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 them. Pardo Baza´n’s second novel, Viaje de novios (“The Honeymoon,” 1881), begins where some (although by no means the majority) of sentimental fictions end, with the marriage of an “angel” who here makes the terrible mistake of marrying a man who is lacking a sense of family solidarity. Going a step further in her most famous novel, Los Pazos de Ulloa (“The Ulloa Manor-House,” 1886), she paints the heroine Nucha’s “home” as a gothic torture chamber where a cruel, uncivilized husband contrasts with the feminized chaplain whose most thrilling moments are spent in the nursery caring for the heroine’s daughter. What stands out in Pardo Baza´n’s fiction is that Civilization is not understood as an unproblematic category to be embraced or rejected wholesale as was the case for many of the preceding generation, rather it holds out the promise of a more just society where men and women can be educated to become better companions.

While all of Nucha’s feminine powers are inadequate to the task of “civilizing” her untamed husband, the more educated and resourceful Fe of Pardo Baza´n’s Memorias de un soltero´ n (“Diary of a Bachelor,” 1896) marries the bachelor Mauro Pareja after he morphs into the ideal “pareja” (“partner”) by becoming her perfect complement. Influenced by John Stuart Mill, whose The Subjection of Women (1869) she greatly admired, Pardo Baza´n here imagined a marriage contract based on the

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468 The Modern, Modernismo, and the Turn of the Century

Concept of different but equal partners in the joint enterprise that is the family. Instead of trying to change Fe’s unconventional, rebellious character, Mauro allows himself to be molded into her ideal mate, able to recognize and encourage her intelligence, independence, and exceptional talents, but also willing to share her family’s economic and emotional burdens. As a man of exceptional powers of observation, Mauro uncovers for female readers the hypocrisy of a male-dominated society, and, more astonishingly, he is willing to suspend all claims to superiority and proclaim that Fe is “su igual en condicio´n y derecho” (“his equal in condition and rights”). Rather than gaining a master, as a husband is imagined in the feudal sexual relations of the period, by marrying him Fe will gain a brother, companion, and lover all rolled into one.

In the latter decades of the nineteenth century and proceeding into the twentieth, women writers began to experiment with characters who, unlike many heroines of the earlier domestic literature, want something more than to be wanted by men or to survive their absence or abuse. It is tempting to assume that, because so much women’s literature was concerned with problems relating to the private sphere, women lacked interest in other social issues. In fact, many understood perfectly the contradictions inherent in the cult of domesticity, for example its social isolationism or its clash with patriotic idealism. An important element of feminine education, according to countless conduct manuals like the ones cited above, was the refinement of the notion of women’s “natural” capacity for empathy. Responding in part to this century-long ideological project, many women were particularly receptive to the problems of the poor and understood the injustices of the unequal distribution of wealth which they tentatively explored in their essays, novels, plays, and stories. Concepcio´n Arenal, for example, is remembered as one of the most important nineteenth-century reformists, working tirelessly for prison reform and other working-class and women’s causes. Freethinker RosariodeAcun˜a, one ofthe few successful women playwrights ofthe late century, explored class conflict in her historical drama Rienzi el tribuno (“Rienzi the Tribune”) produced in 1872. The anticlerical hero of Acun˜a’s El padre Juan (“Father John,” 1891) wants to transform a religious shrine into a spa to care for the sick and poor, reflecting “new socialism’s desire to reform and transform society through social engineering.”14 Similarly, Adelaida Mun˜izy Mas’ El pilluelo de Madrid o Los hijos del pueblo (“The Little Rogue from Madrid or the Sons of the People,” 1893) registers the playwright’s dissatisfaction with class stratification. Novelist Dolors Monserda` i Vidal’s zeal for working women led her to support the unionization of women textile workers and to incorporate the problems of the

14 Gies, The Theatre, p. 210.

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• Because of the forty-seven years separating the first…

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 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

• 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

• 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

• The novelists of psychological Naturalism – or, 22 Pe´rez Galdo´s, Ensayos, pp. 176–177. 23 Pe´rez Galdo´ s, Ensayos, p. 180. Cambridge…

The history of the nineteenth-century Spanish novel, as it evolves from Realism to Naturalism, is the record of the experiments made by writers to create new forms adequate to material “more human than social.” This new material also conveyed growing post-Restoration pessimism regarding Spain among novelists, a development which the

• 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