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422 The Forging of a Nation: The Nineteenth Century

Role of spouse, Pardo Baza´n chafed at the limits being revealed, limits, however, that she did not depict being surpassed in her own work.

During the 1890s and early twentieth century Pardo Baza´n, despite being a principal Realist novelist and critic, faced unabated opposition by the male literary establishment to her entry into the Real Academia Espan˜ol and to a post as university professor. No matter that her accomplishments dwarfed those of most of her male antagonists, she could not overcome the barriers to general recognition of her right to fill positions and hold posts to which no woman for many years afterwards acceded. However, unlike Oller, she wrote in Castilian – instead of the Galician of her home region – which provided her a larger audience than his, one that never allowed her to become so obscured as he, and accords her today a higher level of recognition than ever before.

Because of the forty-seven years separating the first and last death dates of the major Realists (Alarco´n in 1891 and Palacio Valde´s in 1938), and because of different socio-aesthetic trajectories in each writer, it is hard to say when the nineteenth-century Realist novel ends. Pardo Baza´n’s 1905 La quimera (“The Chimera”) may be its last masterpiece. Written as a fictionalized rebuttal to Valle Incla´n’s Sonatas (1902–1905) – themselves a Modernist’s memoirs using as foil the Realist autobiography of Gabriel Araceli in the first series of “Episodios” – La quimera tells the story of the painter Silvio Lago who masters Realist portraiture and landscape, yet feels impelled to quest for an alternative art form. In this pursuit he becomes entangled with Espina Porcel, a glamorous, decadent Modernist, who is Pardo Baza´n’s female equivalent to the Marquis of Bradom´ın, the memorialist of the Sonatas. Setting these characters, their art, and life-style against the normal reality of Galicia, Madrid, and Paris, Pardo Baza´n’s narrator compares and contrasts their alternative lives, works, and theories with that normal reality and the art based upon it. In the end La quimera concludes that art inspired in national peoples and customs is superior to life and art pretending to create its own alternative reality. Nonetheless, the dominance of the Realist novel in Spain ended because a majority of strong writers and their public lost their “ethnographical” interest in the peoples, places, and times of the Spain they and their grandparents lived and were witnessing. Today we can see that even when La quimera was published, Valle Incla´n’s Modernist Sonatas were marking a future in which the theories and works of Ortega, Granell, and Benet would flourish.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

29 The Naturalist novel

STEPHEN MILLER

It is customary to associate Naturalism most frequently with Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) and the experimental novel of Emile Zola (1840– 1902). From the beginning of their stories, it is patent that the protagonists are placed in circumstances that will inexorably crush them into hopelessness and death. These circumstances, which affect disproportionately the low-born protagonists usually favored by Naturalism, are those of heredity, birth, gender, and socio-economic class. In Spain this kind of novel, that of “radical Naturalism” or “barricade Naturalism,” was cultivated intensely by few writers, with Eduardo Lo´pez Bago (1853–1931) and Alejandro Sawa Mart´ınez (1862–1909) being most prominent.1 In the former’s tetralogy composed of La prostituta (“The Prostitute,” 1884), La p a´lida (“The Pallid Woman,” 1884), La buscona (“The Picara,” 1885), and La querida (“The Mistress,” 1885), and the latter’s El cura (“The Priest,” 1885) and La mujer de todo el mundo (“The Woman of All Men,” 1885), the little-remembered, never-popular Lo´pez Bago and Sawa practice the Zola–Hardy deterministic Naturalism explicitly rejected by most Spanish novelists of the period.

This is not to say that these novelists denied the importance and influence of biology, environment, economics, and gender on real people and hence on their fictive counterparts. In La desheredada (“The Disinherited Lady,” 1881), Benito Pe´rez Galdo´s (1843–1920) explored the effect of heredity and socio-economic class on Isidora Rufete and her brother Pecado. In Los pazos de Ulloa (“The Ulloa Manor House,” 1886) and in La madre naturaleza (“Mother Nature,” 1887), Emilia Pardo Baza´n (1851–1921) observed how the often barbarous conditions of rural life shape persons of all classes; and, in Los pazos de Ulloa, Morrin˜ a (“Homesickness,” 1889), and Insolacio´ n (“Midsummer Madness,” 1889), she treated the gender and economic limitations under which women live. For his part Narc´ıs Oller (1845–1930), the premier Catalan novelist of the period, essayed one deterministic novel in his 1884 L’Escanyapobres

• As a man of exceptional powers of observation, Mauro uncovers…

Though certainly not unique in exploring the darker side of domestic arrangements, the Restoration period fiction of Emilia Pardo Baza´n stands out not so much for its challenge to the ideal of the domestic angel, but for its insistence that earth-bound angels can only thrive if men are domesticated alongside

• In his first collection of critical articles, incorporating…

As an indication of how current these views were becoming, the practice of Rafael Altamira (1866–1951), a young writer and disciple of Alas, can be mentioned. In his first collection of critical articles, incorporating pieces published between 1887 and 1891, Altamira as a matter of course differentiated, for example, among

• If Cruz’s and Aguilera’s productions lacked scale and grandeur, they, like…

The reading public, because of the illustrated press, knew the historical narrative into which Galdos entwined the actions of his protagonists. The historical narrative was important in its own terms as a matter of national identity and pride, and the characters’ situations and conflicts became significant as demonstrations of the

• At a time when translations from Catalan to Castilian…

Not surprisingly, given the revolution of 1868, the Third Carlist War (1872–1876), and the Restoration of the Bourbon Monarchy in 1875, a basic Realist focus was the comparison and contrast of life in liberal, cosmopolitan Madrid and the more conservative, traditional provinces. Mindful perhaps of Alarco´n’s Diario and De Madrid

• Gabriel Araceli is the first-person narrator/protagonist of the series. In the initial…

The exact direction this Spanish reply should take, in the person of the Spanish “novelist who is Realist and reflexive,” is toward the rich “territory” of psychological exploration of characters as beings whose body and soul are inextricably linked and mutually influential. Not only does Pardo Bazan thereby counter radical