criticism. Ed. Hernán Vidal. Minneapolis: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature, 1989. 473–95. – ‘Gender and Language: The Womanly Woman and Manly Writing.’ Culture and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Spain. Ed. Lou Charnon-Deutsch and Jo Labanyi. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1995. 98–119. Blanco, Alda. ‘Spain at the Crossroads: Imperial Nostalgia or Modern Colonialism?’ A Contra corriente: Una revista de historia social y literatura de América Latina 5 (2007): 1–11. http://www.ncsu.edu/acontracorriente/. – ‘Teóricas de la conciencia feminista.’ Jagoe et al. 445–72. Blanco Aguinaga, Carlos. ‘Having No Option: The Restoration of Order and the Education of Fortunata.’ Conflicting Realities: Four Readings of a Chapter by Pérez Galdós (Fortunata y Jacinta, Part III, Chapter IV). Ed. Peter B. Goldman. London: Tamesis, 1984. 13–38. Botrel, Jean-François. ‘La novela por entregas: unidad de creación y de consumo.’ Creación y público en la literatura española. Madrid: Castalia, 1974. 111–55. Braun, Lucille V. ‘Galdós’ Re-Creation of Ernestina Manuel de Villena as Guillermina Pacheco.’ Hispanic Review 38.1 (1970): 32–55. – ‘The Novelistic Function of Mauricia la Dura in Galdós’ Fortunata y Jacinta.’ Symposium 31 (1977): 277–89. Bretz, Mary Lee. ‘Text and Intertext in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s Memorias de un solterón.’ Symposium 43.2 (1989): 83–93. Brooks, J.L. ‘The Character of Doña Guillermina Pacheco in Galdós’ Novel, Fortunata y Jacinta.’ Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 38 (1961): 86–94. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Vintage Books, 1985. Brownlow, Jeanne P., and John W. Kronik, eds. Intertextual Pursuits: Literary Mediations in Modern Spanish Narrative. Cranbury, NJ: Associated UP, 1998. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999. – ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination.’ Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991. 13–31. – Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Campos Marín, Ricardo, José Martínez Pérez, and Rafael Huertas GarcíaAlejo. Los ilegales de la naturaleza: medicina y degeneracionismo en la España de la Restauración (1876–1923). Madrid: CSIC, 2000.

254

Works Cited

Canalejas, F. de Paula. Tercera conferencia sobre la educación literaria de la mujer. Madrid: M. Rivadeneyra, 1869. Capel Martínez, Rosa María. ‘Life and Work in the Tobacco Factories: Female Industrial Workers in the Early Twentieth Century.’ Enders and Radcliff 131–50. Cardwell, Richard A. ‘Médicos chiflados: medicina y literatura en la España de fin de siglo.’ Siglo Diecinueve: Literatura Hispánica 1 (1995): 91–116. – ‘Oscar Wilde and Spain: Medicine, Morals, Religion and Aesthetics in the Fin de Siglo.’ Crossing Fields in Modern Spanish Culture. Ed. Federico Bonaddio and Xon de Ros. Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, U of Oxford, 2003. 35–53. Carr, Raymond. Spain 1808–1975. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982. Castillo, Debra. ‘La desheredada: The Institution and the Machine.’ Modern Language Studies 18.2 (1988): 60–72. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Charnon-Deutsch, Lou. Fictions of the Feminine in the Nineteenth-Century Spanish Press. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State UP, 2000. – Narratives of Desire: Nineteenth-Century Spanish Fiction by Women. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1994. – ‘The Pornographic Subject of Los borbones en pelota.’ Bodies and Biases: Sexualities in Hispanic Cultures and Literatures. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. 274–93. – The Spanish Gypsy: The History of a European Obsession. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State UP, 2004. Chauncey, George, Jr. ‘From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the Changing Conceptualization of Female Deviance.’ Salmagundi: A Quarterly of the Humanities and Social Sciences 58–9 (1982–3): 114–46. Cherner, Matilde. [Rafael Luna]. María Magdalena (Estudio social). Madrid: Viuda é Hijos de J.A. García, 1880. Cleminson, Richard, and Francisco Vázquez García. ‘Los invisibles’: A History of Male Homosexuality in Spain, 1850–1940. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2007. Connell, R.W. Masculinities. 2nd ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 2005. Corbin, Alain. ‘Commercial Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century France: A System of Images and Regulations.’ The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987. 209–19. Coward, David. Introduction. Dumas vii–xx. Davis, Lisa. ‘Oscar Wilde in Spain.’ Comparative Literature 25.2 (1973): 136– 52.

Works Cited

255

Delgado, Luisa Elena. La imagen elusiva: lenguaje y representación en la narrativa de Galdós. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000. – ‘Subjetividades errantes: Galdós y la localización de la diferencia.’ Anales Galdosianos 36 (2001): 111–18. Delgado, L. Elena, Jordana Mendelson, and Oscar Vázquez. ‘Introduction: Recalcitrant Modernities: Spain, Cultural Difference and the Location of Modernism.’ Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 13.2–3 (2007): 105–19. Dendle, Brian. ‘The Racial Theories of Emilia Pardo Bazán.’ Hispanic Review 38.1 (1970): 17–31. Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin de Siècle Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. Dumas, Alexandre fils. La Dame aux Camélias. Trans. David Coward. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. Dupláa, Christina. ‘“Identidad sexuada” y “conciencia de clase” en los espacios de mujeres de La Tribuna.’ Letras Femeninas 22.1–2 (1996): 189–201. DuPont, Denise. ‘Decadence, Women Writers, and Literary History in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s Late Criticism.’ MLN 117.2 (2002): 343–64. Enders, Victoria Lorée, and Pamela Beth Radcliff, eds. Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern Spain. Albany: SUNY P, 1999. Ewald, François. ‘Norms, Discipline, and the Law.’ Law and the Order of Culture. Ed. Robert Post. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991. 138–61. Feal Deibe, Carlos. ‘La anunciación a Bonis: análisis de Su único hijo.’ Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 51 (1974): 255–71. Feldman, Jessica R. Gender on the Divide: The Dandy in Modernist Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993. Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995. Fernández, Pura. ‘Censura y práctica de la transgresión: los dominios del eros y la moralidad en la literatura española decimonónica.’ Los territorios literarios de la historia del placer. I Coloquio de Erótica Hispana. Ed. José Antonio Cerezo, Daniel Eisenberg, and Víctor Infantes. Madrid: Huerga & Fierro, 1996. 71–89. – Eduardo López Bago y el naturalismo radical: la novela y el mercado literario en el siglo XIX. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995. – ‘Escritura maniatada, escritura desatada: Matilde Cherner y Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera y la narrativa hispanoamericana del siglo XIX.’ Género y géneros: Escritura y escritoras iberoamericanas. Ed. Ángeles Encinar, Eva Löfquist, and Carmen Valcárcel. Vol. 1. Madrid: Ediciones Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2006. 133–47. – ‘El estatuto legal del romance de ciego en el siglo XIX: a vueltas con la licitud moral de la literatura popular.’ Palabras para el pueblo: Aproximación ge-

256

Works Cited

neral a la Literatura de Cordel. Ed. Aracelino Godino López et al. Vol. 1. Madrid: CSIC, 2000. 71–120. – Introducción. ¿Loco o delincuente? Novela social contemporánea (1890). By Remigio Vega Armentero. Ed. Pura Fernández. Madrid: Celeste, 2001. 27– 40. – Introducción. López Bago, La prostituta 21–108. – ‘Lecturas instructivas y útiles.’ V. Infantes et al. 672–82. – Mujer pública y vida privada: del arte eunuco a la novela lupanaria. Woodbridge, UK: Tamesis, 2008. – ‘Scientia sexualis y saber psiquiátrico en la novela naturalista decimonónica.’ Asclepio: Revista de Historia de la Medicina y de la Ciencia 49.1 (1997): 227–44. Fernández Cifuentes, Luis. ‘Signs for Sale in the City of Galdós.’ MLN 103.2 (1988): 289–311. – ‘Southern Exposure: Early Tourism and Spanish National Identity.’ Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 13.2–3 (2007): 133–48. Fernández de los Ríos, A. Guía de Madrid: Manual del madrileño y del forastero. Madrid: Oficinas de la Ilustración Española y Americana, 1876. Filgueira Ganzo, Jesús. ‘Observaciones sobre el espacio en Insolación de Emilia Pardo Bazán.’ Moenia 8 (2002): 79–102. Flint, Kate. The Woman Reader 1837–1914. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Foucault, Michel. ‘About the Concept of the “Dangerous Individual” in 19th-Century Legal Psychiatry.’ International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 1 (1978): 1–18. – Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. – The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1980. – Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Vintage, 1973. – ‘A Preface to Transgression.’ Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977. 29–52. Freud, Sigmund. ‘On Narcissism.’ http://www.english.hawaii.edu/ criticalink/narc/guide1.html. Frost, Daniel. Cultivating Madrid: Public Space and Middle-Class Culture in the Spanish Capital, 1833–1890. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2008. Fuente, Vicente de la. Las Adoratrices: Noticia acerca del origen de este instituto, para la rehabilitación de jóvenes extraviadas. Madrid: Imprenta de D. Antonio Pérez Dubrull, 1880. Fuentes, Teresa. Galdós’s Torquemada Novels: Waste and Profit in Late Nineteenth-Century Spain. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2007.

Works Cited

257

– Visions of Filth: Deviancy and Social Control in the Novels of Galdós. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2003. Fuentes, Víctor. ‘La aparición del proletariado en la novelística española: sobre La Tribuna de Emilia Pardo Bazán.’ Grial 31 (1971): 90–4. Gilfoil, Anne Wyly. ‘The Criminal Mind and the Social Body: Pardo Bazán’s La piedra angular.’ Anales Galdosianos 31–2 (1996–7): 83–94. Gimeno de Flaquer, Concepción. ‘Influencia de la novela en la imaginación de la mujer.’ El Álbum Ibero Americano 4.12 (1892): 134–6; 4.13 (1892): 148–9; 4.14 (1892): 163–5. Giné y Partagás, Juan. Curso elemental de higiene privada y pública. Vol. 3. Barcelona: Imprenta de Narciso Ramírez y Compañía, 1872. – Misterios de la locura: novela científica. Barcelona: Imprenta de Henrich y Compañía, 1890. Ginger, Andrew. ‘Spanish Modernity Revisited: Revisions of the Nineteenth Century.’ Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 13.2–3 (2007): 121–32. Gold, Hazel. ‘The Novelist at the Opera: Genre and Intertextuality in Su único hijo.’ Brownlow and Kronik 76–96. Goldman, Peter. ‘O máquina buena o mujer mala: Visión determinista y conciencia temporal en Fortunata y Jacinta.’ Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 21.3 (1987): 67–91. Gómez de Baquero, E. Rev. of Memorias de un solterón, by Emilia Pardo Bazán. La España Moderna 8.92 (1896): 106–21. Gómez-Ferrer, Guadalupe, ed. La mujer española y otros escritos. By Emilia Pardo Bazán. Madrid: Cátedra, 1999. Gómez Madrid, Benito. ‘Las ambivalencias del triángulo nacionalista de Insolación.’ Alba de América 26.49–50 (2007): 151–66. Goode, Joshua. Impurity of Blood: Defining Race in Spain, 1870–1930. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 2009. – ‘The Racial Alloy: The Science, Politics and Culture of Race in Spain, 1875– 1923.’ Diss. U of California, Los Angeles, 1999. Gordon, M. ‘The Medical Background to Galdós’ La desheredada.’ Anales Galdosianos 7 (1972): 67–77. Groneman, Carol. ‘Nymphomania: The Historical Construction of Female Sexuality.’ Terry and Urla 219–49. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Gullón, Germán. El narrador en la novela del siglo XIX. Madrid: Taurus, 1976. Gullón, Ricardo. ‘Estructura y diseño en Fortunata y Jacinta.’ Técnicas de Galdós. Madrid: Taurus, 1970. 135–220. Harney, Lucy D. ‘Carnival and Critical Reception in the Sainete Tradition.’ MLN 117.2 (2002): 310–30.

258

Works Cited

Harpring, Mark. ‘Homoeroticism and Gender Role Confusion in Pardo Bazán’s Memorias de un solterón.’ Hispanic Research Journal 7.3 (2006): 195– 210. Hauser, Philip. ‘El siglo XIX considerado bajo el punto de vista médico-social.’ Revista de España 101 (1884): 202–24. Hekman, Susan J. Gender and Knowledge: Elements of a Postmodern Feminism. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1990. Henn, David. ‘Continuity, Change and the Decadent Phenomenon in Pardo Bazán’s Late Fiction.’ Neophilologus 78.3 (1994): 395–406. Hibbs-Lissorgues, Solange. ‘El libro y la edificación.’ V. Infantes et al. 650–61. Hooper, Kirsty. ‘Reading Spain’s “African Vocation”: The Figure of the Moorish Priest in Three fin de siglo Novels (1890–1907).’ Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 40.1 (2006): 171–95. Horn, David G. ‘The Norm Which Is Not One: Reading the Female Body in Lombroso’s Anthropology.’ Terry and Urla 109–28. Hunt, Lynn. ‘Introduction: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500– 1800.’ The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800. Ed. Lynn Hunt. New York: Zone, 1993. 9–45. Huyssen, Andreas. ‘Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other.’ After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. 44–62. Iglesias Rodríguez, Gema. ‘Las cárceles madrileñas de la Restauración (1875– 1902).’ La sociedad madrileña durante la Restauración (1876–1931). Ed. Ángel Bahamonde and Luis Carvajal. Vol 2. Madrid: Consejería de Cultura de la Comunidad de Madrid, 1989. 408–23. Ilustración Artística 1.11 (12 March 1882), 3.109 (28 January 1884), 12.606 (7 August 1893), 13.636 (5 March 1894). La Ilustración Española y Americana 28.4 (30 January 1884). La Ilustración de la Mujer 2.15 (1 January 1884). Infantes, Víctor, and François López et al., eds. Historia de la edición y de la lectura en España 1472–1914. Madrid: Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez, 2003. Jaffe, Catherine. ‘In Her Father’s Library: Women’s Reading in La Regenta.’ Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 39.1 (2005): 3–25. Jagoe, Catherine. Ambiguous Angels: Gender in the Novels of Galdós. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. – ‘Disinheriting the Feminine: Galdós and the Rise of the Realist Novel in Spain.’ Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 27.2 (1993): 225–48. – ‘María del Pilar Sinués de Marco (1835–1893).’ Spanish Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book. Ed. Linda Gould Levine et al. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1993. 473–83.

Works Cited

259

Jagoe, Catherine, Alda Blanco, and Cristina Enríquez de Salamanca, eds. La mujer en los discursos de género: Textos y contextos en el siglo XIX. Barcelona: Icaria, 1998. John, Nicholas. Introduction. Violeta and Her Sisters: The Lady of the Camellias: Responses to the Myth. Ed. Nicholas John. London: Faber and Faber, 1994. 1–11. Johnson, Roberta. Gender and Nation in the Spanish Modernist Novel. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2003. Jubran, Carl. ‘Spanish Internal-Orientalism, Cultural Hybridity and the Production of National Identity: 1887–1940.’ Diss. U of California, San Diego, 2002. Juliá, Santos. ‘Madrid, capital del estado (1833–1993).’ Madrid: Historia de una capital. By Santos Juliá, David Ringrose, and Cristina Segura. Madrid: Alianza, 2000. 315–576. Kirkpatrick, Susan. ‘Gender and Difference in Fin de Siglo Literary Discourse.’ Spain Today: Essays on Literature, Culture, Society. Ed. José Colmeiro et al. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 1995. 95–102. – Mujer, modernismo y vanguardia en España (1898–1931). Madrid: Cátedra, 2003. – ‘On the Threshold of the Realist Novel: Gender and Genre in La gaviota.’ PMLA 98.3 (1983): 323–40. Koch, F.M. Venus sensual. Madrid: Imprenta del ‘El Resumen,’ 1888. Krauel, Ricardo. Voces desde el silencio: Heterologías genérico-sexuales en la narrativa española moderna (1875–1975). Madrid: Libertarias, 2001. Kronik, John W. ‘Emilia Pardo Bazán and the Phenomenon of French Decadentism.’ PMLA 81.5 (1966): 418–27. – ‘Galdosian Reflections: Feijoo and the Fabrication of Fortunata.’ MLN 97.2 (1982): 272–310. Labanyi, Jo. ‘Adultery and the Exchange Economy.’ Scarlet Letters: Fictions of Adultery from Antiquity to the 1990s. Ed. Nicholas White and Naomi Segal. London: Macmillan, 1997. 98–108. – ‘City, Country and Adultery in La Regenta.’ Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 63.1 (1986): 53–66. – Gender and Modernization in the Spanish Realist Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 91–138. – ‘The Problem of Framing in La de Bringas.’ Anales Galdosianos 25 (1990): 25–34. Leps, Marie-Christine. Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Discourse. Durham: Duke UP, 1992. Lewis, Reina. Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.

260

Works Cited

Lombroso, Cesare, and Guglielmo Ferrero. Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman. Trans. Nicole Hahn Rafter and Mary Gibson. Durham: Duke UP, 2004. López Bago, Eduardo. Apéndice. El cura (caso de incesto): novela médico-social. Madrid: Juan Muñoz y Companía, nd. 259–91. – La buscona: novela médico-social. Madrid: Juan Muñoz Sánchez, 1885. – La Pálida: novela médico-social. Madrid: Mariano Núñez Samper, 1884. – La prostituta: novela médico-social. 1884. Ed. Pura Fernández. Sevilla: Renacimiento, 2005. – La querida: novela médico-social. Madrid: M. Núñez Samper, 1885. López Fernández, María. La imagen de la mujer en la pintura española 1890–1914. Madrid: Machado Libros, 2006. Ludmer, Josefina. ‘Tretas del débil.’ La sartén por el mango: encuentro de escritoras latinoamericanas. Ed. Patricia Elena González and Eliana Ortega. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Huracán, 1985. 47–54. – ‘Tricks of the Weak.’ Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Ed. Stephanie Merrim. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1991. 86–93. Luna, Rafael. [Matilde Cherner.] María Magdalena (Estudio social). Madrid: Viuda é Hijos de J.A. García, 1880. Macherey, Pierre. ‘Toward a Natural History of Norms.’ Michel Foucault Philosopher. Trans. Timothy J. Armstrong. New York: Routledge, 1992. 176–91. Mack, Mary Peter. ‘Panopticon Papers.’ A Bentham Reader. New York: Pegasus, 1969. 189–208. Maristany, Luis. El gabinete del doctor Lombroso (Delincuencia y fin de siglo en España). Barcelona: Anagrama, 1973. Martin, Biddy. ‘Feminism, Criticism, and Foucault.’ Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance. Ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1988. 3–19. Martin-Márquez, Susan. Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2008. Martínez Martín, Jesús A. Lectura y lectores en el Madrid del siglo XIX. Madrid: CSIC, 1991. Matlock, Jann. Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria, and Reading Difference in Nineteenth-Century France. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Max-Bembo, Prof. La mala vida en Barcelona: anormalidad, miseria y vicio. Barcelona: Casa Editorial Maucci, n.d. Mayoral, Marina. ‘De Insolación a Dulce dueño: notas sobre el erotismo en la obra de Emilia Pardo Bazán.’ Eros literario: Actas del Coloquio celebrado en la Facultad de Filología de la Universidad Complutense en diciembre de 1988. Ed.

Works Cited

261

Covadonga López Alonso et al. Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1989. 127–36. – ‘Estudio introductorio a Insolación.’ Pardo Bazán, Insolación 9–36. McClintock, Anne. ‘Psychoanalysis, Race and Female Fetishism.’ Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. 181–203. McKenna, Susan M. ‘Reading Practices in La Tribuna.’ Letras Peninsulares 17.2– 3 (2004–5): 559–70. Mercer, Leigh. ‘De la madre vampiresa y el padre maternal: la ruptura de barreras genéricas en Su único hijo.’ Hispanófila 143 (2005): 43–53. Mesonero Romanos, Ramón de. Manual de Madrid. Madrid: D.M. de Burgos, 1831. Mosse, George L. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. Nouzeilles, Gabriela. Ficciones somáticas: naturalismo, nacionalismo y políticas médicas del cuerpo (Argentina 1880–1910). Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo, 2000. O’Byrne Curtis, Margarita Rosa. La razón de la sinrazón: la configuración de la locura en la narrativa de Benito Pérez Galdós. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Ediciones del Cabildo Insular de Gran Canaria, 1996. 65–98. Oleza, Juan. Introducción. Alas, Su único hijo 11–131. Palacio Valdés, Armando. Marta y María. 4th ed. Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1946. Pardo Bazán, Emilia. Aficiones peligrosas. Ed. Juan Paredes Núñez. Madrid: Palas Atenea, 1989. – ‘Apuntes autobiográficos.’ Obras completas. Vol. 3. Madrid: Aguilar, 1973. 698–732. – ‘La cigarrera.’ Las mujeres españolas, americanas y lusitanas pintadas por sí mismas. Ed. Faustina Sáez de Melgar. Barcelona: Juan Pons, 1886. 797– 802. – Doña Milagros. Madrid: Librería de Pueyo, 1894. – ‘La educación del hombre y de la mujer.’ Gómez-Ferrer 149–77. – Insolación. Intro. Marina Mayoral. Madrid: Austral, 1991. – Memorias de un solterón. Ed. María Ángeles Ayala. Madrid: Cátedra, 2004. – ‘La mujer española.’ Gómez-Ferrer 83–116. – Un poco de crítica: Artículos en el ABC de Madrid (1918–1921). Ed. Marisa Sotelo Vázquez. San Vicente, Spain: U de Alicante, 2006. – Porvenir de la literatura después de la guerra: Lectura dada en la Residencia de Estudiantes la tarde del 5 de diciembre de 1916. Madrid: Residencia de Estudiantes, 1917.

262

Works Cited

– La revolución y la novela en Rusia (Lectura en el Ateneo de Madrid). 1887. Madrid: Publicaciones Españolas, 1961. – La Tribuna. Ed. Benito Varela Jácome. Madrid: Cátedra, 1991. – The Tribune of the People. Trans. Walter Borenstein. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1999. Paredes Núñez, Juan. ‘Estudio preliminar.’ Pardo Bazán, Aficiones 7–37. Parsons, Deborah L. ‘The Nineteenth-Century Capital.’ A Cultural History of Madrid: Modernism and the Urban Spectacle. Oxford: Berg, 2003. 33–56. Patiño-Eirín, Cristina. ‘Lectoras en la obra de Pardo Bazán.’ Trueba 296– 306. Pearson, Jacqueline. Women’s Reading in Britain 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Pérez Baltasar, María Dolores. Mujeres marginadas: Las casas de recogidas en Madrid. Madrid: Gráficas Lormo, 1984. Pérez Galdós, Benito. La de Bringas. Ed. Alda Blanco and Carlos Blanco Aguinaga. Madrid: Cátedra, 1991. – La desheredada. Madrid: Alianza, 1980. – The Disinherited. Trans. Lester Clark. London: Phoenix House, 1976. – Ensayos de crítica literaria. Ed. Laureano Bonet. Barcelona: Península, 1972. – Fortunata and Jacinta. Trans. Agnes Moncy Gullón. Athens: The U of Georgia P, 1986. – Fortunata y Jacinta. Ed. Francisco Caudet. 2 vols. Madrid: Cátedra, 1983. – Nazarín. Madrid: Hernando, 1976. – Nazarín. Trans. Jo Labanyi. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. – Las novelas de Torquemada. Madrid: Alianza, 1970. – Tormento. Madrid: Alianza, 1980. – Tristana. Madrid: Alianza, 2002. Pick, Daniel. Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918. New York: Cambridge UP, 1989. Prieto Marugán, José. ‘Nuestra Zarzuela: Cádiz.’ Opus Musica: Revista de Música Clásica 23 (2008). 8 July 2009. http://www.opusmusica.com/023/cadiz. html. Pulido Fernández, Ángel. Bosquejos médico-sociales para la mujer. Madrid: Víctor Saiz, 1876. Ràfols, Wifredo de. ‘From Institution to Prostitution: Bureaumania and the Homeless Heroine in La desheredada.’ Anales Galdosianos 37 (2002): 69–87. Rafter, Nicole Hahn, and Mary Gibson. Editors’ Introduction. In Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman. By Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero. 3–33. Ribbans, Geoffrey. ‘El carácter de Mauricia “la Dura” en la estructura de For-

Works Cited

263

tunata y Jacinta.’ Actas del Quinto Congreso Internacional de Hispanistas. Ed. M. Chevalier et al. Bordeaux: PU de Bordeaux, 1977. 713–21. Ríos-Font, Wadda C. The Canon and the Archive: Configuring Literature in Modern Spain. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2004. Rivière Gómez, Aurora. Caídas, miserables, degeneradas: estudios sobre la prostitución en el siglo XIX. Madrid: Horas y Horas, 1994. – La educación de la mujer en el Madrid de Isabel II. Madrid: Horas y Horas, 1993. Rivkin, Laura. ‘Extranatural Art in Clarín’s Su único hijo.’ MLN 97.2 (1982): 311–28. Rodríguez Ocaña, Esteban. La constitución de la medicina social como disciplina en España (1882–1923). Madrid: Ministerio de Sanidad y Consumo, 1987. Rodríguez Sánchez, María de los Ángeles. ‘Matilde Cherner: Una voz femenina y crítica ante la prostitución en la España de 1880.’ Actas del XIII Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas, Madrid 6–11 de julio de 1998. Vol. 2. Madrid: Castalia, 2000. 370–8. Rodríguez Solís, E. Historia de la prostitución en España y América. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1892–93. Romero Pérez, Francisco. ‘The Grandeur of Galdós’ Mauricia la Dura.’ Hispanic Journal 3.1 (1981): 107–14. Saco, Eduardo. ‘La literata.’ Las españolas pintadas por los españoles: colección de estudios acerca de los aspectos, estados, costumbres y cualidades generales de nuestras contemporáneas. Ed. Roberto Robert et al. Madrid: J.E. Morete, 1871. 67–73. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Sánchez Reboredo, José. ‘Emilia Pardo Bazán y la realidad obrera: Notas sobre La tribuna.’ Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 351 (1979): 567–80. Santiánez-Tió, Nil. ‘En el umbral de las vanguardias: deseo y subversión en la novela naturalista española.’ Bulletin Hispanique 97.2 (1995): 583–604. Scanlon, Geraldine. ‘Class and Gender in Pardo Bazán’s La Tribuna.’ Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 67.2 (1990): 137–50. Scarlett, Elizabeth A. Under Construction: The Body in Spanish Novels. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1994. Schor, Naomi. ‘Idealism in the Novel: Recanonizing Sand.’ Displacements: Women, Tradition, Literatures in French. Ed. Joan DeJean and Nancy K. Miller. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991. 55–73. Scott, Joan Wallach. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.

264

Works Cited

Segovia, Antonio María. Conferencias dominicales sobre la educación de la mujer: Del lujo. Madrid: M. Rivadeneyra, 1869. Segura, Isabel. ‘Prólogo.’ Romances horrorosos: Selección de romances de ciego que dan cuenta de crímenes verídicos, atrocidades y otras miserias humanas. Ed. Isabel Segura. Barcelona: Alta Fulla, 1984. ix–xxiii. Sereñana y Partagás, Prudencio. La prostitución en la ciudad de Barcelona, estudiada como enfermedad social y considerada como orígen de otras enfermedades dinámicas, orgánicas y morales de la poblacion barcelonesa. Barcelona: Imprenta de los Sucesores de Ramírez y Cía, 1881. Servén Díez, Carmen. ‘Mujer y novela: prescripciones sociales en la España de la Restauración.’ Trueba 333–46. Shapiro, Ann-Louise. Breaking the Codes: Female Criminality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1996. Shoemaker, William. Las cartas desconocidas de Galdós en ‘La Prensa’ de Buenos Aires. Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1973. Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. New York: Penguin Books, 1990. – ‘Syphilis, Sexuality, and the Fiction of the Fin de Siècle.’ Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986. 88–115. Sieburth, Stephanie. ‘Enlightenment, Mass Culture, and Madness: The Dialectic of Modernity in La desheredada.’ A Sesquicentennial Tribute to Galdós 1843–1993. Ed. Linda Willem. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 1993. 27–40. – Inventing High and Low: Literature, Mass Culture, and Uneven Modernity in Spain. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1994. Siegel, Sandra. ‘Literature and Degeneration: The Representation of “Decadence.”’ Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress. Ed. J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. 199–219. Simón Palmer, María del Carmen. ‘La mujer lectora.’ V. Infantes et al. 745–53. Six, Abigail Lee. ‘Mothers’ Voices and Medusas’ Eyes: Clarín’s Construction of Gender in Su único hijo.’ Culture and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Spain. Ed. Lou Charnon-Deutsch and Jo Labanyi. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1995. 199–215. Sutherland, Erika. ‘Death in the Bedroom: Eduardo López Bago and His Suspect Syphilitics.’ Excavatio: Émile Zola and Naturalism 18.1–2 (2003): 278–92. Tanner, Tony. Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979. Terry, Jennifer, and Jacqueline Urla, eds. Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995. Tofiño-Quesada, Ignacio. ‘Spanish Orientalism: Uses of the Past in Spain’s

Works Cited

265

Colonization in Africa.’ Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 23.1–2 (2003): 141–8. Tolliver, Joyce. ‘Narrative Accountability and Ambivalence: Feminine Desire in Insolación.’ Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 23.2 (1989): 103–18. Torrecilla, Jesús. España exótica: La formación de la imagen española moderna. Boulder, CO: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 2004. – ‘Un país poético y una polémica: las interioridades de Insolación.’ Hispanic Review 71.2 (2003): 253–70. Trinidad Fernández, Pedro. ‘La reforma de las cárceles en el siglo XIX: las cárceles de Madrid.’ Estudios de Historia Social 22–3 (1982): 69–187. Trueba, V., et al., eds. Actas de la Sociedad de Literatura Española del Siglo XIX. III Coloquio. Lectora, heroína, autora (La mujer en la literatura española del siglo XIX) (Barcelona, 23–25 de octubre de 2002). Barcelona: PPU, 2005. Tsuchiya, Akiko. ‘The Female Body under Surveillance: Galdós’s La desheredada.’ Brownlow and Kronik 201–21. Urey, Diane. Galdós and the Irony of Language. New York: Cambridge UP, 1982. Valis, Noël. ‘Confesión y cuerpo en Insolación, de Emilia Pardo Bazán.’ Estudios sobre Emilia Pardo Bazán: In memoriam Maurice Hemingway. Ed. José Manuel González Herrán. Santiago de Compostela: U de Santiago de Compostela, 1997. 321–51. – The Culture of Cursilería: Bad Taste, Kitsch, and Class in Modern Spain. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002. – The Decadent Vision in Leopoldo Alas: A Study of La Regenta and Su único hiijo. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1981. – ‘On Monstrous Birth: Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta.’ Naturalism in the European Novel: New Critical Perspectives. Ed. Brian Nelson. New York: Berg, 1992. 191–209. – ‘The Perfect Copy: Clarín’s Su único hijo and the Flaubertian Connection.’ PMLA 104.5 (1989): 856–67. Varela, Julia. ‘Técnicas de control social en “La Restauración.”’ El cura Galeote asesino del obispo de Madrid-Alcalá: proceso médico-legal. Ed. Julia Varela and Fernando Álvarez-Uría. Madrid: La Piqueta, 1979. 210–36. Vásquez, Mary S. ‘Class, Gender and Parody in Pardo Bazán’s La Tribuna.’ Estudios en homenaje a Enrique Ruiz-Fornells. Ed. Juan Fernández Jiménez et al. Erie, PA: Asociación de Licenciados y Doctores Españoles en Estados Unidos, 1990. 679–87. Vázquez García, Francisco. ‘El discurso médico y la invención del homosexual (España 1840–1915).’ Asclepio: Revista de Historia de la Medicina y de la Ciencia 53.2 (2001): 143–62. – ‘Ninfomanía y construcción simbólica de la femineidad (España, siglos

266

Works Cited

XVIII–XIX). VII Encuentro de la Ilustración al Romanticismo. La mujer en los siglos XVIII y XIX. Ed. C. Canterla. Cádiz: U de Cádiz, 1994. 125–35. Vega Armentero, Remigio. La Venus granadina: novela social. Madrid: Juan Muñoz Sánchez, 1888. Walkowitz, Judith R. Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1980. Weeks, Jeffrey. ‘Discourse, Desire and Sexual Deviance: Some Problems in a History of Homosexuality.’ The Making of the Modern Homosexual. Ed. Kenneth Plummer. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Nobles, 1981. 76–111. Whitaker, Daniel S. ‘La quimera of Emilia Pardo Bazán: The Pre-Raphaelite Factor in the Regeneration of a Decadent Dandy.’ Hispania 70.4 (1987): 746–51. White, Sarah L. ‘Liberty, Honor, Order: Gender and Political Discourse in Nineteenth-Century Spain.’ Enders and Radcliff 233–57. Willem, Linda M. Galdós’s Segunda Manera: Rhetorical Strategies and Affective Response. Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 1998. Wilson, Elizabeth. ‘The Invisible Flâneur.’ New Left Review 191 (1992): 90–110. – The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991. Zamora Juárez, Andrés. El doble silencio del Eunuco: Poéticas sexuales de la novela realista según Clarín. Madrid: Fundamentos, 1998. Zavala, Iris M. ‘Arqueología de la imaginación: erotismo, transgresión y pornografía.’ Discurso erótico y discurso transgresor en la cultura peninsular, siglos XI al XX. Ed. Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz and Iris M. Zavala. Madrid: Tuero, 1992. 155–81. Zecchi, Barbara. ‘Insolación de Emilia Pardo Bazán: Intertextualidades y parodias, hacia una escritura de la igualdad.’ MLN 122.2 (2007): 294–314. Zola, Émile. The Experimental Novel and Other Essays. Trans. Belle M. Sherman. New York: Haskell House, 1964. – Nana. Trans. and intro. Douglas Parmée. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.

Index

Adoratrices, las, 224–5n3, 225n4. See also Desmaisières, Micaela adulteress and adultery, 14, 21, 28, 37, 57, 68, 71–3, 121, 123–4, 215, 217n1, 219n17, 226n13, 234n12 aesthete and aestheticism, 24, 112, 113, 118, 121, 125–6, 129, 132–3, 134, 135, 233–4n11, 236nn30,31,32. See also dandy; decadence; homosexual(ity); lesbianism; masculinity, crisis of; perversion Africa: constructions of (in Spanish cultural imaginary), 24, 136–40, 219n19, 238n5; Spanish colonialism in, 6, 136–7 Alas, Leopoldo (pseud. Clarín), 4, 12, 26, 109–10, 162; ‘Las literatas,’ 96–7, 228–9n14; La Regenta, 13, 23, 48, 60, 90, 95, 96, 97, 220n25, 228n9; review of La desheredada, 224n20; review of La Tribuna, 109–10, 231n27; Su único hijo, 12, 13, 23–4, 113–25, 215, 233nn7,8,10, 233–4n11, 234nn12,15,16,18 alcoholism, 10, 39, 63, 65, 68, 170 Aldaraca, Bridget, 34, 47, 51, 101–2 Alfonso XII, King, 40, 217n7

Álvarez Junco, José, 217n5; and Adrian Shubert, 139 Álvarez-Uría, Fernando, 12, 218n10 Amadeo of Savoy, King, 36 Amann, Elizabeth, 145, 155 anarchism (anarchist), 135, 223n17 Andalusia, in the cultural imaginary (as orientalist myth, etc.), 24, 136, 138–44, 147, 151–61, 178, 237–8n1, 240n15, 240–1n18, 242n25 Anderson, Amanda, 217n1 Andreu, Alicia, 220n22, 221–2n3 ángel del hogar (Angel of the House), 46, 49 anthropology in Spain, 6, 10, 17, 137, 163, 238–9n6, 239n7 Arenal, Concepción, 192, 227n4, 232n1; La voz de la caridad, 192 Argentina, 218n11, 247n24 Aspasia (historical figure), 248n3, 249n9 autoeroticism (female), 183–4, 244–5n6 Bahamonde Magro, Ángel, and Julián Toro Mérida, 218n9 ballads. See romance(ro)

268

Index

Balzac, Honoré de, 3, 162, 247n21; La Cousine Bette, 3; Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, 3 Baroja, Pío, 246n16 Bartky, Sandra, 67 Baudelaire, Charles, 33, 171 Baudrillard, Jean, 41–2 Bauer, Beth, 114, 115, 125, 131–2, 228n12, 234n18 Beizer, Janet, 51, 52, 116 Bell, Shannon, 120, 165, 178, 209, 210, 217n1, 246n19 Benjamin, Jessica, 234n14 Benjamin, Walter, 33, 171 Bentham, Jeremy, 6, 57, 60, 61, 218n9, 225n5. See also panopticon Bernaldo de Quirós, C., 10, 230n22, 246n19. See also Llanas Aguilaniedo, J.M. Bernheimer, Charles, 165, 217n1 Bhabha, Homi K., 25, 144, 178 Bieder, Maryellen, 19, 126, 132, 220–1n27, 230–1n24, 231nn25,27, 234n19, 235n22 Blanco, Alda, 217n2, 219n18, 232n1, 238n2 Blanco Aguinaga, Carlos, 74 Braun, Lucille V., 225n7, 226n10 Bretz, Mary Lee, 132, 133 Britain, 5, 11, 78, 112, 130, 136, 191, 217n1, 227n4, 232n3, 245n10 Brooks, J.L., 226n10 Brooks, Peter, 75, 188, 223n16, 247n21, 248n28 Butler, Josephine, 6, 191, 192, 209; abolitionism, in Britain, 191, 192, 209–10 Butler, Judith, 5, 7, 8, 147, 215, 241n24 Cádiz. See zarzuela

Campos Marín, Ricardo, 10, 19, 30, 31, 39, 142, 217n6, 222n9, 223n15, 240n14 Canalejas, Francisco de Paula, 96; Tercera conferencia sobre la educación literaria de la mujer (1869), 96 Capel Martínez, Rosa María, 106 capitalism, 3, 5, 11, 29, 36, 40, 46, 100, 223n12 cárcel-modelo, 11, 46, 218n9, 223n14, 225n7 Cardwell, Richard A., 12, 163, 236n28 Carr, Raymond, 239n9 casticismo (lo castizo), 144, 145, 239n10 Castillo, Debra, 29 Catholic Church. See Catholicism Catholicism, 5, 18, 59, 91, 160 Certeau, Michel de, 5, 7, 9, 33, 37, 51, 55, 69, 73, 75, 221–2n3, 249n8; spatial practice (spatial trajectory), 9, 33, 51, 70, 149–50 Cervantes, Miguel de, 97, 194. See also Don Quixote archetype Charcot, Jean-Martin, 6, 233n9 Charnon-Deutsch, Lou, 19, 79, 132, 140–1, 143, 214, 217nn2,4, 218n12, 228nn6,7, 242nn25,26, 247n25 Chauncey, George, Jr, 235n21 Cherner, Matilde (pseud. Rafael Luna), 25–6, 27, 215; María Magdalena, 25–6, 190, 191–212; — as political denunciation, 201, 207, 208; naturalism, evocation of, 193, 197 (see also Zola); Ocaso y Aurora (1878), 192 Chodorow, Nancy, 234n14 Cixous, Hélène, 234n14 Clarín. See Alas, Leopoldo Cleminson, Richard, and Francisco

Index Vázquez García, 17, 128, 216, 219– 20n20, 230n19 colonialism (Spain), colonialist discourse, colonization, 136, 137, 144, 148, 161, 178 commodity or commodification, 35, 39, 41–2, 50, 54, 171–2, 187, 244–5n6. See also consumption or consumerism conduct manuals, 16, 77 Congreso Pedagógico (1882, 1892), 16 Connell, R.W., 232–3n4. See also hegemonic masculinity; masculinity, crisis of consumption or consumerism, 34–5, 39, 53, 76–9, 84, 99–108, 117, 118, 172, 181, 181–3, 187, 221–2n3, 228n7, 230n19, 244–5n6, 249n5. See also commodity; luxury Contagious Disease Acts, Britain, 209 convent, as reformatory, 58–65, 224n3; Recogidas, las (convent of), 59 Corbin, Alain, 168, 172, 176, 209 costumbrismo (novela costumbrista, cuadros de costumbres), 147, 148, 218n12, 241n23 Coward, David, 204, 250n10 criminal (criminality). See delinquent (delinquency) criminal anthropology. See criminology criminal justice system, 30 criminology, 6, 7, 10, 11, 15, 17, 227– 8n5, 238–9n6. See also Lombroso, Cesare crowd, 36, 37, 38–9, 54, 55 Cruz, Ramón de la, 147 cursi or cursilería, 35, 36, 104, 105, 130, 151, 235n25

269

Dame aux Camélias, La. See Dumas, Alexandre, fils dandy, 3, 24, 117, 118, 125–6, 127, 129, 130, 143, 173, 234–5n20, 236n31 Darwin, Charles, 16 Davis, Lisa, 236n28 decadence or decadentism, 3, 16, 84, 112–13, 117–18, 130–1, 133–4, 228n8, 232n3, 233n8, 233–4n11, 236n27, 236nn30,31 (see also J.K. Huysmans); national and imperial, 10, 131, 137,142 degeneration, 6, 10, 16–17, 39, 52, 53, 64, 66, 113, 163, 170, 219n19, 222n9, 223nn15,17, 240n14 (see also Max Nordau); racial, 116, 142, 219n19, 240n14, 245n11, 246n19 Delgado, Luisa Elena, 19, 37, 219n15, 220n21, 222nn4,7, 226n14, 238n2 delinquent (delinquency), 9, 11, 19, 28, 29, 30, 38, 52, 53, 57, 58, 64, 66, 71, 185, 188, 219n16, 223nn15,17, 224n1 Dendle, Brian, 137–8, 161, 239n7 Desmaisières, Micaela, 59, 225n4. See also Las Adoratrices Dickens, Charles, 3; David Copperfield, 3; Oliver Twist, 3 Dijkstra, Bram, 16–17, 246n14 Dirección General de Seguridad, 58, 224n1 docile body, 21, 40, 52, 53, 63, 67–8, 75, 223n14, 225n6. See also Foucault, Michel domestic novel, 218n12 Don Juan archetype, 141, 151, 155, 239n12 Don Quixote archetype, 246–7n20 Dorado, Pedro, 10 Dumas, Alexandre, fils, 162; La

270

Index

Dame aux Camélias, 98, 177, 203–4, 228n10, 246n18, 250nn10,11 Dupláa, Christina, 230n23 DuPont, Denise, 131 empire, 4, 10, 27, 217n4, 238nn2,3,4 England. See Britain Enríquez de Salamanca, Cristina, 219n18 Esquerdo, José, 30, 64 Esquirol, Jean-Étienne Dominique 31 Estébanez Calderón, Serafín, 241n23 Ewald, François, 7 Feal Deibe, Carlos, 233n10, 234n15 Feldman, Jessica R., 127, 130, 234– 5n20 Felski, Rita, 23, 35, 77–8, 84, 96, 99–100, 105, 107, 111, 112, 114, 118, 119, 121, 125, 126, 127, 129, 233n5, 234n17 female domesticity. See ángel del hogar female reader. See women’s reading feminism. See women’s movement feminist. See women: New Woman femme fatale, 115, 246n14, 247n22 Fernández, Pura, 20, 162, 164, 166, 180, 187–8, 189, 191, 192, 202–3, 207, 218–19n13, 219n14, 227n1, 228n11, 242n1, 245nn7,9, 245–6n13, 246n16, 247n23, 248n30, 248n1, 249n6, 250n13 Fernández Cifuentes, Luis, 35, 36, 41, 136, 138, 237–8n1 Fernández de los Ríos, A., 224–5n3 fetish (fetishism), 41–4, 50, 110, 118, 124, 127, 171, 178, 240–1n18 Filgueira Ganzo, Jesús, 140, 145

flamenco, 141; flamenquismo, 152, 242n26 flâneur (or flânerie), 33–4, 38, 101, 171 Flaubert, Gustave, 3, 234n18; Madame Bovary, 3, 96, 99 Flint, Kate, 78, 84 folletín, 12, 91, 98, 104, 163, 181–2, 183, 188, 189, 248n27; French serial novel, 223n16 Foucault, Michel, 6, 7, 8, 9–10, 17, 18, 28, 29, 57–8, 59, 60, 63, 64, 70, 75, 128, 163, 164, 167–8, 169–70, 172, 189, 218n8, 219n16, 219–20n20, 223n14, 225n6, 245n12 France, 5, 11, 59, 78, 108, 112, 128, 136, 163, 165, 188, 193–4, 211, 217n1, 217–18n7, 219nn15,16,20, 227n4, 227–8n5 Frost, Daniel, 222n4 Freud, Sigmund, 45; narcissism, 45 Fuencarral, calle de (crime of), 13, 30 Fuente, Vicente de la, 224–5n3 Fuentes, Teresa, 8, 19, 29, 63, 64–5, 222n8, 225n5, 225–6n9 Fuentes, Víctor, 109, 230–1n24 Fuss, Diana, 7 Galeote (priest), 30 Galicia, in Spanish imaginary, 139, 149, 156, 239n9 gaze, male (masculine), 42, 84, 166–7, 170–1, 172, 183, 188, 191, 214, 220n24, 246n17 Germany, 112, 128, 219–20n20 Gibson, Mary. See Rafter, Nicole Hahn Gilfoil, Anne Wyly, 239n7 Gimeno de Flaquer, Concepción, 227n4

Index Giné y Partagás, Juan, 30, 167, 180, 246n19 Ginger, Andrew, 220n21 gitanismo. See gypsy Gloriosa (Glorious Revolution), 15, 37, 103, 106, 217–18n7 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur Comte de, 136 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 79, 97; Faust, 79 Gold, Hazel, 234n16 Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis, 231n27 Gómez de Baquero, E., 235–6n26 Gómez Madrid, Benito, 239n8 Goode, Joshua, 136–7, 138, 238–9n6 Gordon, M., 64 Goya, Francisco de, 147 Groneman, Carol, 14 Grosz, Elizabeth, 28 Gullón, Germán, 230n20, 231n26 Gullón, Ricardo, 225n7, 226n10 gypsy, 141, 147, 160–1, 242nn25,26; gitanismo, 152, 242n26 Harney, Lucy D., 147–8 Harpring, Mark, 128, 134 Hauser, Philip, 167, 245n11 hegemonic masculinity, 232–3n4. See also masculinity, crisis of Hekman, Susan J., 198 Henn, David, 236n31 hetaera, 204, 249n9 Hibbs-Lissorgues, Solange, 277nn1,2 homoeroticism, 119, 128, 129, 234n13 homophobia, 128 homosexual and homosexuality, 4, 17, 39, 112, 113, 118, 127–8, 130, 219–20n20, 232n3, 235n21. See also

271

lesbianism; perversion; sexual inversion Hooper, Kirsty, 137, 238n4 Horn, David G., 7 Hospital de San Juan de Dios, 175, 176, 179, 242–4n3, 246n16. See also syphilis Huertas García-Alejo, Rafael, 19 Hunt, Lynn, 186–7, 188, 247n25, 247n26 Huysmans, J.K., 118, 233n5; A rebours, 118 Huyssen, Andreas, 107, 230n21 hygiene, 6, 10, 12, 20, 77, 78, 163, 175, 202, 227–8n5 hysteric or hysteria, 6, 13, 17, 51–2, 91, 113, 116–7, 168, 180–1, 184–5, 199, 205, 225n8, 233n9, 247n22 idealism: as literary genre, 193–4, 209, 210, 248n2; versus naturalism, 210–11 Iglesias Rodríguez, Gema, 218n9 illustrated magazines or periodicals, 22, 79–90, 228nn6,7; Ilustración Artística, 79, 84, 85, 90; Ilustración Española y Americana, 79, 84; La Ilustración de la Mujer, 90 insane asylum. See mental institution Isabel II, 15–16, 217n4, 217–18n7, 219nn15,18 Jaffe, Catherine, 95, 228n9 Jagoe, Catherine, 34, 46, 97, 116, 193, 218n12, 219n18, 220n22, 221–2n3, 232n3, 248n2 John, Nicholas, 204, 250n11 Johnson, Roberta, 232n2 journalism, 13 Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, 202

272

Index

Jubran, Carl, 136, 137 Julià, Santos, 150 Kirkpatrick Susan, 14, 16, 19, 216, 217n2, 218n12, 232n2, 236nn29,31,32 Koch, F.M., 246n19 Krauel, Ricardo, 220n25 Kristeva, Julia, 234n14 Kronik, John W., 73, 133–4, 236n30 Labanyi, Jo, 5, 8–9, 11–12, 15, 18, 19, 29, 42, 61, 72, 73, 74, 78, 217nn2,6, 219n17, 226nn10,13, 238n2, 246n15 Larra, Mariano José de, 241n23 LeBon, Gustave, 38 Leganés, 31–2. See also mental institution Leps, Marie-Christine, 11 lesbianism, 14, 91, 180, 181, 230n22, 233n10, 246n19. See also homosexuality; perversion; sexual inversion Lewis, Reina, 238n3 liberalism, 5, 18, 247n23 literata (woman of letters), 96–7, 228–9n14 Llanas Aguilaniedo, J.M., 230n22. See also Bernaldo de Quirós, C. Lombroso, Cesare, 6, 7–8, 10, 13–15, 17, 53, 138, 223n17, 239n7; and Guglielmo Ferrero, La donna delinquente (Criminal Woman), 7, 14, 246n19; ‘habitual criminal,’ 223n17; L’uomo delinquente (Criminal Man), 10 López Bago, Eduardo, 4, 13, 25, 26, 91, 162–90, 198, 211, 242n1, 247n23, 248n29 (see also radical naturalism); El cura, 187; ‘La moral del naturalismo,’ 164; La prostituta

series (tetralogy): La prostituta, La Pálida, La buscona, La querida, 25, 48, 91, 163–90, 195, 199, 201, 205, 214, 215, 228n10, 242–4n3, 244–5n6, 245nn7,8, 245–6n13, 246nn15,18, 246–7n20, 247n22 López Fernández, María, 217n4, 228– 9n14, 230n22, 244–5n6, 245n11 Lotman, Yuri, 55 Ludmer, Josefina, 26, 202, 249n8 Luna, Rafael. See Cherner, Matilde luxury, 33, 34, 35, 41, 42, 43–4, 50, 101–2, 105, 107, 117, 181, 182, 184, 196, 230n19, 242–4n3, 249n5. See also commodity; consumption; marketplace Macherey, Pierre, 6, 7 machine, subjection to, 29, 30–1, 40–1, 46, 47, 48 Mack, Mary Peter, 61 madness. See mental illness Madrid, 32–3, 38, 70, 101, 140, 144, 239n10; Salamanca neighbourhood (barrio de Salamanca), 32–3, 149–50, 222n4 male gaze. See gaze, male (masculine) Manet, Édouard, 3 Marcus, Stephen, 188 Maristany, Luis, 10 marketplace, 34, 44, 78, 101, 183, 222n5. See also consumption marriage, 28, 45, 47, 48, 68–9, 72–4, 128, 132, 159 Martin, Biddy, 40 Martin-Márquez, Susan, 136, 217n2, 219n19, 238nn2,5 Martínez Martín, Jesús A., 189 Martínez Pérez, José, 19

Index masculinity, crisis of, 13, 23–4, 112– 35, 232n2, 232–3n4, 234n17, 237n33 maternity, 119–20, 122, 123, 225–6n9, 234n15 Matlock, Jann, 18, 78, 116, 163–4, 165, 173, 179, 181, 190, 196, 217n1, 233n9 Max-Bembo, Prof., 228n8, 246n19, 246–7n20 Mayo, F. de S., 246n16 Mayoral, Marina, 144, 160, 240n17 McClintock, Anne, 178, 240–1n18 McKenna, Susan M., 100, 108, 109, 230–1n24 medical-social novel/study (novela/ estudio médico-social), 13, 25, 26, 167, 186, 192, 227n4 medicine, 10, 50, 163, 186; medical discourse (or treatises), 12, 13, 19, 47, 64, 78, 113, 116, 169, 180, 182, 198–9, 205, 225n8, 227n3, 246–7n20; medical metaphors, 48, 60, 169, 222n11, 250n12 melodrama, 104, 133, 163, 177, 186 Mendelson, Jordana, 220n21 mental illness, 12, 19, 30, 31, 39, 47, 63–4, 66, 67, 75, 181, 185, 221n2 mental institution, 30–2, 75 Mercer, Leigh, 114, 115, 116 Mesonero Romanos, Ramón de, 224–5n3, 241n23 Model Prison. See cárcel-modelo modernism, literary, 127, 216, 230n21, 232n2, 236n32 modernity, 6, 10, 19, 112, 142, 213, 220nn21,22, 237–8n1 Morel, Bénédict Augustin, 6, 245n11 Mosse, George L., 113, 232n2, 232– 3n4 mother(hood). See maternity

273

narcissism. See Freud national identity, 24, 136, 138–43, 146–9, 151–2, 154–8, 161, 213, 237– 8n1, 238n2, 241n21, 242n26 naturalism, 6, 13, 47, 163, 164, 176, 189, 193, 208, 214, 220n22, 228n8, 231n26, 239n7, 241n23, 242n27, 245n9, 247n24. See also Zola, Émile Nordau, Max, 16. See also degeneration Nouzeilles, Gabriela, 12, 186, 218n11, 247n24 novela costumbrista. See costumbrismo nymphomaniac (or nymphomania), 14, 91, 117, 185, 225n8, 242–4n3, 247n22 O’Byrne-Curtis, Margarita Rosa, 221n2 Oleza, Juan, 114, 115, 118, 124, 233nn8,10 orientalism, 24, 136–7, 139–40, 143–4, 238nn3,4, 240n17, 242n28; and Andalusia, 24, 136, 138, 143–4, 155, 160, 178. See also Said, Edward Palacio Valdés, Armando, 12–13, 228nn12,13; La fe, 13; Marta y María, 13, 91, 97 panopticon (or panopticism), 6, 21, 29, 31, 46, 50, 57–8, 61, 168, 218n9, 223n14, 225n5. See also Bentham, Jeremy; Foucault, Michel Pardo Bazán, Emilia, 4, 12, 22, 25, 27, 162, 211, 220–1n27, 231n27, 232n1, 236nn30,31,32; Aficiones peligrosas, 98–9; ‘Apuntes autobiográficos,’ 98, 106, 231–2n28; ‘La cigarrera,’ 231–2n28; Una cristiana, 238n4, 239n7; La cuestión

274

Index

palpitante, 22, 220–1n27; Doña Milagros, 12, 234n19, 237n33, 240n17; Dulce dueño, 12, 236n31; ‘La educación del hombre y de la mujer,’ 219n18; Insolación, 12, 22, 24, 43, 138–61, 178, 214, 215, 239nn8,12, 240n15,16, 240–1n18, 241nn20,21, 242n27,28,29; Literatura francesa moderna, 131; Memorias de un solterón, 12, 13, 22, 23, 24, 125–35, 143, 234n19, 235nn22,23,24, 235–6n26, 236n27, 237n33; ‘La mujer española,’ 249n7; ‘Náufragas,’ 249n7; Los Pazos de Ulloa, 13; La piedra angular, 239n7; Un poco de crítica, 131; Porvenir de la literatura después de la guerra, 133; La prueba, 239n7; La Quimera, 13, 236n31; La revolución y la novela en Rusia, 138; La sirena negra, 236n31; La Tribuna, 12, 15, 22–3, 97–111, 117, 149, 181, 182, 194, 205, 206, 210, 212, 215, 230nn18,20,23, 230–1n24, 231n26, 231–2n28 Paredes Núñez, Juan, 98 Parent-Duchâtelet, Alexandre, 6, 245n7, 246n19 Parsons, Deborah L., 37, 69–70, 226n12 paternity, 24, 119–20, 122, 124, 233n8, 234n18 Patiño-Eirín, Cristina, 95, 97–8, 99, 108, 228n13, 229n16 Pearson, Jacqueline, 78, 97 Pérez Baltasar, María Dolores, 225n4 Pérez Galdós, Benito, 4, 12, 25, 111, 162, 226n14; El amigo Manso, 13; La de Bringas, 13, 15, 20, 34, 37, 105, 130, 219n15, 249n5; La desheredada, 12, 15, 20–1, 22, 28–56, 57,

60, 64, 75, 100, 108, 117, 149, 173, 174, 179, 181, 182, 184, 195, 198, 205, 206, 214, 215, 220n22, 221n3, 222nn4,6,10,11, 223nn13,17,18, 224nn20–1; La familia de León Roch, 12; Fortunata y Jacinta, 12, 13, 20, 21–2, 28, 57–75, 121, 149, 206, 215, 220n22, 225nn4,5,7,8, 225–6n9, 226nn10,12; La incógnita, 13; Nazarín, 12, 226n11; Novelas Españolas Contemporáneas, 20; Las novelas de Torquemada, 213, 222n8; Lo prohibido, 13; ‘La sociedad presente como materia novelable,’ 237n35; Tormento, 20, 37; Tristana, 12, 20, 37 performance, 118, 119, 124, 127, 151; of gender, 24, 127, 143, 156, 160, 233n9, 241n24; of nation (national identity), 24, 145–8, 151–6, 160 Pericles, 204 periodical press. See periodicals periodicals, 12, 227n1 perversion, sexual, 91, 114, 128, 169, 172, 180, 181, 230n22, 233n7, 233– 4n11, 245n12 Pick, Daniel, 64, 223nn15,17. See also degeneration popular literature, 221–2n3. See also folletín pornography, 186–9, 247nn25,26, 248nn27,29 Prieto Marugán, José, 146 Primo de Rivera, Miguel, 217–18n7 prostitute (and prostitution), 6, 10, 11, 14, 15, 17, 21, 25–6, 28, 29, 33, 34, 37, 38, 39, 54, 57, 60, 68, 71, 72, 77, 91, 107, 120, 162–90, 191–212, 215, 219n17, 222n11, 223n16, 228nn8,10, 229n15, 242n2, 244–5n6,

Index 246n19, 246–7n20, 247n21, 248n31, 249n6, 250n12; in Britain, 191; debate on abolition vs. regulation, 191; in France, 163, 165; as object of (masculine) knowledge, 164–6, 170–1, 177, 186, 189, 192; regulation of, 179 psychiatry, 10, 12, 30, 31, 64, 233n15. See also mental illness psychoanalytic theory, feminist, 234n14 Pulido Fernández, Ángel, 30, 77, 79, 91, 167, 181–2, 198, 245n11 race and racial identity (also racial theories), 4, 19, 24, 27, 140, 141, 142, 148, 155, 238n3, 239n7, 242n27; Pardo Bazán’s views on, 137–8, 140, 155, 161, 239n7; racial hybridity (or mixture), 137, 142–3, 238–9n6; racial theories, in Spain, 136–8, 238–9n6, 239n7 radical naturalism (radical naturalists), 4, 13, 25, 26, 47–8, 91, 162–3, 164–5, 170, 180, 188, 189, 191–2, 242n1, 247n23 Ràfols, Wifredo de, 222n6, 223n18 Rafter, Nicole Hahn, and Mary Gibson, 14 Republic, First (or Republicanism), 36, 103, 106, 110, 192, 217–18n7, 247n23 Revolution of 1868. See Gloriosa Ríos-Font, Wadda C., 13 Rivière Gómez, Aurora, 12, 58, 163, 209, 219n18, 242n2 Rivkin, Laura, 114, 120, 121–2 Robert, Roberto, 228–9n14 Rodríguez Ocaña, Esteban, 11–12, 218n10

275

Rodríguez Sánchez, María de los Ángeles, 192, 209, 211 Rodríguez Solís, E., 192, 246n19 romance(ro), 14, 218–19n13, 219n14 romanticism (romantics), 26, 118, 119, 131, 137, 141, 203, 204, 233nn8,10, 241nn22,23, 242–4n3; romantic literature, 95, 99, 124, 146, 151, 162, 227n4, 228n10, 239n12, 246n18 Romero Pérez, Francisco, 225n7 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 233n5; Venus in Furs, 233n5 Saco, Eduardo, 228–9n14 Sáez de Melgar, Faustina, 228–9n14; Las mujeres españolas, americanas y lusitanas pintadas por sí mismas, 231–2n28 Said, Edward, 136, 137, 141, 238n3. See also orientalism sainete, 147 Salamanca neighbourhood (barrio de Salamanca). See Madrid Salas Valldaura, Josep Maria, 147 Salillas, Rafael, 10 Sánchez Reboredo, José, 109, 230– 1n24 Sánchez Seña, Enrique, 4, 13, 162 Sand, George, 93, 231n27 Santiánez-Tió, Nil, 179, 184 Sawa, Alejandro, 4, 13, 162 Scanlon, Geraldine, 104, 109, 230n18, 231n26 Scarlett, Elizabeth A., 138, 143, 144, 239n12 Schor, Naomi, 193, 194 sciences and scientific discourse, 19, 137, 138, 165, 167, 169, 170, 189, 219–20n20 Scott, Joan Wallach, 164

276

Index

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 234n13 Segovia, Antonio María, 102 Segura, Isabel, 218–19n13, 219n14 sentimental genre, 209 Sereñana y Partagás, Prudencio, 34, 77, 102, 229n15, 245n11 Servén Díez, Carmen, 227nn1,3,4 sexual inversion, 23, 114, 115, 125, 128–9, 180, 246–7n20. See also homosexuality; lesbianism; perversion Shakespeare, William, 97 Shapiro, Ann-Louise, 10, 107–8, 165, 219nn15,16, 227–8n5 Shoemaker, William, 223n14 Showalter, Elaine, 112, 116, 117, 130, 172, 219n16, 232n3, 245n10 Shubert, Adrian. See Álvarez Junco, José Sieburth, Stephanie, 41, 43, 48, 220n22, 221–2n3, 222nn5,10 Simón Palmer, María del Carmen, 227n1 Six, Abigail Lee, 115, 233n10 Spanish-American War (1898), 142 spatial practice. See Certeau, Michel de Stoker, Bram, 117; Dracula, 117 Sue, Eugène, 162 Sutherland, Erika, 169, 176–7 syphilis (venereal disease), 48, 113, 168–9, 171, 172, 173, 175, 201, 205, 206, 209, 242–4n3, 245nn10,11, 245n12, 246n16 Tanner, Tony, 71–3, 121, 217n1, 226n13. See also adultery Terry, Jennifer, and Jacqueline Urla, 8, 14, 28–9 Tofiño-Quesada, Ignacio, 136, 137

Tolliver, Joyce, 139, 158, 159 Tolstoy, Leo, 3; Anna Karenina, 3 Toro Mérida, Julián. See Bahamonde Magro, Ángel Torrecilla, Jesús, 137, 139, 141, 142 transvestism, 127 Trinidad Fernández, Pedro, 11, 29, 218n9, 224n1 Tsuchiya, Akiko, 29 Urey, Diane, 224nn19,21 Urla, Jacqueline. See Terry, Jennifer vagabondism or vagrancy, 10, 11, 65, 71, 218n9, 223n17 Valis, Noël, 39, 47, 114, 115, 117, 118, 124, 139, 233–4n11, 234n18, 235n25, 237n35 vampire, woman as (vampirism), 46, 115, 117 Varela, Julia, 11, 218n9 Vásquez, Mary S., 230–1n24 Vázquez, Óscar, 220n21 Vázquez García, Francisco, 128, 185. See also Cleminson, Richard Vega Armentero, Remigio, 4, 13, 91, 162, 228n11; La Venus granadina, 91 venereal disease. See syphilis voyeurism, 25, 39, 47, 55, 84, 127, 170, 178, 183, 184, 186, 188, 189, 191, 204 Walkowitz, Judith R., 217n1 Weeks, Jeffrey, 235n21 Weininger, Otto, 16 Whitaker, Daniel S., 236n31 White, Sarah L., 15, 106, 219n15 Wilde, Oscar, 3, 130–1, 134, 236n28; The Picture of Dorian Gray, 233n5 Willem, Linda M., 224n21

Index Wilson, Elizabeth, 33–4, 38, 54, 101, 171–2, 244–5n6 ‘woman question,’ 16, 113, 232n3 women: as commodity (see prostitution); New Woman, 17, 24, 112, 115, 116, 117, 125–6, 132, 135; as subjects of knowledge production, 198 women’s education, 3, 6, 16, 22, 76, 77, 78, 96, 97, 191, 192, 199, 202, 219n18, 227n4, 230n23, 249nn6,7 women’s literacy, 3, 16, 22, 76, 78, 107 women’s movement (feminism), 5, 6, 112, 115, 230–1n24, 232nn1,2,3 women’s reading (female reader), 22–3, 76–111, 181–2, 187, 189, 198– 9, 220n24, 221–2n3, 227nn1,2,3,4,

277

228nn10,13, 229n15, 233n7, 246– 7n20, 248n31, 249n6 Zamora Juárez, Andrés, 114, 115 zarzuela, 146, 154, 241n22 Zavala, Iris, 248nn27,29 Zecchi, Barbara, 151, 153, 155, 158, 239n12 Zola, Émile, 3, 4, 6, 13, 47–8, 83–4, 162, 163, 164, 173, 193, 228n8; Au Bonheur des Dames, 34, 130; experimental method, 47–8, 165; The Experimental Novel, 47–8; Nana, 3, 162, 174, 183, 223n13, 242–4n3, 244–5n6. See also naturalism Zorrilla, José, 239n12. See also Don Juan archetype