The intersection of public and private discourses oriented the instructional potential of Galdos’ novels toward a new objective: the creation of a public-spirited reader. At the same time, a renewed interest in mind-body dualism, which, in the 1880s, took a decisively inward turn toward psychic formation, converged with the need to capture deeper cultural anxieties, arising as high, middle, and lower classes blurred into each other. Thus the notion of “lo cursi” - a derisive epithet applied to those who, like Rosal´ıa Bringas, strive to imitate in fashion and gesture the glossy ways of the aristocracy - becomes a culturally transparent mode.23 “Lo cursi” manifests obliquely the anxieties accruing to a jumble of class alliances and aspirations taking place in the wake of the new economy and while, in the main, the term applies to women, impoverished dandies like don Frasquito Ponte, in Misericordia, are also “cursi.” As Labanyi notes, “In emphasizing ‘lo cursi’ in his novelas contempora´neas, Galdos is identifying Spain’s insertion into capitalistic modernity, indeed, into a global network of economic relations.”24

Galdos’ novels present an ambivalent critique of the process of standardization and imitation in late nineteenth-century Spain. The novels expose, on the one hand, the human suffering, loss, and waste incurred as “pueblo” - people of rural and working class-origins - either strive or are forcibly molded into “personas decentes” (“decent people,” model bourgeois citizens), or as the state invades private life, as in Miau (1888), which recounts the story of Villaamil, an elderly civil servant, who is dismissed from the employ of the Minister of Finance. In the case of Isidora (La desheredada), her illusions of noble birth transmute into counterfeit - but charismatic - images of artistic, aristocratic bearing, “high” postures that inevitably turn upon the “lows” of prostitution.

Zz Raymond Carr, Spain, 1808-1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 2.

23 Noel M. Valis, The Culture of Cursiler´ıa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002),

Pp. 149-171.

24 Labanyi, Gender and Modernization, p. 114.

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On the other hand, the history of Fortunata shows how a step up the stair to bourgeois respectability can be a good thing. Unlike Papitos, the little gypsy girl found barefoot in the mud holes of Cuatro Caminos – orphaned, illiterate, truly poor, and truly “pueblo” – in the novel, Fortu-nata emerges midway on the great stone stair, shod in stylish shoes – a manufactured, middle-class article of which she is very proud. Through her liaison with Feijoo, a retired, elderly military man who gives her a Singer sewing machine and who provides in his will for stock options, this working-class woman of the people, who at times had been a prostitute, gains a measure of legitimate financial independence. At the beginning of the novel, wealth, privilege, and political power had placed her seducer, Juanito Santa Cruz, and his powerful family at the top of the social pyramid. At the end, Fortunata, rising from below to form a new family, heroically challenges tradition and entrenched social codes to bridge the gap.

There is the view that Fortunata’s incorporation into bourgeois society only illustrates the confounding, tragic result of any attempt to bridge the gap between social classes: as a savage, as “pueblo,” she pays the price of death for her striving to become part of the nation’s stable, propertied, middle class. Fortunata’s death, however, comes not as she gives birth to the Santa Cruz heir and assembles, atop the stair, the kind of new, integrated family of intersecting social relationships to which the nation aspired. A passion for revenge precipitates her death. Gripping a house key like a brass knuckle, Fortunata, once again a savage, lacerates Aurora’s face on the floor of Madrid’s most fashionable foreign shop. She avenges Aurora’s treachery – those aspersions on the legitimacy of the newborn heir and the supreme insult levied against both Jacinta and herself through Aurora’s liaison with Juan and the vicious rumor that Aurora has propagated about a liaison between Jacinta and Moreno-Isla. Fortunata’s savage behavior, which Jacinta recognizes as a “justiciada” (“righteous action” [Obras, V, 528]), arises from her passionate nature but also from a clear sense of right and wrong, of legitimacy, of civic and natural rights, and from the conviction of being a proper and “propertied” individual: the child is hers and hers to keep or give away.

Not only savages experience passion and a protest against bourgeois norms. Fortunata’s ideas and feelings, which evolve as a mix of “pueblo” and bourgeois values, also characterize don Manuel Moreno-Isla, an expatriate, an island (“isla”) to himself, a banker of wealth and social prominence allied to the Santa Cruz family. As the novel develops For-tunata’s story, it develops also the story of Moreno’s obsessive love for Jacinta and his unspoken kinship to Fortunata. The manner of his death prefigures Fortunata’s, and it is no coincidence that he owns the building in La Cava where she dies as she contemplates her infant son. Moreno

• Couples cross as Fortunata marries little Maxi, while Jacinta, the legitimate…

Ish Literary History.” In Culture and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Spain. Ed. Lou Charnon-Deutsch and Jo Labanyi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 128; Labanyi, Gender and Modernization, p. 9. 11 See Rodolfo Cardona’s edition of Don˜a Perfecta (Madrid: Ca´tedra, 1984). 12 Labanyi, Gender and Modernization, p. viii. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Benito

• With every word, Pepe offends; with…

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.

• The lives of the protagonists – Ana Ozores, the “Regenta” or judge’s wife…

14 Cited by Maurice Hemingway, “La obra novel´ıstica de Emilia Pardo Baza´n.” In Historia De la literatura espan˜ola. Vol. IX: Siglo XIX (II). Ed. Leonardo Romero Tobar (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1998), pp. 664–665. 15 Leopoldo Alas, “El amigo Manso. Novela de D. B. Pe´rez Galdo´s.” Cited in John W. Kronik, “La resen˜a de Clar´ın

• Ed. Jose´ Amor y Va´zquez and A. David…

The decisive factor in Galdo´s’ Realist novels is story telling itself. The notion of “narraciones interiores” (“inside stories”)31 of characters who, in telling, become the makers of their lives, transmutes story telling into the illusion of immediate experience. Family ties, business interests, political affiliations, religious practices, money, fashion, adultery, prostitution

• He sought to depict the impact of current…

22 Rafael Gutie´rrez Giradot, Modernismo: supuestos histo´ ricos y culturales (Barcelona: Montesinos, 1983; repr. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Econo´ mica, 1988), p. 50. 23 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Con Tinuum, 1997), pp. 17–18. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 27 Benito Perez Galdos HARRIET S. TURNER The term “Realism,”