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Benito Perez Galdos

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Isidora strives to become the person she imagines herself to be, to exert her rights as a citizen of the nation, to be first among equals, to rise from plebeian origins to occupy her rightful place in society. As Jo Labanyi argues, the lesson Isidora learns when her claim to the Aransis family is rejected is that “wealth is acquired through private initiative in the public sphere of the market.”29 If she cannot be noble, if she is socially disinherited, she will inherit her true self by entering the marketplace; her only property is her person, which she then determines to sell to the highest bidder. That property is alluring. Even the prudish narrator, like Augusto Miquis, senses something dangerously alive in Isidora’s ruinous passion for luxury. Both he and Miquis, when confronted with Isidora as she turns before the mirror in the studio of a French dressmaker, waver in their convictions: her beauty seduces them again and again. Isidora’s passion responds to something deeper than the mere love of ostentation, as is the case of Milagros in La de Bringas. For Isidora, as for her aging, alcoholic godfather, the addiction is existential: “Ser algo por diez minutos” (“to be something for ten minutes” [Obras, IV, 1150]). The much-maligned don˜a Pura, housewife in Miau, is another case in point. While Pura, like Isidora, is a spendthrift, her behavior owes much to the human need for self-expression, sounded in the second sentence of the novel as a “himno a la libertad” (“hymn to freedom” [Obras, IV, 551 ]); such an attitude is surely justifiable in a person who lives as a shut-in, facing the Woman’s Prison House.

Augusto Miquis, rising in society, counsels prudence, thrift, obscurity – the Krausist family ideal achieved by Isidora’s cousin who marries an honest man, sews for a living, and cares for Riqu´ın, the illegitimate son whom Isidora has abandoned as she takes to the streets. The narrowness of this regulated ideal, however, cannot hold. The mix, in Isidora, of a gift for high art and the imperative – the social punishment – of a low life exceed the prescriptions of doctor and narrator. A gift for high art, in a woman like Isidora, has nowhere to go but down. We last catch a glimpse of her in Torquemada en la hoguera where, fittingly, she reappears as the lover of an impoverished painter. Art trails her skirts, even to the end.

Another example, in La de Bringas, of the imagistic power of narrative point of view is the ceremony (“Lavatorio”) on Maundy Thursday in which the queen and her courtiers wash the feet of the poor. Perched high on a stair, near the ceiling of the vast interior of the Royal Chapel, children espy through a round, half-window (“claraboya”) the particulars of the event. The ceremony appears in bits and pieces, mediated, as it were, by the amazed eyes of the children and giving a staggering, close-up view of paintings on the ceiling: huge, monstrous figures of nymphs and

29 Labanyi, Gender and Modernization, p. 105.

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408 The Forging of a Nation: The Nineteenth Century

Angels tumble in grotesque postures. Down below, where the ceremony is taking place, everything appears in miniature – tiny figures crowding and scurrying to take part in the “pomposo acto de humildad regia” (“pompous act of royal humility”). In this upside-down world, children peering through a half-window register the decadence and deformity of this “comedia palaciega” (“palatial farce” [Obras, IV, 1585]).

In this way, point of view imprints upon the reader’s eye an image of fragments and exaggerations typical of Queen Isabel’s reign. Later the child Isabelita Bringas, named for the queen, vomits in reaction to the confusions of the entire event. Like family, like nation, high is low, large is small, Christian is pagan, art is caricature, charity is greed, indeed, governance no more than a parasitical exchange system of favors, bribes, and defaulting payments. The representatives of the poor, humiliated, not honored, by the ceremony, sell their parcels of royal largesse to rapacious agents waiting outside the chapel. Indeed, the narrator himself begins the novel by straying into the labyrinthine inner world of the “palace-city” where the Bringas family lives. He parlays the system of favors and bribes to his own advantage, and while he dismisses the hair-picture as a “mamarracho” (“travesty”), he also “lives” inside that “social picture”30 and its deceptions, dozing on the terrace, half-hearing, half-seeing, finally to enjoy sexual relations with the protagonist, Rosal´ıa. The hypocrisy and corruption of the narrator illustrates to perfection a cynical comment a character makes in Miau: Spain is “el pa´ıs de las vice-versas” (“the country of vice-versas” [Obras, V, 600]).

• Ed. D. A. Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 2. 28 Labanyi, Gender…

These tensions arise from a natural affinity between writers of Realist fiction and doctors, emphasized during the latter half of the nineteenth century and characterized by the gradual infiltration of new scientific findings into both medical and artistic thought. The process accelerated rapidly in the 1880s and 1890s. On the

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Styled as allegory, Don˜a Perfecta tells the story of made-up words and names, of surfaces and beliefs, of appearances that contradict what is real. The narrator participates in these linguistic shifts. He introduces the novel as artifice. It is manifestly a fiction, a cautionary tale, for the sign “Villahorrenda,” name

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Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 402 The Forging of a Nation: The Nineteenth Century And Fortunata, from opposite poles of the social spectrum, die in a gush of blood, refusing to moderate their passions; the prescriptions of modern medicine (Moreno-Rubio) and mentors (Feijoo) are as nothing before the wave.

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