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 one hand, the products of laboratory investigations in physiology and bacteriology were finally shown to be of practical use at the bedside.26 On the other, observation, hypothesis, experiment, and verification shaped the more or less scientific determinist philosophy that broadly underlay the aesthetic theories of nineteenth-century Realist fiction.27 La desheredada reflects that determinism in the description of inherited traits – stunted growth in street urchins, manias and mental aberrations in adults, delinquency in vagrants and ragpickers, and the brutalizing consequences of industrialization. Juan Bou’s rope factory is a case in point.
Galdo´s articulates these fluid interactions of science and the Realist novel in three major ways: through the propositions of his essays and prologues about Realist fiction (e. g. 1870, 1889, 1897), the recurring presence of doctors and disease in his novels, and the literary figurations that represent the inner workings of the mind of both narrator and character. La desheredada opens with an elaborate description of Legane´s, which, as a municipal institution, mirrors the operations of state surveillance and control; these operations are “as deranged as Rufete’s fantasies of national life.”28 Each sector of Madrid, which Rufete sees as the “Envidio´ polis” (“City of Envy” [Obras, IV, 967]) finds a correlative in Legane´s: correctional officers (“loqueros”), whom the narrator compares to civil servants,
26 Sherwin B. Nuland, “The Uncertain Art.” American Scholar (Spring 1998), p. 139.
27 Cecil Jenkins, “Realism and the Novel Form.” In The Monster in the Mirror. Ed. D. A.
Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 2.
28 Labanyi, Gender and Modernization, p. 104.
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Patrol the grounds; access to living quarters follows social differentiation and gender bias, for the “low life” of the patio for women is more deprived, more desperate, than that of men; privileged quarters are only for people who pay. Rufete’s head rattles with the business of the state; he believes he is the state, consumed by defaulting payments to the point of death. Public and private have become fused through his madness in a manner not dissimilar to the fusions in society at large. Rocking from one extreme to the other, like the ball of mercury sliding around in Rufete’s brain, all classes, it would appear, are either uprooted, disinherited, or confined to the dustbin by modernity’s capitalistic economy.
Chapter 1 of La desheredada frames in a literary way the reversals of these intersections between madness and sanity, public and private, old privileges and new civic rights. The title “Fin de otra novela” (“The End of Another Novel”) alludes to the origins of Rufete’s own “novel” of modernity, ending as Isidora’s “novel” begins. Rufete and his family come from La Mancha. Incited by the fictions of a relative, the canon Santiago Quijano, Rufete believes his daughter Isidora to be the illegitimate granddaughter of the Marchioness of Aransi, and so inculcates that image in her mind – a familiar story line in serialized fiction. Thus the cause and effect of Isidora’s own novel of disinheritance – her illusory claim to an aristocratic title and her descent into prostitution – evolve in reverse as a nested structure of fictions, running counter-clockwise to turn “ends” into retrospective and retroactive beginnings.
While the narrator, in his guise as diagnostician, lays claim to the writing of this novel, Isidora’s imagination is far more powerful. She has, he says, a gift for imagining, for anticipating events, for representing these in exalted images and “de una manera muy viva” (“in a lively way” [Obras, IV, 977]). It is she who really writes the novel of her disinheritance. Her conviction of noble lineage is so strong, so deeply rooted, that the narrator himself keeps slipping into that imagined reality. In Chapter 2 she has already won him over. He can hardly refer to her as Rufete’s daughter, thinking of her beauty as somehow consistent with her claim to the aristocratic title of the Aransis family. The reversed literary format of this novel, which combines a classic (Don Quijote) with popular, serialized fiction, mirrors the narrator’s own reversals about art and life. His slips from critique to belief in Isidora’s image of herself reflect his vulnerability to Isidora and his own fear of modernity, of losing his identity in a mixed upside-down world. Isidora’s claim to the house of Aransis, her innate sense of style, her artistic temperament, love of art, and her great beauty are not far from his own ideals. Now the so-called balance between “exactitud” (“factual accuracy”) and “belleza” (“beauty”), which Galdo´ s proposes in 1897 as the secret of the Realist novel, tilts toward the pole of aesthetics.
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