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.

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Married women “because it was not clear where they stood, particularly if they were members of the property-owning class, which by definition constituted society.”13 At the same time, throughout Europe, the old order (patriarchy, religious dogma, and a domestic economy) braced against new ideas and actions. Settings large and small registered the gaps, as shown in the heated debate at the table in Don˜a Perfecta, or in a husband’s patronizing lecture to his wife in the privacy of their bedroom in Fortunata y Jacinta (1886–1887).

In Fortunata y Jacinta, Galdo´s’ four-volume masterpiece, triangular relationships, combining with the “woman question” and the “social question,” structure the plot. Juanito Santa Cruz, the dauphin or bourgeois prince (as he is called), seduces Fortunata, half-gypsy and a working-class woman. He then marries his first cousin Jacinta but keeps visiting his former mistress. Couples cross as Fortunata marries little Maxi, while Jacinta, the legitimate but spurned wife, imagines a love relationship with the banker Moreno-Isla. Aurora, former lover of Moreno-Isla and new lover of Juanito, betrays Fortunata, while Fortunata, having purposefully conceived a child, before dying delivers that child to Jacinta, bringing about a reconciliation between the two women.

Adultery, identified by Galdo´s in his early essay (1870) as problematic, blurs boundaries between private and public spaces. As Jo Labanyi observes, “if it is possible to be simultaneously inside and outside, the boundary between the two positions disappears.”14 Fortunata y Jacinta illustrates this insight. One instance is the moment when Fortunata, mistress to Juanito Santa Cruz, seizes upon the blurred, reversible status of her own marriage to Maxi and of Juan’s to Jacinta. In the intimacy of their affair Fortunata proposes to trade “el nene grande” (“the big boy”) – Juan – for “el nene chico,” the infant son and heir that Jacinta, supposedly sterile, cannot produce. Fortunata’s “gran idea” (“great idea,” [Obras, V, 280]) of a trade across marriages, from the outside to the inside, turns into a “p´ıcara idea” (“madcap idea” [Obras, V, 238]), fleshed out in a real event when she delivers her newborn son by Santa Cruz to her childless rival.

Fortunata’s image of both husband and child as a “nene” (“baby boy”) also captures the deeper reality of other traded relations within the paired marriages of the Santa Cruces. Responding to Fortunata’s “madcap idea,” Juan immediately expresses his fear that any newborn son would, in the end, supplant him and his privileges as the only man-child in the family. Thus he inadvertently discloses the Oedipal nature of the paired Santa Cruz marriages of father, mother, son, and wife. Juan’s formidable mother, don˜a Ba´rbara, had arranged his marriage to his first cousin Jacinta. Don˜ a

13 Labanyi, Gender and Modernization, p. 40.

14 Labanyi, Gender and Modernization, p. 40.

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Barbara, grooming the “sisterly” Jacinta as a daughter-in-law, transforms her into a kind of “calza” (“leash”) that ties son (and husband) to her - dona Barbara’s - maternal rule. Thus the barren Jacinta finds herself brought into the family expressly to mother the son, ironically and to her great grief reinforcing - but also obliterating - any truly maternal ties. For in this marriage, mothering has meant that Jacinta herself will never be a mother.

As literary Realism evolved as part of the twin processes of modernization and nation formation, Galdos adhered to the aesthetic of mimesis, which he understood both as the observance of facts and as a mirror of minds in action; his aim was to reproduce in fiction what in life was “la novela de verdad” (“truly real” [“Observaciones,” 124]). Once the moral category of truthfulness became a fundamental premise, the representation- “reproduccion” (“reproduction”) is his word - of people and places, events and society acquires moral as well as spatial dimensions. The novel, like the human mind, is a huge, hospitable realm where everything has a place although not everything coheres. The “true” and the “real” arise within intermediate spaces between pieces and parts, parts and wholes, and, correspondingly, between the two poles of “exacti-tud” (“factual accuracy”) and what Galdos calls in his later essay (1897) “belleza” (“beauty” or aesthetic design). When things fit together, when the “perfecto fiel de la balanza” (“perfect point of balance”) of form and content is achieved, the novel enacts the truth of fiction, since truthfulness perforce encompasses the whole of a thing in its relation to everything else.15

• As the novel develops For-tunata’s story, it develops also…

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

• 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

• 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

• New York and London: Routledge, 1992. ´ Jime´nez, Jose´ Olivio. Cinco…

Iglesias Feijoo, Luis. La trayectoria drama´tica de Buero Vallejo. Santiago de Com-postela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 1982. Iglesias Santos, Montserrat. Canonizacio´n y pu´blico. El teatro de Valle-Incla´ n. Santiago: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 1998. Illades Aguiar, Gustavo. “La Celestina” en el taller salmantino. Publicaciones de Medievalia, 21. Mexico: Universidad Auto´noma

• 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.