3—
Suffering Women

Gender and Representation in the Early Novels

Successive literary histories have immortalized the categorization of Galdós's early narrative fiction as "thesis novels," engaged in exhaustive attacks on the enemies of a progressive liberal agenda. Thus, generations of students have learned that works such as La Fontana de Oro (1871), Doña Perfecta (1876), Gloria (1877), and La familia de León Roch (1878) are all about the evils of absolutism and fanatical Catholicism. A broad consensus in Galdós mythology has held that these protest novels, while interesting, are the one-dimensional products of a young writer: only when we reach the 1880s, some have argued, does Galdós reach his full literary stature, with the depiction of the multifarious urban world of the Restoration and the subtle exploration of its attendant social and psychological problems.^[1] Yet, in the light of modern work on ideology, we cannot affix an "ideological" label on certain of Galdós's novels and not on others. Nor, despite the narrower range and more explicitly political focus of his early novels, can we consider them to be as monolithically univocal as has been supposed. Making gender the central category of analysis reveals uncharted levels of complexity in the deceptively simple thesis novels and highlights the fact that literary texts are always ineluctably complicit in the production and reproduction of multiple ideologies, often in ways unintended by the author.

Women characters in Galdós's novels are widely read as allegories of nineteenth-century Spain "her"self, oppressed by the ancien régime and the Church and, in later works such as La de Bringas and Fortunata y Jacinta , turning from the traditionally sanctioned embrace of marital-monarchical authority to pursue new freedoms with a lover-republic. Yet the way in which the texts invite this allegorical feminization of Spain itself begs for a further reading, one which calls attention to their relation to the system of sex and gender character-

istic of nineteenth-century Spanish culture. Focusing on this occluded ideological level in the texts allows us to perceive the diverse and polyphonic nature of these early narratives. We should not underestimate the importance of gender ideology to Galdós's early novels. For example, the wellspring of the disasters that befall the hero and heroine of Doña Perfecta lies, as the narrator reveals at the end of the novel, in the perverted maternal instinct and social aspirations of an apparently minor character, María Remedios. In an emblematic moment of anagnorisis, we learn that questions of class and gender have been the prime movers of a social drama ostensibly centered on religious behaviour.

The representation of the heroines in Galdós's early novels is clearly inspired by the fables of angelic feminine victimhood that were so popular in the serialized novels of the time. The paradigm that shapes the Galdosian novels of the 1870s, seen in its most exaggerated form in La Fontana de Oro, Doña Perfecta, Marianela , and Gloria , is the exhibition of the heroine as sweet, suffering victim. These novels follow what Nancy Miller terms a "dysphoric" rather than "euphoric" plot structure.^[2] The heroines—meek, loving, virginal young things—are martyred by supporters of the monarchy, caciquismo (corrupt political interests), and the clergy, personified in such characters as doña Perfecta, don Elías Orejón, and the Porreño sisters.

The texts' construction of their religio-political allegories is successful thanks to the mobilization of a whole set of assumed values and conventions of gender. If heroines such as Rosario and Clara act as allegories of liberal "Spain in captivity," as Stephen Gilman suggests, they are successful in arousing the readers' indignation because their conventionally feminine innocence and purity make them blameless victims.^[3] Their characterization draws heavily on nineteenth-century constructions of femininity as soft, susceptible, and malleable, both physically and emotionally. They are presented as being more easily destroyed, more vulnerable in their physical and mental integrity, than their male counterparts. Through love, unwittingly they become entangled in politics, about which they remain ignorant until the end. Their role is to suffer and wait, confined within the household, while the hero, outside, struggles with their adversaries and agitates for their release.

The feminine antithesis of the impressionable, docile heroines of the early novels is the type of perverted womanhood represented by

Paulita Porreño, doña Perfecta, Serafina, and María Egipcíaca: domestic tyrants in whom excessive religiosity has warped feminine softness into intolerance and cruelty. Galdós presents female fanaticism as a cloak for unfulfilled and dangerous sensuality, the refuge of the widow, spinster, or unhappily married woman. Doña Perfecta exemplifies this dichotomy of model feminine sensitivity (and moderate piety) versus depraved rigidity caused by religious fanaticism. Wooed by the impetuous liberal Pepe Rey, the angelic Rosario is a hapless pawn imprisoned by her evil mother in a struggle between the forces of reaction and progress. The personification of true womanhood, just as doña Perfecta is the ultimate perversion of her gender, Rosario suffers patiently and incites our moral outrage against the social and religious conservatism of the power-hungry clique in Orbajosa; she functions as an indicator of their selfishness and cruelty. When doña Perfecta finally has Pepe Rey murdered, Rosario becomes quite literally a patient, committed to the local insane asylum.

In the novels Galdós published after the Restoration, the ideal of the angel is refracted in more qualified and equivocal ways. It is the flawed angel who comes to dominate his narratives, rather than the perfect one: he creates a variety of heroines who are endowed with most of the attributes of the ángel del hogar , including the power to redeem and inspire moral admiration, but who deviate in some central way from the model. Marianela, a fragile, self-abnegating child-woman, is, despite her moral beauty, poor and physically ugly. Gloria has an independent and intellectual nature. Pepa Fúcar is in an adulterous relation to León Roch. In elaborating the fictional lives of these characters, Galdós's novels obey the punitive code of nineteenth-century fiction; the heroine's nonconformity, however involuntary, to the desiderata of middle-class feminine conduct—passivity, chastity, humility, domesticity, and piety—is followed by death, insanity, or abandonment, detailed sympathetically but nevertheless presented as an inexorable progression. Interestingly, while La Fontana de Oro originally had a tragic ending, in line with the female victimhood theme of the 1870s, by 1885 Galdós felt moved to alter the ending to a happy one. In the revised version the heroine Clara's story concludes in marriage and rural domesticity, whereas in the earlier version her lover is assassinated and she herself dies of grief.^[4]

Gender seems to determine an asymmetric use of realism in Galdós's early novels. The treatment of the heroines obeys a different code

from the representation of the male protagonists and indeed selectively disrupts the narrative's realist or verisimilar dynamic with the discourse of the sentimental novel. The majority of the female protagonists—including Clara, Gloria, Marianela, and María Egipcíaca—die spectacularly of broken hearts. In contrast the heroes, such as Lázaro and Pepe Rey, more commonly meet their ends not for emotional but for physical reasons—the former is stabbed and the latter shot. We perceive the unevenness of the realist aesthetic also when we compare the strikingly verisimilar vignettes of minor female lower-class characters in La Fontana de Oro , such as that of Leoncia, who appears "mal ceñidas las faldas, sin corsé y descubiertas con negligente desnudez las dos terceras partes de su voluminoso seno" (with her skirt badly fastened and no corset, carelessly displaying two-thirds of her ample bosom), with the much more stylized, romantic representation of the heroine as sad, pale, beautiful, orphaned, and utterly innocent.^[5]

At the end of the decade Galdós published the first of a series of novels that bear signs of clear departures from the angelic feminine ideal: Gloria (1877) and La familia de León Roch (1878). Both texts stage a subliminal debate about true womanhood that centers on a dialectic between the social and the private, reputation versus individual moral worth. Each novel broadly upholds the premises of conventional gender ideology but advances the potentially revolutionary notion that purity of soul overrides breaches of feminine decorum, and even (in the case of Gloria) the loss of chastity itself. In these novels, the cause of female suffering has shifted at least partly beyond that of the evil machinations of some depraved antithesis to that of oppression at the hands of a system: rather than creating heroines whose prime function is to excite pathos for gothic victims of evil individuals, as in the typical narrative of the time, Galdós began to portray women characters chafing at the constraints of societal expectations. The bourgeois feminine role appears in these novels both as an ideal and as a cause of female dissatisfaction, and the redemptive value of female suffering is no longer always clear.

The Bird-Angel in Gloria

In Gloria this dual dynamic is particularly clear. The text itself has an early alter ego, the manuscript of a lost novel recently rediscovered

and edited by Alan Smith, featuring a heroine called Rosalía who is docile and submissive, and whose lover is a Protestant, rather than a Jew.^[6] Yet at the same time as he revised his heroine to make her less like the contemporary angelic ideal, Galdós provided her with a name which has much greater connotations of angelic spirituality. The ambiguity that fuels this change is a central feature of the published novel.

The first few pages of Gloria set up a dialectic of presence and absence, affirmation and denial, which is to characterize the novel. There is a play between various different and more or less ostensibly reliable levels of narrative voice. To begin with, the narrator pretends to be physically accompanying the reader as an interpreter and guide, as we walk towards the town where the events of the novel are to unfold. He addresses the readers directly as "señores" ([ladies and] gentlemen), and is by turns deferentially courteous and mildly imperious (515–16).^[7] Yet at other times, particularly during the reporting of important scenes, this personal voice is noticeably absent. The capacity to fluctuate between different levels of personal and impersonal narrative presentation takes an important role in the work's first part, since it enables the narrative both to mount and to undercut a potentially polemical critique of middle-class culture's view of woman's place.

The characterization of Gloria at the outset is carefully designed to suggest that she is a model young woman, an ángel del hogar . She was enthusiastically hailed as such by Clarín, who declared that "Gloria es un alma purísima de belleza celestial" (Gloria is a soul of the purest celestial beauty).^[8] Early scenes involving Gloria, for example with Caifás, the villager to whom she plays a ministering angel, suggest that she is a model heroine, for they establish her domesticity, purity, piety, and nurturing skills. She is young, pallid, and beautiful, comes from a respectable middle-class household, and is "buena, piadosa y honesta" (kind, pious, and virtuous [518]). She has domestic instincts, rising at the crack of dawn to attend to her household duties (550). She exercises self-denial and exhibits charity to the poor. Caifás repeatedly characterizes her as a guardian angel from heaven (540). Tender-hearted, maternal, and deeply sensitive (517), she is identified with love from the outset, when we first see her at her window. Her life before Daniel Morton's arrival consists of needlework, household duties, and hopes of love.

Yet aspects of the nineteenth-century feminist discourse which represented women as painfully confined by domesticity are also insistently present in the first part of the novel. In the opening pages, the narrator introduces two images which are to be central to the first half of the work: that of the home as prison, and that of the heroine as caged bird. Significantly, our first introduction to the Lantigua household is an ironic reference to the joys of living in what is termed a prison (516); the narrative links the heroine through a series of metaphors to a bird prevented from flying: "hasta cuando el pájaro anda se le conoce que tiene alas" (even when a bird isn't flying you can tell it has wings [517]). The reason for this becomes clear as Gloria's characterization is developed: she is a woman of considerable intellectual stature and is therefore doomed to dissatisfaction. The narrator frequently directs the reader's attention to the conflict between the heroine's desire for mental freedom and exercise, represented in the text as the desire to use her "wings," and the familial injunction to be an immobile and enclosed angel in the house. As the novel progresses, the ideal feminine role for which Gloria is being trained is increasingly associated with an image of constraint and mutilation that had a long history as a political metaphor: like a domestic bird unable to fly, the heroine, says the narrator, "tenía cortadas las alas" (had clipped wings [525]). The bird imagery in Gloria frequently evokes the romantic tradition of symbolizing the untrammelled natural liberties and power of the individual via winged creatures, a tradition which women writers in Spain had used to suggest that conventional femininity was coercive and restrictive. Originally a symbol for the liberal cause during the French Revolution, bird imagery was adopted by Spanish women writers during the 1840s as a feminist metaphor for the self, as is graphically evident in poems such as "Ultimo canto" and "Untitled" by Carolina Coronado and "A mi jilguero" by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. The connection between women and birds seems also to have figured in an enigmatic personal mythology of Galdós's own: H. Chonon Berkowitz's biography of the author mentions that as a student, Galdós became notorious on the Madrid café scene for the dexterity and obsessiveness with which he would fashion paper figures that always took two forms: birds, which he would launch into the air, or prostitutes; they earned him the twin titles of "Little Paper-Birds Man" and "Harlot Kid."^[9]

The names of Gloria's relatives suggest their intimate involvement with the process of making an angel out of her, for example, her uncle Angel and her aunt and Serafinita (little seraph). The diminutive form used for Serafina and don Angel's characterization as a child contribute to the association between an angelic nature and infantilism or stunted growth. The allusion to antiquity in Gloria's family name, Lantigua, can also be interpreted symbolically, for the ideology of domesticity constantly harked back to a mythical past, as Andreu shows;^[10] the name of the heroine's father, Juan Crisóstomo, links him with the church father who preached the silencing of women. All three of the heroine's relatives take part in the process of containing, confining, and intervening with her that goes on throughout the novel.

The relationship portrayed between the heroine and her father is a particularly clear example of the intertwining of feminist and liberal humanist discourse in part 1. Lantigua's general philosophy is coercive: he believes that "la Humanidad pervertida y desapoderada merece un camisón de fuerza" (the human race is perverse and ungovernable and requires a straitjacket [520]). The link between his neo-Catholicism and his espousal of patriarchal sexual politics is laid out for the reader in part 1. The suitor he has chosen for Gloria is metaphorically linked to a tomb. The narrator points out that Lantigua's main criterion in the education of his daughter is containment rather than growth: "creía que con encerrar a su hija en el colegio bastaba" (he thought that shutting his daughter up in school would do the trick [521]). Lantigua tells her that she must rein in her thoughts and bow her neck to the yoke of authority (532). While he lectures her on the marriage he is planning for her, Gloria remains silent, incapable of words, but with the point of her parasol she draws in the sand. As her future is dictated, the thing that she is drawing is gradually revealed, without comment, by the narrator. It provides a visual metaphor for the sensation of imprisonment which Gloria is presumably experiencing in her mutism, for it is an enrejado (iron grid [532]). Having symbolically completed her picture with arrows, like the gate of a castle keep, Gloria announces her acquiescence: "Bien, papa; yo haré siempre lo que usted me mande" (Very well, Papa; I shall always do as you command [533]). Later, Gloria envisages this consent as a voluntary self-mutilation: "Mi padre me ha dicho varias veces que si no corto las alas al pensamiento voy a ser

muy desgraciada . . . Vengan, pues, las tijeras" (My father has often told me that if I don't clip the wings of my mind I'm going to be very unhappy . . . So let's have the scissors [534]).

Chapters 5 and 6 of part 1 deal with Gloria's reading and the markedly heterodox development of her intellect. She displays a startling capacity for independent thought. Menéndez y Pelayo found the characterization of Gloria unacceptable in the extreme because of her intellectual tendencies, considered unfeminine at the time. Indeed, the representation of Gloria in part 1 apparently caused him to class the novel among the most "heterodox" of Spanish literary productions.^[11] On more than one occasion, Gloria contradicts canonical interpretations of history and literature. Each time she is either dismissed or else severely reprimanded by her father: "¿Qué entiendes tú de eso? Vete a tocar el piano" (What do you know about that? Go off and play the piano [521]). Lantigua limits his daughter's mental travels by barring her access to the novels in his library, citing the still popular notion that novels were dangerous for women's virtue: "enardecen la imaginación, encienden deseos y afanes en el limpio corazón de las muchachas" (they fire up the imagination, and set desires and urges in the pure hearts of girls [522]). Lantigua has his daughter read aloud to him from religious and moral works. However, in the intervals while he is writing, she secretly devours forbidden risqué classics such as La Celestina and El Buscón . At one point, Gloria embarrasses her father by voicing in male company her opinion that the society and literature of the Golden Age are not the pinnacles of achievement her father believes them to be. Lantigua's response deserves quoting in full, because it illustrates how Galdós's trick of slipping in and out of free indirect style allows the author to create a tension between the character's patriarchal viewpoint and that of the narrator, who takes pains to distance himself from Lantigua at this point. Lantigua, who holds that religion, politics, and history are male preserves upon which Gloria has no right to comment, qualifies her independence of mind as mad and sinful. His self-congratulatory report of this lecture is, however, prefaced by some words in the narrator's own voice, so heavily loaded with sarcasm that we cannot safely conflate the two:

Más tarde, cuando los sabios privaron a la casa de su presencia majestuosa, don Juan de Lantigua, a quien as absurdas opiniones de su hija habían puesto algo malhumorado, encerróse con ella y la reprendió

afablemente, ordenándole que en lo sucesivo interpretase con más rectitud la Historia y la Literatura. Afirmó que el entendimiento de una mujer era incapaz de apreciar asunto tan grande, para cuyo conocimiento no bastaban laboriosas lecturas, ni aun en hombres juiciosos y amaestrados en la crítica. Díjole también que cuanto se ha escrito por varones insignes sobre diversos puntos de Religión, de Política y de Historia, forma como un código respetable ante el cual es preciso bajar la cabeza; y concluyó con una repetición burlesca de los disparates y abominaciones que Gloria había dicho, y que, evidentemente, la conducirían, no poniendo freno en ello, al extravío de la razón, a la herejía y tal vez al pecado. (524)

(Later, when the learned personages had deprived the household of their august presence, don Juan de Lantigua, who had been somewhat put out by his daughter's absurd opinions, shut himself up with her and rebuked her affably, ordering her in future to be more careful in her interpretation of History and Literature. He declared that a woman's brain was incapable of comprehending such a weighty matter, and that extensive reading did not equip one to understand it, not even if one were a wise man with a training in criticism. He also told her that everything that has been written by famous gentlemen on various points of Religion, Politics, and History forms a respected code of opinion before which we must bow; and he ended with a parodic repetition of the idiotic and abominable things Gloria had said, which, if she did not restrain herself, would obviously lead to error, heresy, and perhaps sin.)

Montesinos, puzzled by this chapter, which clearly disturbs the traditional notion of Gloria as dealing only with religious issues, pronounces it superfluous. From our perspective, however, it shows the author explicitly bringing to the reader's attention the fact that "correct" ways of reading texts were defined by men, and that women's potential for creative thought and free exposure to different kinds of writing was severely limited by the gender roles of a patriarchal society which prescribed the ideals of submissiveness and chastity for the female sex. Lantigua invokes a patriarchal canon, the "respected code of opinion to which we must bow," produced by "famous gentlemen" who define the correct ways to interpret history and literature. Gloria assents to this curtailing of her mental horizons. Crucially, she vows henceforth to read only material suitable for an angel in the house: "hizo voto de no volver a leer cosa alguna escrita o impresa, como no fuera el libro de misa, las cuentas de la casa y las car-

tas de sus tíos" (she vowed never again to read any written or printed work unless it were the missal, the household accounts, or letters from her aunts and uncles [525]). In trying to limit her mind to the pattern set for the angelic woman, Gloria begins to incorporate the patriarchal notion of female creative powers as monstrous: "aquella facultad suya de discernir era como un monstruo fecundo que llevaba dentro de sí y que a todas horas estaba procreando ideas" (that power of discernment she possessed was like a fertile monster which she carried within herself and which was always incubating ideas [525]). But her vow of obedience is short-lived. After the introduction of Daniel Morton into the household, Gloria begins to question her father's ideas about religion, falling as she does so into a sin whose textual name reveals her longing for space and freedom: latitudinarianism. Again, the heroine's desires are figured in terms of flying: the narrator comments at the end of part 1 that "Gloria movía con más vigor a cada instante as funestas alas de su latitudinarismo" (The fateful wings of Gloria's latitudinarianism beat more energetically every minute [579]).

Images of flight as revolt against the feminine role occur repeatedly in chapter 26. In this chapter, appropriately entitled "The Rebellious Angel," Gloria's Satanic or Promethean revolt against her father's religious creed is also a rebellion against the special requirements for the female angel. The use of interior monologue constructs a heroine tormented by contending impulses, on the one hand to obedience and immobility and on the other to self-assertiveness, power, and flight. The description of her struggle is presented in such a way as to thwart moral condemnation, for the hubristic inner voice urging Gloria to rebellion speaks not as the devil but as an echo of Christ: "Levántate, no temas. Tu entendimiento es grande y poderoso. Abandona esa sumisión embrutecedora, abandona la pusilanimidad que te ha oprimido. . . . Tú puedes mucho. Eres grande: no te empeñes en ser chica. Tú puedes volar hasta los astros; no te arrastres por la tierra" (Arise, fear not. Your mind is great and powerful. Cast off that stupefying submissiveness, cast off the cowardice which has oppressed you. . . . You are capable of many things. You are great; don't insist on being small. You can fly to the stars; don't drag along the ground [569]). Gloria imagines her hidden strength to be such that, released, it would destroy the myths of male authority around her: "Yo sé más que mi

padre, yo sé más que mi tío. Les oigo hablar, hablar . . . y en mis adentros digo: 'Con una frase sola echaría abajo toda esa balumba de palabras' " (I know more than my father and my uncle. I listen to them talk and talk . . . and I say to myself: "with a single sentence I could knock down this whole heap of words" [569]). Her fantasies of power and destructive revolt are accompanied by a clear intuition that she has acquiesced to the mutilation of her own wings:

Yo he sido hipócrita; yo me dejé cortar las alas, y cuando me han vuelto a crecer he hecho como si no las tuviera . . . He afectado someter mi pensamiento al pensamiento ajeno y reducir mi alma, encerrándola dentro de una esfera mezquina. Pero no. ¡El cielo no es del tamaño del vidrio con que se mira! Es muy grande. Yo saldré fuera de este capullo en que estoy metida, porque ha sonado la hora de que salga, y Dios me dice: "Sal, porque yo te hice para tener luz propia, como el Sol, no para reflejar la ajena, como un charco de agua." (569)

(I have been hypocritical; I allowed my wings to be clipped, and when they grew back I acted as if I didn't have any . . . I have pretended to submit my thoughts to those of others and to shrink my soul, shutting it up in a cramped space. But it can't be done. The sky isn't the same size as the glasses through which we look at it! It's enormous. I will get out of this cocoon I'm trapped in, because my time has come, and God says to me: "Come out, because I made you to shine with your own light, like the sun, and not to reflect someone else's, like a puddle.")

This same chapter compares Gloria, in a curiously double-layered imaged, to an angel with a halo and to a sleeping bird: "de su brazo derecho hacía una aureola, dentro de la cual metía la cabeza, escondiendo el rostro como lo esconde el pájaro bajo el ala" (her right arm made a halo above her head, and she nestled into it, hiding her face like a bird beneath its wing [567]). Although in this particular instance the bird and the angel can almost be conflated—the bird is sweet, innocent, sentimentalized, and not wild, soaring, or free—normally the two images are counterpoised in the novel. At one point, the connection between domesticity and imprisonment is made explicit:

[Gloria] corrió a la cocina. Su alma revoloteaba en el seno del éter más puro, en plena luz celestial, como los ángeles que agitan sus alas junto al trono del Señor en todas sus cosas. . . . Y era en verdad contraste singular que mientras su alma, como dice el Salmista, escapaba al monte cual ave , estuviese su cuerpo en lugar tan rastrero como una cocina, y arremangándose los lindos brazos y poniéndose un delantal blanco,

empezara a batir con ligera mano muchedumbre de claras y yemas de huevo." (552)

([Gloria] ran off to the kitchen. Her soul was fluttering about in the midst of the purest ether, bathed in celestial light, like the winged angels around the throne of the Lord of creation. . . . The contrast was a strange one indeed; while her soul, in the words of the Psalm, fled like a bird to the hills , her body remained in that humblest of places: a kitchen. Rolling up the sleeves on her pretty arms and donning a white apron, she began lightly to beat a big bowl of yolks and whites of eggs.)

Even though the narrator's avuncular tone and his prettifying vision of Gloria here somewhat efface the power of the contrast, the tropes of winged creatures are so persistent that they overwhelm the narrative's efforts to dilute and coopt them. We are continually furnished with instances of the heroine's compulsion to gender rebellion. She wishes to be like the masculine principle of the sun, an independent source of light, rather than the feminine principle of reflection. The choice that Gloria faces, besides being a choice between religious orthodoxy and heterodoxy, is also one of conformity to or rebellion against the model of femininity.

In part 1, then, intertwined with the critique of neo-Catholicism, we can read a critique of patriarchal sexual politics and their effect upon the heroine. Galdós provides a strikingly modern analysis of the way that women were excluded from the historical and literary discourses of his time, and of the experience of the angelic role as confining and mutilating. The novel does not, however, consistently maintain the feminist critique of gender roles which it undertakes at the outset. It consists of two parts, which were published separately, and in which we can trace fundamentally opposing ideologies of woman's place. Part 1 details the rise but also the end of Gloria's rebellious stance. Halfway through the novel, with Gloria's fall, there is a radical shift in the characterization of the heroine. In the early descriptions of Gloria, before the appearance of Daniel, and up until her union with him, the tragedy we are invited to consider is the destruction of Gloria's free mind because of the requirements placed on women by a society whose central icon is that of a confined, domestic angel. This theme is not pursued further, for the subject of Gloria's struggle to use her mental powers is abandoned once she loses her chastity to Daniel Morton, at the end of part 1. The results of this fall are so catastrophic that she no longer fights to use her mind for

herself. The choice she faced earlier of whether to rebel against femininity or resign herself to it is translated into the emblematic feminine dilemma of love for a man versus duty to family.

The sexual union between Gloria and Daniel is staged in a storm and flood of gothic proportions, signalling the disturbance and disorder of the entire cosmos. Even though, like Tess of the D'Urbervilles, the heroine is passively propelled by circumstance and her lover into succumbing, her loss of chastity is still symbolically invested with earthshaking implications: "Después soplaba de nuevo con rabia; las ramas, en su rozar vertiginoso, se azotaban unas a otras, y parecía que entre aquel torbellino, difundido por la inmensidad de los cielos, se estaba oyendo el rumor de las rotas alas de un ángel que caía lanzado del Paraíso" (Then the wind started gusting furiously again; the branches scraped and writhed and lashed against one another, and it seemed as if in the midst of the gale, lost in the vastness of the heavens, you could hear the fall of an angel with broken wings being expelled from Paradise [592]). The storm indeed presages dire consequences for the heroine, for after consummating their love, Daniel reveals that he is not, as Gloria had assumed, a Protestant, but a Jew. Gloria's sexual initiation is, furthermore, figured as striking at the very heart of the patriarchal order, for upon discovering the lovers in Gloria's bedroom, her father falls dead instantly of a heart attack. Gloria's disobedience has rendered her nothing less than a parricide.

At this central point of the novel, the metaphor of breaking wings is employed for the heroine's loss of chastity. In context the metaphor bears an important second meaning, which is that Gloria's powerful, independent thought processes are now destroyed. From this point on her path is one of submission and obedience, not free flight. She uses all her energy to conform to the angelic mould which, in the eyes of contemporary society, has been irreparably shattered by her extramarital sexual initiation. Ironically, it is at the point when Gloria becomes, in conventional terms, a fallen woman, that she comes to seem most conventionally angelic. The latter half of the novel traces Gloria's decline, during which she demonstrates two main characteristics of the angel figure: woman as redemptive sacrificial victim, and woman as mother. Thus the narrative foregrounds the image of woman as angel rather than as caged bird, and the latter image is largely left behind. Hence the domestic ideology of the middle classes, which was subverted in the opening pages of the novel, is at

last reaffirmed. The angelic values of purity, piety, submissiveness, martyrdom, and motherhood displace the earlier transgressive, intellectual, rebellious stance of the heroine. After her fall Gloria begins a long process of atoning self-effacement which culminates in her death. Far from completing the process of rebellion against the injunction of her societal environment to "suffer and be still" begun in her youth, she now concurs with it completely. The silencing and confinement imposed on her by her father in part 1 she now imposes on herself: her "confinement" in order to give birth to an illegitimate son has become the reason for a perpetual confinement with the ultimate fin (ending) of death.

In part 2, the patriarchal construction of gender imposed on Gloria by the male characters is taken up and endorsed by women: by Gloria herself, by the women in Ficóbriga, and by her aunt Serafina. All of them combine to uphold the ángel del hogar as the model of womanhood and to punish Gloria's departure from it. The narrative stance here is contradictory, for although the narrator displays a good deal of dislike for the punitive zeal of these women, the text nevertheless presents Gloria as admirable for submitting to them. As a result of her fall Gloria becomes almost totally submissive, focused obediently on the need for Christlike penitential suffering. She is tutored by Serafina in remorse and self-sacrifice, and has become desperate to conform: "'¿Qué debo hacer para no ser rebelde? Estoy dispuesta a todo,' declaró la joven, arrojando fuera hasta el último átomo, si así puede decirse, de libre albedrío" ("What must I do not to be rebellious? I'll do anything," the young woman declared, abandoning, as it were, the last remaining atom of her free will [617]). Her resignation and self-prostration are clearly intended to be construed as signs of nobility of soul. Her self-offering is made in the language of the female mystics: "acepto la expiación horrible . . . no diré una sola voz por defenderme, porque sé que todo lo merezco, que mis culpas son grandes; bebo hasta lo más hondo, hasta lo más repugnante de este cáliz amargo, y ofrezco a Dios mi corazón llagado, que chorrea sangre y que jamás, en lo que le resta de vida, dará un latido que no sea un dolor" (I accept this hideous penance . . . I shall not say a single word in my own defence, because I know I deserve it all, that I have sinned a great deal; I shall drink this bitter cup down to its last dregs, and I offer up to God my wounded and bleeding heart, which will never again, as long as it lives, give a painfree beat [617]). By the

end of the novel, Gloria has explicitly abdicated her own will and dedicated herself to becoming the instrument of her family, in obedience to nineteenth-century culture's injunction to women (662).

In accordance with the ideology of domesticity, motherhood is invoked in part 2 as a central value. Not only is Gloria now idealized in her motherly role, but the maternal instinct is presented as an irresistible biological and moral force in both the heroine and Esther Spinoza, Daniel Morton's mother. Since fallen women were typically imagined to be bad mothers or, to use the phrase of the day, "desnaturalizadas" (unnatural women), Gloria's overwhelming love for her child acts as a sort of moral shorthand to the reader not to dismiss her as immoral. She refuses to give up seeing her son, despite Serafina's exhortations, for although she now professes to despise herself as a woman, "como madre no puedo hacerlo" (as a mother I cannot do so [653]). It is maternal instinct that causes her to flout prohibition and to overcome her own intense physical weakness in order to visit the child alone, at night. She describes the bond with her son as noble, sacred, and divinely inspired, all conventional nineteenth-century epithets for motherhood, and defends her right to see her baby in melodramatic terms (653–55). Chapter 21, in which Gloria makes her final via crucis to the child's cradle, is entitled "Mater Amabilis": she is a mother worthy of love. The narrator now refers to her simply as "the mother" (691) and "the unhappy mother." The immensely painful effort of her last journey, undertaken whilst Gloria is in a state of near collapse, shows how she, as the model of true womanhood, is entirely devoted to the child's welfare rather than her own. In this final journey the parallel between Gloria and the Mater Dolorosa is very clear. Love, marriage, and the family have replaced individual self-affirmation as the central dynamic in the heroine's character.

After her fall Gloria continues to manifest the same strength of character she demonstrated earlier in the novel, but it is turned inwards against herself. In the first part Gloria's inner voice tells her that she should emerge from her "cocoon" and exercise the "wings" of her mind. But she makes a penitential return to the cocoon in the second part, deliberately arresting her own growth and development. She submits herself to a long process of atonement and tries to conform to the image of the angel woman. She has internalized the angelic ideal of selflessness and self-sacrifice. Like the angel, she becomes an icon of passivity—in strong contrast to the restlessness and

movement which she manifested at the outset. In the opening chapters she was described as lively, vivacious, and restless; "allí dentro había un espíritu de enérgica vitalidad, que necesitaba emplearse constantemente" ([in her eyes] there was a spirit of powerful vitality that craved constant occupation [517]). By the second half of the work she has become virtually lifeless. In chapter 26, entitled "The Captive," Gloria is ambushed by Daniel on her way home from a clandestine visit to her son. Feminine weakness, beauty, and suffering are contrasted to masculine strength, action, and energy in a cameo of conventional manliness and womanliness:

Santóse [Daniel] en una gran piedra del camino, sin dejar de sostener a la joven en los brazos, y la puso sobre sus rodillas, cual si fuera la carga más ligera. . . . Presa en los amantes brazos, Gloria permanecía inmóvil, y el mantón que la cubría, dejando tan sólo libre la preciosa y afligida cara, hacía más estrecha la prisión en que se encontraba. (646)

([Daniel] sat down on a rock by the wayside, still holding the young woman in his arms, and put her on his knees as if she were as light as a feather. . . . Captive in his loving arms, Gloria lay motionless, and the cloak in which she was wrapped, from which only her beautiful, sad face emerged, imprisoned her still further.)

As angelic heroine, Gloria is exquisitely sensitive. The trauma of admitting to Daniel the existence of their son causes her to lose consciousness and to have to be transported home in an invalid state (647). Her moral sense is so acute that voicing the secret that she has borne an illegitimate child causes her to begin to die of shame.

In Gloria , as in Doña Perfecta , Galdós used the powerfully sentimental plot of the woman whose heart breaks because she cannot marry her true love, in order to illustrate that religious antagonism can have tragic results. But the subtexts of both novels' "theses," the terms in which they are framed, follow cultural notions of gender. Galdós creates a fiancé for Gloria who is, in the context of the Spanish obsession with limpieza de sangre (racial purity and Christian orthodoxy), implacably other, by reason of his Jewishness. In order for Gloria to have a relationship with a non-Catholic, the author has to endow her with sufficient independence of mind to question her neo-Catholic upbringing. Yet it is precisely this quality that must be jettisoned if the work's appeal for religious freedom is to find favour with a mainstream liberal audience, who would find a thoroughly

emancipated heroine distasteful. In order to present the thwarting of their union as a tragic waste produced by unnecessary intolerance, rather than a just and necessary outcome, the narrative stresses that despite their disparate religions the lovers are perfectly conventional mates, ideals of manliness and femininity according to the ideology of the time.

The end of the novel is suffused by a characteristically nineteenth-century predilection for transfigured and visionary dying women, seen at its most spectacular in operas such as La Traviata . Gloria's death is represented as an obedient self-erasure (688), whose pathos Galdós exploits to the full. His representation of the moribund heroine repeatedly evokes the image of the ángel del hogar that was such a positive term throughout part 2. She speaks with an "angelic smile" (694), declaring that "mi esposo y mi hijo subirán conmigo a descansar a la sombra de ese árbol celestial en cuyas ramas cantan los ángeles" (my husband and son will rise with me to rest in the shadow of that heavenly tree in whose branches the angels sing [695]). Daniel calls her his "poor angel" (694), and when she finally dies, having wrung a promise of conversion from him, we are told that she is being carried off to heaven by the angels (697). Significantly, Gloria dies at the very moment on Easter Sunday when the priest is intoning the Gloria in excelsis Deo , just after she has uttered the words "mañana serás conmigo en el Paraíso" (tomorrow you will be with me in Paradise [697]). Since she has also produced a son called Jesús, Gloria has come, by the end of the novel, to fulfil the ambiguous spiritual function of the angel, identified at once with the Virgin Mary and, thanks to her almost ritualistic immolation, with the redemptive powers of Christ, the supreme sacrificial victim.

As we have seen, the representation of the heroine changes direction halfway through the novel, creating an intriguing combination of reaction against and reiteration of middle-class domestic ideology and its attendant vision of womanhood.^[12] The very power of this cultural stereotype is attested by the way it resurfaces in a novel whose initial premises overtly opposed it. The figure of woman as suffering, redemptive victim, living only for her relations with man, is resoundingly restated. In part 2, the Promethean rebel is replaced by a woman whose entire being is concentrated upon doing penance for disobeying her father, whilst suffering because she cannot marry her natural mate or care for her son. In the place of the lively, spirited, rebellious adolescent girl of part 1 we see a debilitated, fragile, spiritu-

alized angel woman who struggles painfully to a visionary death. Gloria's acquiescence to the cultural code embodied in the angel woman becomes the index by which we are invited to judge her as morally worthy. The contrast in the fates of heroine and hero upholds the nineteenth-century dictum that "woman cannot live without man," since "the end of woman on this earth, her evident vocation, is love";^[13] while the heroine dies, the hero survives, albeit tortured and, in later years, insane.

The author himself was, according to Clarín, dissatisfied with the second half, pronouncing it "postiza y tourmentée " (artificial and tourmentée [28]). There is no doubt that he provides a conservative resolution of the questions about gender roles raised in the early part of the novel. The narrative recoils from its own subversion of conventional femininity. In tracing the heroine's evolution into a suffering angel, the novel reaffirms the very ideology that it had challenged. The narrative resolution is not, however, wholly effective. It cannot efface from the readers' memory the persistent imagery evoking enclosure and oppression, which formed a subversive symbolic structure "opposed to the sexual values of the direct narrative."^[14] In later novels, this repressed awareness of the problematic, oppressive nature of the gender system was to surface more and more overtly.

León Roch's Wife

La familia de León Roch (1878), the last of Galdós's so-called thesis novels, portrays a triangular relationship between León Roch, a young Krausist intellectual, and two women: his wife, María Egipcíaca, a fanatical Catholic, and Pepa Fúcar, the ideal woman whom León comes to realize he should have married. The fact that León Roch is indirectly identified with the Krausist movement and that Galdós himself was loosely associated with it is by now a commonplace of Galdós criticism.^[15] Yet La familia de León Roch itself has been relatively little studied. It is an intriguing novel, which probes the intricate connections between religion and marriage in Restoration Spain, staging in the process a complex crosscultural dialogue between the strain of Krausist thought peculiar to nineteenth-century Spain and the more widespread Victorian views on gender.

Krausism began as a body of mystical idealist theory formulated by a minor German philosopher, Karl Christian von Krause. It was imported to Spain by one of his disciples, Julián Sanz del Río, an

academic who popularized Krause's work among the faculty and students of Madrid University, among them Galdós, who studied there in the early 1860s. Sanz del Río published a translation of Krause's main work, the Ideal de la humanidad para la vida , in 1860. Widely read among the country's intelligentsia, the treatise led to a movement for progressive social, intellectual, and spiritual reform that was extremely influential in the last forty years of the nineteenth century and aroused great suspicion within the Catholic establishment. The Krausist movement offered a way of reconciling religious faith with rational humanism through militant support for freedom of thought and spiritual autonomy. Its outlook was rigorously intellectual, humanistic, ethical, rational, tolerant of all religious positions, and pro-European. Its supporters, who were mostly liberal and republican academics, men of letters and politicians, believed strongly in the power of education to regenerate and perfect society, and were instrumental in founding the Asociación para la Enseñanza de la Mujer (1870) and the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (1876), the two most progressive educational institutions in Spain.^[16]

Krausists were often satirized as idealistic, bookish ascetics, and this leads us to the plot of La familia de León Roch . The novel centres on the spectacular failure of a husband's formative plans for his wife. [León Roch, contemplating marriage to the beautiful María at the beginning of the novel, thinks of her as a tabula rasa , "amante y sumisa" (loving and submissive [816]), on which he plans to inscribe his own will and thereby create the ideal family.^[17] The novel, however, follows the progressive miscarriage of his plans; instead of applauding his rationalist project, María clings ever more stubbornly to her Catholicism, until the couple are entirely estranged. In the meantime León is reacquainted with his former sweetheart, Pepa Fúcar, who becomes in effect his mistress, albeit platonically. After he moves out of the marital household in order to be closer to Pepa, his wife suffers a dramatic attack of hysteria provoked by jealousy and dies. The marriage of León to Pepa remains impossible, however, for Pepa's husband, Cimarra, long presumed dead, now reappears to claim her, and the lovers are forced to separate forever. León's Krausist dream of achieving familial harmony and unity by what he thinks are ethical and rational means has proved a resounding disaster. A thoughtful reader is left with many questions. What does León Roch's failure mean—an attack on Krausism, or an attack on the Church? Is the

novel a misogynistic creation or a satire on male hubris? and why does religion have such a part in this fictional marriage?

The last point is easiest to answer. In the early 1870s Krausist free-thinkers had begun to clash with the supporters of religious orthodoxy and various professors were subsequently fired or imprisoned, giving rise to much public controversy. Galdós had written in his artistic manifesto of 1870 that he was concerned to show the divisive effect of religion upon the bourgeois family unit. It was the business of the novelist, he stated, to search for "el origen y el remedio de ciertos males que turban las familias. . . . Descuella en primer lugar el problema religioso, que perturba los hogares y . . . afloja o rompe los lazos morales y civiles que forman la familia" (the causes and remedies for those ills threatening family life. . . . What is most striking is the problem of religion, which causes such upheavals in families and . . . loosens or breaks the moral and civil ties that bind the family).^[18]

Galdós was, of course, not alone in perceiving religion, particularly as it affected women and the family, as a stress point in contemporary society. In nineteenth-century Spain, as elsewhere in western Europe, piety was considered the province of women.^[19] As increasing numbers of men privately or publicly renounced Catholic dogma, the special relationship between women and the Church came to be at once assiduously cultivated by the clergy and angrily protested by liberal men concerned with the threat to marital authority. Alfred Rodriguez attributes the inspiration for La familia to an inflammatory anticlerical work by Jules Michelet, Le Prêtre, la femme, et la famille (1845), which warned liberal men that "nos femmes et nos filles sont élevées, gouvernées, par nos ennemis " (our wives and daughters are raised and controlled by our enemies ).^[20] With the increase in Church power that came with the Restoration, women occupied an ever more pivotal position in the contest for social and political power.

The question of religion and marital relations formed the substance of a proven source text for La familia : Gumersindo de Azcárate's polemical work Minuta de un testamento (1876). Particularly interesting in the Minuta is the exposition of a philosophy of marriage and women's place that was appealing to Spanish Krausists. Azcárate's narrator chooses a devout, loving, intelligent, and virtuous wife whom he guides into a sympathetic understanding of non-Catholic thought. He undergoes a crisis of faith which he keeps from her for many years. When he finally reveals his agnosticism, his

wife responds with tolerance and understanding, and they devise a rational plan for bringing up their children in the light of their father's inability to participate in Catholic devotional practice.

Krausist gender ideology in the 1870s was largely, though not entirely, situated within the mainstream current of Victorian thought. Its concept of marriage as the union of dialectical opposites combining to form a harmonious whole fit well with the emerging middle-class construction of the sexes as different and complementary.^[21] The Spanish Krausists all believed in the necessity of educating Spanish women.^[22] However, theirs was not an emancipationist position: documents such as the Minuta and the Krausist lectures for women that began in 1869 show that, with a few possible exceptions such as Rafael María de Labra, their rationale for promoting the education of women was nationalist rather than feminist; by making better wives and mothers, they argued, the general standard of education of future generations of Spanish children could be raised. Krause's Ideal de la humanidad para la vida states that women should be educated but appends the telling catchphrase, seen in so many nineteenth-century treatises on women's education, that this should be done "en relacion proporcionada con su carácter y su destino" (in proper relation to their character and destiny).^[23] Azcárate, who argues that legislation to improve women's position would be superfluous, proposes the need for the married woman to be educated,

para que pueda contribuir á la [felicidad] de su marido y preparar la de sus hijos. Solo atendiendo al cultivo de sus facultades, podrá ser capaz de interesarse vivamente en todo cuanto importa al compañero de su vida, el cual, lejos de sentir entonces en el seno del hogar el vacío que á tantos obliga á buscar fuera de la familia lo que dentro de ella no encuentran, hallará quien comparta sus alegrías y tristezas, no solo sintiéndolas, sino tambien comprendiéndolas.

(so that she may contribute to the [happiness] of her husband and create that of her children. Only if her mind is cultivated will she be able to take a lively interest in everything that matters to the man in her life, who, far from sensing that emptiness in the heart of the home which drives so many husbands to look outside the family for what they fail to find within it, will find someone to share his joys and sorrows, someone not only capable of feeling them, but understanding them.)^[24]

The Krausist proposition that women should be educated to be better helpmates, but not in order to be independent or enter the male

working sphere, meshed with contemporary Victorian domestic ideology; helping to promulgate the Ruskinian reverence for the ideology of the ángel del hogar which included a moderate, prefeminist view of women's education were influential Krausist thinkers such as Fernando de Castro and Giner de los Ríos, who worked to Europeanize social, political, and intellectual life in Spain.^[25]

Krausism's construction of gender does, however, differ from Victorian domestic ideology in one respect: the position that it allots to man. Far from being the errant male redeemable only by the purity of the angel wife, as in the Victorian model, in Krausist thought the rational man is capable of chastity before marriage and fidelity after it.^[26] Because of this capacity for purity it is man, and not woman, who figures as the primary redeeming force in the family and society, and indeed it was Giner de los Ríos's dream of creating a nation of "new men" that was a driving force behind the creation of the famous Institución Libre de Enseñanza.^[27] Thus Krausism negates the one potentially liberating aspect of the ideology of domesticity: its positioning of woman as the morally superior saviour of society, a concept which, for all its drawbacks, offers the basis for women's later work outside the home.

The Krausists' belief that men were called to be the redeemers of society led to a contradiction in the movement's position on gender; despite Krause's affirmation of the equality of the sexes, the Spanish Krausists of the 1860s and 1870s, by stressing the husband's role as teacher and shaper of his wife, in fact drew on the traditional hierarchical model of gender difference, originating in Aristotle and still firmly rooted in the nineteenth-century European imagination, in which the female decidedly occupies the inferior role.^[28] The Spanish Krausists' allegiance to the Pygmalion myth of male primacy gives the lie to their propositions of egalitarian harmony between the sexes. The Pygmalion motif is common in nineteenth-century works by men about women, in Spain as elsewhere. Michelet, writing on marriage in L'amour (1858), tells future husbands, in a section entitled "Il faut que tu crées ta femme: elle ne demande pas mieux," that men are the "ouvriers, créateurs, et fabricateurs" of their wives.^[29] Dr. Monlau's popular Spanish work on marriage repeats this advice: "el hombre hace a la mujer " (man makes woman ).^[30] Galdós himself, in an 1870 essay, had described woman as innately more malleable than man: "más flexible y movediza que su compañero . . . cede prontamente a la influencia

exterior, adopta las ideas y los sentimientos que se le imponen y concluye por no ser sino lo que el hombre quiere que sea . . . un reflejo de las locuras o de las sublimidades del hombre" (more docile and fickle than her mate . . . she is easily swayed by the influence of others, and adopts the ideas and sentiments that are imposed on her, and ends up being only what man wants her to be . . . a reflection of his folly or of his sublime aspects).^[31]

Yet Galdós's novelistic treatment of this issue is much more ambiguous than his personal endorsement of the myth of male moulders might lead us to suppose. He seems to delight in making the utopic Krausist vision of marriage miscarry in his fictional world. The moulding enterprise, central to so many of his works, takes in La familia de León Roch the form of a gendered power struggle. A modern incarnation of Pygmalion, León Roch takes a more crudely patriarchal line than Azcárate's narrator, stating blatantly that his role as husband is that of the mind shaping or forming the passive, malleable, female matter he supposes his wife to be. In expounding his educational plans for María, he constantly recurs to godlike images of artistic creation: "podré hacerla a mi imagen y semejanza" (I can make her in my own image and likeness [796]), he declares; "empezaré a modelar—empleaba con mucha frecuencia este término de escultura—el carácter de María. Es un barro exquisito, pero apenas tiene forma" (I shall start to model—he often used this sculptor's term—María's personality. She is made of the most marvellous clay, but she is virtually amorphous [798]). Undercutting León's resolute confidence in his masculine role is the description of the beautiful María a that immediately follows this last statement. Here, as at a great many other points in the novel, the narrator describes María as a perfectly formed Greek statue, "cuyas partes aparecían tan concertadas entre sí y con tan buena proporción hechas, que ningún escultor la soñara mejor" (whose parts seemed so harmoniously arranged and so well proportioned in relation to one another that no sculptor could have dreamed of doing a better job [799]), a fact which bodes ill for the would-be Pygmalion. Interestingly, this representation of woman as artifact is not limited to María; there is a startling proliferation of such images in the novel. In one sentence, for example, María's mother is compared to three different artworks: a piece of "desplomada arquitectura" (ramshackle architecture), a clichéd "oda académica" (academic ode) and a "pintado lienzo" (painted canvas [802]).

The description of León's discovery that he cannot control his wife similarly occurs in Aristotelian terms of artistic creation; to his dismay, León discovers that María, far from being tractable, has a will of iron,

una resistencia acerada a plegarse a ciertas ideas y sentimientos de su marido. . . . María no iba en camino de someterse a sus enseñanzas. . . . ¡Estupendo chasco! No era un carácter embrionario, era un carácter formado y duro; no era un barro flexible, pronto a tomar la forma que quieran darle las hábiles manos, sino bronce ya fundido y frío, que lastimaba los dedos sin ceder jamás a su presión. (801)

(a steely resistance to bending to certain ideas and sentiments of her spouse. . . . María was not about to submit to his lessons. . . . What a tremendous disappointment! Her personality was not embryonic, but hard and formed; she was not made of pliable clay, ready to take on the shape that skilled hands might impart to it, but cold, cast bronze, which stubbed the fingers and never gave way to pressure.)

Foiled as the sculptor of his wife, León, ironically, resorts to collecting bronze sculptures for the house (802). Yet, even though León Roch fails to mould his wife, the novel does not unequivocally subvert the patriarchal prescription of male as creator versus female as matter.

The above passages from La familia , in which León appears, initially at least, as such an ineffectual figure, suggest that the novel will develop into an antipatriarchal satire on the whole notion of masculine primacy in marriage. It is this aspect that the Krausist Francisco Giner de los Ríos apparently addressed in his response to the first third of the novel. He voiced a great unease about León's weakness with regard to the women characters, calling it strange, unwise, unbalanced, and defective, while Leopoldo Alas lamented that the protagonist was not "el varón perfecto, el Mesías de estos nuevos judíos que esperamos al hombre nuevo " (the perfect male, the Messiah of these new Israelites who are awaiting the new man ).^[32] However, as the novel unfolds, it becomes a much less radical critique of patriarchal constructions of gender: León's failure with María stems not from the nature of his enterprise but merely from the material he has chosen. He tries to rationalize the choice that he made, blinded by desire (unlike the narrator of the Minuta ).^[33] León proceeds to make elementary mistakes in his male preserves of art and science, confusing cast bronze with soft clay and adult with embryo. Crucially, however, Galdós's novel does not conclude that women are too strong to be

moulded; for María, far from being intractable, is only too susceptible to a rival masculine authority, that of the Church, represented by her confessor, Paoletti, and her morbidly ascetic twin brother, Luis Gonzaga. León bitterly concedes this as he relinquishes control of his wife at the end of the novel to Paoletti: "su conciencia, yo la entrego a quien la ha formado " (I'm handing over her mind to the man who shaped it [920; emphasis added]). The fact that María allows herself to be moulded by priests and not by her husband is represented as a grave moral defect on her part, compounded of fundamental stupidity and debased sensuousness.

The conflict between León Roch and María Egipcíaca stems in large part from the difference between the Krausist gender ideology espoused by León and the more standard Victorian ideology of his wife. Thus León tries, and fails, to play the ideal redeeming Krausist husband, precisely because María Egipcíaca in her turn aspires to conform to the conventional image of the long-suffering angelic wife, redemptrix of her husband, endorsed by Church and society. Galdós's characterization of María highlights the paradox that in some senses the angel in the house is an antipatriarchal construction. Galdós shows the danger to marital power relations when a woman acts on the Victorian belief that wives could and should redeem their husbands, for to redeem is ultimately to reform, to recreate; that is, to usurp a masculine privilege. María demonstrates a dangerous and traditionally masculine desire for domination when she tells León she will recreate him "a mi imagen y semejanza" (in my own image and likeness [802]). In a nice irony, her religious vocabulary leads her to use the precise terms of male appropriation he had earlier used of her: "estás ligado a la materia . . . . ¡Pobre puñado de barro miserable!" (you are linked to matter . . . . Miserable handful of clay ! [853; emphasis added]). They both fail to conform to their chosen roles, through excessive but misplaced zeal. Significantly, however, María grows increasingly unpleasant, while León comes to evoke the reader's sympathy and respect

María Egipcíaca becomes for La fimilia de León Roch the epicentre of its thesis about the evil effects of Church power. Clerical influence has made of León's wife an "odalisca mojigata" (sanctimonious odalisque [821]). She is a synthesis of nineteenth-century Spain's two worst stereotypes of woman: the mojigata (religious fanatic) and the coqueta (temptress). María's name itself is used ironically, for her

characterization is ultimately much more reminiscent of stereotypes of seductive fallen women such as Eve, Salome, or Circe than of the pure Virgin Mary or, indeed, of the character's namesake, Saint Mary of Egypt, a prostitute recognized by God for her good intentions and saved from her sinful ways. The fact that León and María have no children serves, in the novel, to underline María's perversity, since childlessness was both the punishment and the identifying sign of the debased society woman in nineteenth-century popular literature. Galdós, like many other male writers of the time, censures María's mysticism as a diseased sham, a form of depraved sensualism, and a perversion of her true destiny as loving wife and mother.^[34] When, towards the end of the novel, María is suddenly overcome by such violent jealousy of Pepa that she determines to win back her husband at all costs, even if it means sacrificing her crusade to convert him, the narrator earnestly intrudes to explain how her essential "true womanhood" is finally reasserting itself over her false mysticism:

¿Qué era aquello? Lo real destruyendo al artificio. El alma y el corazón de mujer recobrando su imperio por medio de un motín sedicioso de los sentimientos primarios. Era la revolución fundamental del espíritu de la mujer reivindicando sus derechos, y atropellando lo falso y artificial para alzar la bandera victoriosa de la naturaleza y de la realidad, aquello que emana de su índole castiza y por lo cual es amante, es esposa, es madre, es mujer, mala o buena, pero mujer verdadera, la eterna, la inmutable esposa de Adán, siempre igual a sí misma, ya fiel, ya traidora. (895)

(What was happening? Reality was destroying artifice. Her woman's heart and soul were reclaiming their dominion by means of a treacherous uprising of her instincts. It was the fundamental revolution of woman's spirit asserting its rights, crushing what was false and artificial to raise the victorious banner of the natural and real, all that emanates from her truest self and that makes her a beloved, a wife, a mother, a woman, bad or good, but a true woman, the eternal, immutable wife of Adam, always following her nature, now faithful, now fickle.)

While María Egipcíaca, despite being nominally the virtuous wife, is in fact based upon nineteenth-century stereotypes of feminine depravity, Pepa Fúcar is cast as the ideal, angelic wife and mother. Galdós even has her appear at one point with a halo (864). She epitomizes "healthy" purity instead of diseased voluptuousness. Pepa, who starts out as a spendthrift but reforms upon the birth of her child, in line with Victorian belief about the redemptive powers of

motherhood, is made to appear in every respect the antithesis of María; she is plain whereas María is beautiful, rich whereas María is poor, maternal whereas María is sterile, chaste whereas María is lascivious, and moderately instead of fanatically pious. This polarizing of qualities is in itself nothing new in nineteenth-century representations of women, but what is surprising is that the stereotypical qualities of the good and the bad woman—usually associated respectively with the wife and the mistress—are thoroughly confused: the true wife is in fact the mistress, the mistress is the wife. Pepa inspires in León what both Krausist and Victorian writers saw as the best kind of love in marriage: amor-amistad (tenderness) not the uncontrollable pasión (passion) which he feels for María. León is able to remain true to his principles with Pepa, choosing not to elope with her. Significantly, and in a reversal of the popular motif of the sentimental novel, it is not the pious wife María but the mistress Pepa who achieves a symbolic redemption of León's lost religious faith, when her maternal devotion inspires him to pray with her for the recovery of her child. Most importantly, Pepa is a "good" woman in the novel's terms because she displays the very desire to be shaped and guided by León that María lacks; she yearns for "la paz y el yugo de tu autoridad de esposo" (the peace and the yoke of your authority as a husband [882]) and remonstrates with him for not having formed her : "[yo] era un instrumento muy raro que no podía dar sonidos gratos sino en las manos para que se creía nacido. Fuera de mi dueño natural, todo en mí era desacorde y disparatado" (I was a very strange instrument that could not make pleasing sounds except in the hands it felt it was born for. Away from my natural lord, I was all tuneless and senseless [880–81]).

Thus, as the novel progresses, what had initially seemed like a subversion of contemporary gender roles reveals itself as an attack merely on the letter, and not the spirit, of conventional ideologies of gender. The nineteenth-century ideals of masculinity and femininity not only remain fundamentally unchallenged; they are increasingly reaffirmed, and the implications of the novel become more and not less patriarchal. The gender element of the novel's thesis is that men can mould but women should not.

As if to emphasize María's perversity in not allowing herself to be moulded by León, Galdós places a scene just before the climax of the novel in which María gives herself over to the artistry of three soci-

ety women: her mother, the hairdresser, and the marchioness of San Salomó. Between them, they physically recreate her from a black-clad beata (prude) into a dazzling belle in order to seduce León. Artistic metaphors abound in this scene: with her marble shoulders, María "fué como un lindo ejemplo de la creación del mundo" (was like a beautiful example of the creation of the world); she is envisaged in turn as a "sublime cuadro," a "figurín vivo," and an "obra . . . magistral" (sublime painting, live mannequin, and masterly work of art [899]). The narrator's point here is that these women's creative act is an example of perverted and dangerous artistry. Together they make of María an Eve-Pandora to tempt Adam-Prometheus: "una de las maravillosas estatuas de carne y trapo ante las cuales sucumben a veces la prudencia y la dignidad, a veces la salud y el dinero de los hombres. ¡Pobre Adán!" (one of those marvellous statues of flesh and cloth to which men's prudence and dignity, as well as their health and wealth, sometimes succumb. Poor Adam! [899]).

From this point on, the statue motif becomes highly conspicuous once again. As María bathes and dresses to go meet León, the masculine eye of the clock watches with voyeuristic delectation the preparations of this "estatua humana" (human statue [901]). As she appears at León's house, in all her finery, she is perceived as a "muñeca rígida y colosal" (gigantic, stiff doll [904]). After her death María is repeatedly compared to a marble statue, and her marble hands are contemplated by León, who reflects phlegmatically upon "el sentido profundamente filosófico de la aparente transformación de su mujer en estatua" (the profoundly philosophical meaning of his wife's apparent transformation into a statue [955]). Even Pepa has become statuesque by the end of the novel; she lies unconscious under the gaze of her husband while León kisses her pale, inert cheeks goodbye. This climactic return to imagery of women as statues—after León's failure early in the work would seem to have dismissed the notion—serves as an index of the novel's increasingly patriarchal bent and constitutes what Naomi Schor has identified as a "hieratic code" in the realist novel.^[35]

On the most simple level, the statue imagery signifies the reversal of the Pygmalion motif, for María is gradually transformed by her male moulders Paoletti and Luis Gonzaga from the warm, pliant, adoring Galatea she promised to be at the beginning of the novel into a cold, hard statue who rigidly denies all physical and emotional

contact with her husband; a thing of marble, cold, inanimate, beautiful but sterile. At another level, the hieratic code perhaps serves to assuage the patriarchal anxieties the novel evokes, by metafictionally reminding the reader that despite the heroine's apparent intractability in León's hands, she is nevertheless a made thing . Not only has she been definitively shaped by the male clerical characters within the novel; ultimately, as the text continually insinuates, she has been authored out of a male head. Just as what John Kronik calls the "bevy of builders" in Fortunata y Jacinta mirror in their creative activities Galdós's own construction of Fortunata, so the multiple references to María as artifact, like those to Tristana as paper, signal to the reader Galdós's ultimate right of ownership and authorship over the female characters in this novel—María Egipcíaca in particular—a right which he never seeks to assert in the same way over his male hero.^[36] Even if León cannot mould María, Galdós, the narrative subtly and insistently reminds us, could and did.

La familia de León Roch , as Dena Lida remarks in another context, is a compendium of paradoxes and ambivalences.^[37] It is anticlerical but reaffirms Christian values; ironizes without really detracting from Krausism; and appears to undermine, but in fact reasserts, the gender roles propounded in nineteenth-century conduct literature. The novel does not, ultimately, subvert Azcárate's Krausist view of women and marriage, with its Aristotelian undertones of male as Pygmalion, the moulder or sculptor. It does, however, question the ease of attaining that ideal in the corrupt medium of Spanish society, with its apparent shortage of intelligent and willing Galateas. La familia de León Roch rejects one of the premises of the Spanish Krausists—that men, like women, were capable of controlling their sexuality before marriage—but reaffirms Krausism's espousal of the Victorian ideology of domesticity. Intermeshed with the novel's anticlerical thesis is a fundamentally contradictory thesis about gender; an unwieldy amalgam that ultimately dissolves into sentimental melodrama with the death of María Egipcíaca from jealousy. Perhaps the fact that the many disparate elements in Galdós's thesis novels were by this point threatening to overwhelm the boundaries of the genre itself suggests why La familia heralded one of the few definitive breaks in Galdós's novel-writing career. It was not until three years later that he was to unveil his next novel about contemporary life, in which he would inaugurate what he described as a new mode of writing.