5—
Gender Trouble

En épocas de agitacion, de inquietud y de transicion, como la nuestra, han surgido en la mente del filósofo y de los ensueños del reformador teorías estrañas sobre la condicion social de la mujer, que no merecen otro nombre que el de locuras y desvaríos del entendimiento. Pero . . . la ley natural, que quiere que la mujer pase su existencia dedicada exclusivamente á los trabajos del hogar, nunca ha podido desaparecer.

(In times of upheaval, anxiety, and transition like our own, strange theories about the social condition of woman have arisen in the minds of philosophers and the dreams of reformers, theories that can only be described as insane and erroneous. But . . . the law of nature, which prefers woman to devote her life exclusively to domestic occupations, has never disappeared.)^[1]

Es la llamada cuestión de la mujer acaso la más seria entre las que hoy se agitan.

(The so-called woman question is perhaps the greatest of our modern-day concerns.)^[2]

Feminism and the Fin De Siècle in Spain

As the century drew to an end, the Restoration system's promise of order, stability, and prosperity came to seem increasingly hollow. The tranquility of the system established in 1886, whereby elections were rigged in order to ensure the peaceful transfer of government back and forth between the two parties, was only apparent; it masked escalating anxieties about socio-political instability and imperial decline, as well as intractable social problems such as suicide, prostitution, syphilis, and violent crime. The history of the Restoration, as one commentator notes, was one of an increasingly precarious social,

political, and economic equilibrium that barely masked the signs of impending crisis.^[3] By the early 1890s some members of what was to become known as the generation of 1898 were already elaborating new socio-philosophical theories that posed Spain itself as a problem, attributing its cultural and economic stagnation to abulia (apathy). As early as 1889, a youthful Angel Ganivet ascribed Spain's malady to the lack of what he intriguingly termed ideas madres (matrix ideas). The fin-de-siècle era in Spain was marked by a sense of approaching national apocalypse, heralded by a marked increase in strikes, terrorist and anarchist acts, and assassinations. Galdós himself, who commented in response to the recently inaugurated May Day demonstrations that Spain was on the edge of a volcano, in 1890 painted a dire picture of a collapsing society and implied that the world he knew was coming to an end.^[4] The bourgeois oligarchy was in the throes of crisis in a number of arenas: in class relations through the growth of working class and anarchist militancy, in empire and race relations through the colonial uprisings in Cuba and the Philippines and the growth of the abolitionist movement, and in sexual relations. Women, the working class, and the natives were all threatening to seek independence.

Middle-class intellectuals were busy formulating theories about what they saw as the physical and mental degeneration of society. A number of new disciplines were born in Europe at this time. Neurologists and psychologists, following the example of pioneers such as G. Stanley Hall, Henry Maudsley, and Jean-Martin Charcot, sought answers to the perturbing increase in mental illness, describing and investigating new diseases and sexual perversions, such as hysteria and nymphomania. Criminal anthropology emerged in the late 1880s in response to the perceived rise in violent crime and alcoholism. All over Europe science, which was playing such a vital role in transforming western structures of thought, also helped to shore up aspects of the old order in the face of threatened social changes. Biology having become the determining factor in social theory, the stage was set for medical science to play its peculiarly decisive intervention in nineteenth-century culture, policing the patriarchy. In 1889 Geddes and Thomson advanced their popular theory of the essentially gendered nature of metabolism, strengthening the case that physicians such as Edward Clarke had already made against female education as exhausting women's smaller stock of vital energy and leading to

neurasthenia and, eventually, to sterility.^[5] The female physique, it was argued, automatically and naturally disqualified women from undertaking a strenuous education or competing with men in the public sphere. Weir Mitchell proposed confinement and his famous "rest cure" for overactive women, including the writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Anthropometric studies measured and compared human frames, giving rise to conclusions that were blatantly misogynist, racist, and classist. Cesare Lombroso and Gustave Le Bon, at the forefront of the new science of physical anthropology in Italy and France, argued that women, criminals, and "savage" races were all evolutionary anachronisms, cases of arrested development. Evolution, they believed, had bypassed women, leaving them with smaller skulls, stunted frames, and a greater propensity to insanity.^[6]

In Spain, a major part of the pervading sense of impending collapse stemmed from a perception of a disease in gender relations threatening to invade the heart of the country. As one writer put it, in biblical rhetoric, women's emancipation was "la mala nueva de los tiempos apocalípticos de la revolución social que nos amenaza" (the bad news of the apocalypse of social revolution that is threatening us).^[7] Since the middle of the century, conservative apologists had written of the disturbing developments in women's rights movements abroad. But whereas in 1877 an amendment in the Spanish parliament proposing a limited degree of female suffrage could sink almost without trace in the press, by the late 1880s those advocating an expansion in women's role beyond the domestic sphere had a great deal more support. Thanks to the efforts of the Asociación para la Enseñanza de la Mujer, the foundations of some possibilities for women to work outside the home were being laid. In 1884 Concepción Arenal, who had disguised herself as a man in order to attend classes at Madrid University in the 1840s, arranged for her analysis of the situation of Spanish women, The Woman Question in Europe , to be published simultaneously in North America, Britain, and France.

The term feminism itself was coined in France around 1882 and migrated abroad in the following decade.^[8] An article by one Adolfo Llanos on North American feminism, printed in 1883, carries a distinctly minatory tone, and he goes to great pains not just to dismiss women's emancipation but to show how American women themselves are unhappy with their independence.^[9] His strategy is more openly defensive than the confident ridicule of feminism seen in ear-

lier texts and must be placed (albeit on the margins) in the context of the growth of feminism within Spain itself: in 1883 feminist conferences were held in Palma de Mallorca and Barcelona, arousing a number of satirical attacks in the press.^[10] A feminist journal, La Ilustración de la Mujer , also founded in that year, celebrated the fact that Spain was on the eve of a gender revolution and attacked the notion of the ángel del hogar in a piece called "O votos o rejas" (either votes or prison).^[11]Las Dominicales del Libre Pensamiento argued provocatively that "la mujer ni es joya, ni perla, ni ángel del hogar, ni tanto y tanto adjetivo como la prodiga su discreto admirador; es un set humano digno de todo respeto" (woman is neither a jewel, nor a pearl, nor an angel in the house, nor any of the endless adjectives bestowed on her by her tactful admirer; she is a human being worthy of the greatest respect).^[12] In the 1890s María Goyri, the first woman to matriculate in the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras at Madrid University, began to write the "Crónicas del feminismo" for the Revista Popular . Galdós himself noted with scornful concern, as a manifestation of the volatility of bourgeois social order, a socialist feminist meeting in Barcelona: "Entre las curiosidades de estos días, la más señalada es el meeting de mujeres celebrado hace dos días en Barcelona. ¡Las mujeres también en huelga! ¡Emancipación, igualdad de derechos con el hombre! La cosa se complica" (Among the curiosities of the day, the most noteworthy is the women's meeting held two days ago in Barcelona. Women on strike too! Emancipation, equal rights with men! Things are getting complicated).^[13]

An important sign of the sea change under way was the Congreso Pedagógico Hispano-Portugués-Americano held in 1892, where for the first time a special section was devoted to women's education; the most radical feminists in Spain took impassioned positions supporting women's right to higher education for its own sake, rather than as preparation for motherhood, the argument previously used to buttress demands for educational reform.^[14] Throughout the 1890s a series of debates between major intellectual figures marked the importance of the woman question, such as the Posada-Serrano correspondence on whether friendship was possible between the sexes, stimulated by Pardo Bazán's spirited attack on a recent book by González Serrano. The polemic between antifeminism and feminism continued on a literary level in the dialogic texts of three fictional versions of the Adam and Eve myth, each imbued with their author's ideology on the

woman question; Clarín's Cuento futuro (1892), Pardo Bazán's Cuento primitivo (1893), and Blasco Ibañez's Establo de Eva (1896).^[15] In the last year of the century Adolfo Posada wrote that "la marcha que sigue en todas partes el llamado movimiento feminista , es de tal naturaleza, que apenas pasa un día sin que se produzca, ó una manifestación doctrinal . . . ó bien una disposición legal, . . . ó bien por último, una institución dedicada á la propaganda del feminismo" (the progress being made everywhere by the so-called feminist movement is so great that scarcely a day goes by without the appearance of some manifesto . . . or law . . . or institution devoted to feminist proselytizing).^[16]

Fear of women's economic and sexual liberation gave rise to growing misogyny among many male writers by the end of the 1890s. Turn-of-the-century antifeminist writings escalated in number and urgency of tone; many made direct reference to a last-ditch attempt to close the barriers to feminism, which they portrayed as a revolting foreign aberration. Once the doors were opened, they argued, "á esa inmunda cloaca iría a caer la sociedad moderna, envuelta en una corrupción universal" (modern society would fall into that filthy sewer, and be swamped by decaying matter). The same writer raised the possibility of the sexes themselves disappearing into a monstrous androgynous figure, "el hombre-femina " (the man-woman). Feminism was represented by its detractors as an infectious disease afflicting women, who were particularly vulnerable to "el creciente contagio de un feminismo morboso, de que adolecen tantas neuráticas [sic ], histéricas, desequilibradas, hipnotizadas y autosugestionadas que . . . sólo son útiles a la medicina" (the growing spread of a diseased feminism, contracted by so many neurotics and hysterics who are disturbed, mesmerized and deluded and . . . are only of interest to the medical profession).^[17] Misogyny seems to have been endemic in western Europe during the turn of the century period, as Bram Dijkstra attests in his study of the visual arts.^[18] Nietzsche, a virulent opponent of the women's movement, which he termed "one of the worst developments in the general uglification of Europe," was the intellectual guru for members of the up-and-coming generation of 1898 such as Maeztu, Baroja, and Azorín.^[19] One of Galdós's most important colleagues, Leopoldo Alas, published numerous antifeminist articles in the 1880s and 1890s. Another influential young writer, Angel Ganivet, was working on La conquista del reino de Maya in 1893, in which he depicted women happily confined to segregated quarters

in the home, required to love like domestic animals and forcibly returned to their families if they proved sterile. In Granada la bella (1896) he attacked the recently formed women's Telephone Operators Schools, while in his Cartas finlandesas (written 1897–1898) he grappled with his mingled repugnance and grudging admiration for the relatively emancipated Scandinavian women. He spoke for the vast majority of Spanish men of his generation when he remarked that "Muy hello sería que la mujer, sin abandonar sus naturales funciones, se instruyera con discreción; pero si ha de instruirse con miras emancipadoras ó revolucionarias, preferible es que no salga de la cocina" (It would be fine if women could be educated sensibly, without abandoning their natural functions; but if they are to be educated with a view to emancipation or revolution, it's better that they stay in the kitchen).^[20]

The idea of even the most exceptional women entering the male sphere was hotly resisted. Clarín and Valera ridiculed the candidacy of Pardo Bazán to the Academia Real in 1890, rightly suspecting that the issue was a symbolic one, and attacked women's growing extra-domestic pretensions as absurd and dangerous. While Valera tried unsuccessfully to belittle the issue, entitling his comments "una cuestión social inocente" (an innocuous social question), Clarín was more brutal, returning to the theme of keeping the sluice gates firmly closed: "Si hoy hacemos académicas a tres que valen, mañana pedirán plaza las muchas que creen merecerla" (If we make three decent women academics today, tomorrow all those who think they're any good will be asking for places). Intellectually, women, he boasted, "comparadas con los hombres se quedan tamañitas" (are nothing compared to men).^[21]

The woman question must have touched Galdós on a personal level, and not just through his literary relationships with male colleagues such as Clarín and Valera. Intriguingly, despite all the evidence of his adherence to his culture's ideology, Galdós had a clandestine affair with Spain's leading feminist, Emilia Pardo Bazán, in 1889 and 1890.^[22] During the latter part of her affair with Galdós, Pardo Bazán was reading and translating John Stuart Mill's Subjection of Women (1869). Her translation, the first in Spain, was entitled La esclavitud femenina and appeared in her series entitled 'Biblioteca de la mujer" in 1891. Galdós came the closest to semifamilial stability in Santander with Lorenza Cobián, who bore his child, María, in

January 1891. Yet he was also engaged in another documented affair at that time, with the struggling actress Concha-Ruth Morell. This liaison dated at least from the summer of 1891, suggesting that Galdós was simultaneously involved with at least two if not all three of these women. Morell's letters weakly echo some of Pardo Bazán's feminist positions, expressing Morell's more inchoate and often contradictory longings for independence, love, and a successful career. While the ambivalence in Galdós's novels on the issue of women's place seems to parallel his real-life attraction to, and subsequent abandonment of, these women for whom domesticity was not enough, the Galdosian enigma is ultimately preserved, since his letters to them have never been made available. The only evidence we have to go on is their alternately passionate and pleading letters to him, as he gradually withdrew.^[23]

Tristana and the "Legless Angel of Victorian Romance"

Se ha querido limitar la vida de la mujer, física, moral e intelectual, de manera que no saliese del hogar doméstico, sin ver que no era obra de concentración sino de mutilación la que se hacía (People have tried to limit woman's life physically, emotionally and intellectually, so that she would not leave the home, without realizing that what they were doing was not focusing her but mutilating her).
Concepción Arenal^[24]

Tristana prometía otra cosa. . . . Galdós nos dejó entrever un horizonte nuevo y amplio, y después corrió la cortina (Tristana promised something different. . . . Galdós gave us a glimpse of a wide new horizon, and then he drew the curtain).
Pardo Bazán^[25]

The woman question, which was frequently present at a submerged symbolic level in previous Galdosian novels, becomes in Tristana (1892) the central subject of the novel. This work depicts the dire fate of a woman who tries to elude feminine domesticity. The title of the work itself, feminizing the name of the doomed lover of Iseult, suggests that both gender and sadness are going to be at issue in this work, especially since it also echoes the name of Flora Tristán, a famous Franco-Hispanic feminist of the early nineteenth century.^[26] The novel reproduces the Tristan-Iseult myth structurally, with its love triangle between a young woman, the older man she is destined to marry, and a younger one. Don Lope, like King Mark, will even-

tually assert his power and separate the lovers. But the novel plays with the gender identities of its source. The character corresponding to the mythic Tristan is in fact Horacio, and not Tristana. Implicitly, thus, gender, in this version of the myth, has become problematic.

Tristana's one aim in life is to find a fulfilling career that will allow her to live independently. Instead, she has a leg amputated and undergoes a curious conversion to domesticity, becoming the wife of her aging seducer. The novel clearly alludes to the woman question of the 1890s; yet critics have never been able to reach a consensus as to the nature of the statement it makes. Some critics read it as an attack on feminism, in which the mutilation and enclosure of Tristana are correctives, applied by an author who fundamentally disapproved of his heroine's feminist aspirations.^[27] Other commentators take exactly the opposite position, arguing that the novel should be interpreted instead as a feminist allegory, a protest on the part of the author about women's condition.^[28]

The reason for the emergence of such diametrically opposed sets of readings lies, once again, in the ambiguity of narrative presentation. In Tristana Galdós has contrived a supremely equivocal narrative voice, using a chameleon narrator who cleverly manipulates contradictory points of view. The narrative alludes constantly to one of the major issues of the day but refuses ultimately to identify with either patriarchal or feminist positions.^[29]

Tristana falls into three broadly distinct modes of narrative presentation. In the first of these, the characters are presented to the reader through the mediating consciousness of a narrator who is patently unreliable. From the outset, he engages the reader in a "now-you-see-it, now-you-don't" game, in which he constantly adopts different guises. In the novel's opening paragraph, he presents himself as an eyewitness, a mere acquaintance, who has to learn about don Lope from others: "la primera vez que tuve conocimiento de tal personaje y pude observar su catadura militar . . . dijéronme que se llamaba don Lope de Sosa" (the first time I met this character and could observe his military demeanour . . . I was told his name was don Lope de Sosa [349]).^[30] Yet in the second paragraph this personal narrator suddenly becomes authoritatively omniscient, revealing Lope's age even while telling us that it is impossible to ascertain. The opening portrait of don Lope reveals the other major level of ambiguity in the narrator's technique: the constant oscillations between complicity

with and criticism of the characters. Towards don Lope he shows a kind of friendly malice, for while he describes his subject as noble, honourable, and basically decent, he simultaneously undercuts him by hinting that Lope is in fact vain, egotistical, socially pretentious, obstinate, and lecherous.

Since the narrator's oscillations in the opening paragraphs establish him as unreliable, we are already alert to the possibility of irony when the narrator launches into an exposé of don Lope's womanizing. The passage is a clever parody of moralistic rhetoric, a balloon of hot air which collapses at the pinprick insertion of an "etcétera, etcétera" that self-mockingly implicates the narrator in the practice of the very double standard he purports to condemn. The discovery is similar to that made at the end of La de Bringas , when we realize that the narrator of that novel is a former lover of Rosalía:

Inútil parece advertir que cuantos conocían a Garrido, incluso el que esto escribe, abominaban y abominan de tales ideas, deplorando con toda el alma que la conducta del insensato caballero fuese una fiel aplicación de sus perversas doctrinas. Debe añadirse que a cuantos estimamos en lo que valen los grandes principios sobre que se asienta, etcétera, etcétera . . . , se nos ponen los pelos de punta sólo de pensar cómo andaría la máquina social si a sus esclarecidas manipulantes les diese la ventolera de apadrinar los disparates de don Lope. (355)

(It seems superfluous to remark that all who knew Garrido, including the writer, deplored and continue to deplore such ideas, lamenting wholeheartedly that the senseless man's behaviour should have been such a faithful application of his perverse doctrines. Furthermore, those of us who value the great principles which are the basis of, etcetera, etcetera . . . , are horrified at the very thought of how society would function if its enlightened members took it into their heads to follow don Lope's crazy notions.)

The narrator's manipulation of contradictory positions is equally evident in the way he presents Tristana. The slippage between omniscient and eyewitness persona strikes us first, as he alternately professes to know all about the heroine and then disclaims knowledge, playing the part of a fallible acquaintance: "¿Qué dijo a Tristana el sujeto aquel? No se sabe" (What did the gentleman say to Tristana? No one knows [363]). More important, his attitude towards her feminist ideas is consistently double-edged, as he appears first friend, then saboteur.

In the early part of the novel the narrator adopts a largely anti-patriarchal role. He describes Tristana's awakening to an awareness of the problematic nature of gender as a realization of enclosure: "los horizontes de la vida se cerraban y ennegrecían cada día más delante de la señorita de Reluz" (life's horizons were narrowing and darkening more every day in front of Miss Reluz [359]). Like the heroines of the nineteenth-century female-authored Bildungsroman , Tristana grows up to a realization of coercive social pressures; she envisages women as bound and motionless (358). The novel contains many images of wings and frustrated flight, in the tradition of contemporaneous feminist discourse.^[31] The narrator seems at pains to stress the master-slave dialectic between Lope and Tristana, consistently referring to the former as the "dueño," "señor," and "amo" (owner, lord, and master) and Tristana as "la esclava," "la cautiva," and "la prisionera" (slave, captive, and prisoner).

The narrative constructs patriarchal sexual relations in terms of devastating images of disease, mutilation, and enclosure. Initially, both the male characters are figured as pitifully damaged creatures. Don Lope, in his relations with women, is cast in the part of a war veteran, while Horacio's studio is equally reminiscent of the battlefield in its multiple depictions of fragments of naked women (364). The first image of mutilation which the narrator uses refers to Lope's mind, which, like scar tissue, is incapable of sensation—in this case, of feeling the harm he is doing to Tristana by seducing her:

La conciencia del guerrero de amor dejaba ver . . . arideces horribles de astro apagado y muerto. Era que al sentido moral del buen caballero le faltaba una pieza importante, cual órgano que ha sufrido una mutilación y sólo funciona con limitaciones o paradas deplorables. . . . Su conciencia, tan sensible en otros puntos, en aquél era más dura y más muerta que un guijarro. (354–55)

(The conscience of the veteran of love had . . . dreadfully arid parts, like those of a dead, collapsed star. The truth was, the good man's moral sense was lacking an important piece, like an organ which has been mutilated and which is unfortunately only partly, haltingly functional. . . . His conscience, which was so sensitive on other points, was, in that area, more hard and dead than a stone.)

Don Lope's moral disfigurement is compared to the ravages of leprosy (360). The narrator employs a simile of airborne bacteria to evoke the contemporary patriarchal mentality that Lope has absorbed:

"una moral compleja, que no por ser suya dejaba de ser común, fruto abundante del tiempo en que vivimos; moral que, aunque parecía de su cosecha, era en rigor concreción en su mente de las ideas flotantes en la atmósfera metafísica de su época, cual as invisibles bacterias en la atmósfera física" (a complex morality, which was widespread and not don Lope's alone, a crop that flourished in the times we live in; a morality which, although it appeared to be peculiar to him, was in point of fact the manifestation in his mind of the ideas floating around in the metaphysical atmosphere of his time, like the invisible bacteria in the physical atmosphere [351]). Don Lope's hypnotic power over Tristana is similarly figured as a contagious disease, a few pages later (357).

Horacio too has been handicapped—by a grandfather who, in his desire to create a model successor able to value commerce and domesticity, used to tie him to the table leg to prevent him from going out (365). Even though Horacio claims to have learned how to walk and even to fly after his cramping exposure to these bourgeois ideals, it is significant that Tristana appeals despairingly to him not to tie her to a table leg with his conventional prescriptions of behaviour (399).

The theme of disablement and disease extends, in the early stages of the novel, beyond the two male characters to encompass the whole notion of bourgeois conduct, and specifically middle-class notions of marriage and gender relations. Significantly, Tristana's first encounter with Horacio is set against the background of a procession of horribly defaced deaf-mute and blind children walking in pairs. The implications of faculties or organs diseased, or useless through mutilation, is very clear throughout the description of the blind children: "Las caras aburridas, muertas, de los ciegos, picoteadas atrozmente de viruelas, vacíos los ojos, y cerrados entre cerdosas pestañas, o abiertos, aunque insensibles a la luz, con pupila de cuajado vidrio" (The bored, dead faces of the blind ones were badly scarred by smallpox; some of them had eyes that were empty and closed, with gummy lashes; others were open, though impervious to the light, with set, glassy pupils [361]). The children walk in couples; "en cada pareja, los ojos del mudo valían al ciego para poder andar sin tropezones" (the deaf ones would use their eyes to help their blind partners walk without tripping [361]). Tristana often harks back to the chilling sight, recalling it as "la tarde aquella de los sordomudos" (that day we saw the deaf-mutes [363]). The patriarchal vision of the

ideal couple that Horacio cherishes is framed in terms curiously reminiscent of this episode of the blind children. He rhapsodizes about an utterly dependent wife who sees through her husband's eyes: "la esposa que vive de la savia moral e intelectual del esposo y que con los ojos y con el corazón de él ve y siente" (the wife who lives off the emotional and intellectual sap of her husband, who sees with his eyes and feels with his heart [377]). The narrator's elliptical way of hinting at the beginning of their sexual relations also suggests a sort of confining disablement: "y desde aquel dia no pasearon más" (after that day they didn't go walking again [376]).

Tristana's hopes that a relationship with Horacio can provide an escape from gender roles are doomed because ironically, it is Horacio, through whom she had hoped for escape from the imprisoning domestic ideal, who turns out to be its most enthusiastic devotee. Horacio ultimately finds Tristana alarming and disquieting and finds himself wishing she could be reduced to a more manageable size: "esperaba que su constante cariño y la acción del tiempo rebajarían un poco la talla imaginativa y razonante de su ídolo, haciéndola más mujer, más doméstica, más corriente y útil" (he hoped that his constant love and the passing of time would help to reduce his idol's capacity for imagination and reasoning, making her more womanly, more domestic, more ordinary and useful [379]). To Horacio, the notions of woman and domesticity are so inseparable that he takes pains to correct Tristana's repeated disavowals of domestic capabilities. Symbolically, he becomes a cultivator of doves and hens—both, like the ángel del hogar , tame, confined, nonflying birds. As Horacio and Tristana become estranged, he writes to Tristana from the country about the doves and hens who are the symbol of what he wants her to be: calm and contained. The birds become a way for the lovers to convey their fundamental disagreements over sexual roles. Horacio, commenting on Tristana's English lessons, for example, says that "las palomas no quieren nada con ingleses" (the doves don't want anything to do with the English [390]). Horacio finally rejects Tristana because she will not accede to bourgeois domestic ideals: "no le gusta el campo, ni la jardinería, ni la Naturaleza, ni las aves domésticas, ni la vida regalada y obscura" (she doesn't like the country, or gardening, or nature, or keeping birds, or the easy, quiet life [413]).^[32]

Since Tristana is often figured not just as a restless bird but as a stampeding horse, the image of the wooden horses galloping crazily

on the merry-go-round which the lovers see in the playground early on in their affair is freighted with symbolic significance. The sight serves as a silent comment on the circularity and inevitability with which these two lovers will conform to conventional roles. By implication their affair, far from allowing Tristana to run free, will be a charmed but vicious circle, merely causing her to rehearse all the platitudinous gender roles from which she is trying to escape.

The antipatriarchal tenor of the beginning of the novel gives way to a distinctly antifeminist slant after Tristana begins the affair with Horacio and tries out her revolutionary ideas on him. The narrator abandons his earlier characterization of the heroine as justified in her demands, presenting her instead as insatiable and febrile. Although earlier he had recounted Tristana's awakening to the consciousness of oppression with great sympathy, he now comes to present her as an impossible, hysterical female. Throughout the rest of the novel, typically fin-de-siècle images of drunkenness, delirium, and hysteria recur throughout the narrator's characterizations of the heroine, who now appears inimical to the principle of order and regulation. Tristana's desire to spread her wings and make a life free of social and familial conventions makes her as dangerous as the anarchists whose bombs were spreading such fear in bourgeois hearts; the fact that the Spanish verb volar can mean both to fly and to explode is curiously appropriate to our reading of Tristana . Her characterization would have made her anathema to the middle-class audience for whom the novel was originally intended, for the social ideals of the Spanish bourgeoisie were order and stability: concepts such as peace and tranquility were the watchwords of apologists of the ideal society.

Throughout the novel that is called Tristana , attention is largely focused on the reactions and thought processes of the two male protagonists and the male narrator, as they react to Tristana. The heroine is constructed as the object of their and of our judgemental gaze, a state of affairs which becomes more pronounced as the novel develops. Tristana is censured by Horacio, don Lope, and the narrator for being the frantic dreamer of an impossible utopia that all three characterize as excessive, unhealthy, and unnatural. Horacio alludes to Tristana's mental powers as a "fiebre de ideación" (ferment of ideas [379]), and tells her that she needs to be cured of the "locas efervescencias" (crazy effervescences [389]) that disturb her. The narrator represents her as feverish, suffering from a kind of delir-

ium of the spirit (363), and possessed by manic-depressive and hysterical tendencies: "tan voluble y extremosa era en sus impresiones la señorita de Reluz, que fácilmente pasaba del júbilo desenfrenado y epiléptico a una desesperación lugubre" (Miss Reluz was so moody and extraordinarily sensitive that she would easily pass from an uncontrollable, hysterical joy to a mournful desperation [387]). Her liaison with Horacio he repeatedly dismisses as inebriated and stormy, a "tempestuosa embriaguez de los sentidos, con relámpagos de atrevidas utopías eróticas y sociales" (drunken storm of the senses, with flashes of daring erotic and social utopias [378]). The narrator's judgements of her veer between pitying and disapproving, but they always stress the notion of Tristana's tendency to sick excesses of fancy. In his view Tristana launches herself wildly, as the wooden horses of the merry-go-round do, into the realm of the impossible and the imaginary, "como córcel desbocado, buscando el imposible fin de lo infinito, sin sentir en su loca . . . carrera" (like a frenzied steed, seeking the impossible end of infinity, feeling nothing in her mad . . . race [398]). Tristana, in her letters as well as her conversation, is often shown asking for more, a characteristic presented by the narrator, who disapproves of her unrealistic social dreams, as a kind of draining sexual voraciousness (364, 368). As Gilbert Smith shows, there are strong parallels between the fictional Tristana and the plaintive and rather dizzy correspondence of the real-life Concha-Ruth Morell, with whom Galdós was involved at the time of writing the novel. The narratorial ambivalence in the novel towards Tristana may be accounted for, at least in part, by the incipient negativity towards Morell that was to lead Galdós to distance himself from her.

After the novel's contradictory feminist-antifeminist beginning, the mode of presentation changes entirely; the reader encounters the lovers' correspondence, while the schizophrenic narrative voice of the first part disappears. Replacing it is that of an editor of a series of letters. The comments of this new narrative persona, few as they are, reveal an unambiguously paternalistic and derisive attitude towards the affair documented in the letters. He is forgetful, and faintly bored: "esto decía la primera carta . . . , no, no, la segunda" (that was in the first letter . . . , no, no, the second [363]). After a brief interjection at the beginning of chapter 17, he disappears for the rest of the epistolary section, leaving only the voices of the two lovers, which eventually

dwindle to that of Tristana alone. At the crucial point when Tristana develops the tumour in her leg, there is no narrative comment whatsoever; even Horacio is silent, leaving only the feverishly bright and despairing voice of Tristana prattling on into an ominous void.

In chapter 19 the disease metaphor becomes fictional reality: Tristana develops a disease of mysterious etiology in her leg. At this point the two discourses, the patriarchal and the feminist, ambiguously mingle, as the text suggests two opposing explanations for the sinister train of events. From the antifeminist point of view of Lope and Horacio, it is significant that the disease which breaks out in Tristana's leg appears to be a tumour, for the uncontrollable multiplication of abnormal cells parallels the uncontrollable, insatiable, hubristic overreaching of Tristana's fevered mind. In her imagination she longs to overstep the order predicated by patriarchy; according to the norms of her society, her feminist ideas are "unnatural," an aberration. From Tristana's own viewpoint, however, the disease does not originate in feminism but in patriarchy. It is another case of don Lope wielding his power and mysteriously infecting her "porque la cojera es como un grillete que [me] sujeta más a su malditísima persona" (because my limp is like a shackle that binds me even more to that dreadful man [393]).

The representation of Tristana's unnamed disease demonstrated how, even in 1895, cancer and consumption remained metaphorically linked. Tristana is the typical consumptive subject, alternating between febrile hyperactivity and "passionate resignation," a "hectic, reckless creature of passionate extremes." Furthermore, as Sontag writes, according to the "mythology of TB, there is generally some passionate feeling which provokes, which expresses itself in, a bout of TB. But the passions must be thwarted, the hopes blighted. And the passion, although usually love, could be a political or moral passion," such as a revolutionary political doctrine.^[33] The text has certainly done enough to suggest that it is Tristana's own passionate desire for a feminist utopia that causes her disease. But it simultaneously raises the possibility that she has been infected by don Lope, perhaps with syphilis, that great scourge of the nineteenth century. Alternatively, we could see her cancer as a kind of "demonic pregnancy."^[34] All these alternatives exist simultaneously: the text does not allow us to choose among them, for Tristana , perhaps more than any other novel by Galdós, exhibits what Peter Goldman terms an "aesthetic of ambigu-

ity."^[35] The tug of thesis and antithesis is deliberately held in suspension, never to be resolved.

Critics such as Carlos Feal Deibe comment upon the sinister description of the operation itself, figured as a drastic male intervention, the "cure" which Horacio and Lope had secretly desired for so long. The episode of Tristana's illness and operation contains many references to the notion of wings and flight. The immobilizing of Tristana by the anaesthesia prior to the symbolic mutilation of her wings is described as forcing her into a nest. Míquis "hizo con su pañuelo una especie de nido chiquitín" (made a sort of little nest with his handkerchief [404]) which he applies to her face when she is not looking. This produces a deathlike sleep, from which Tristana is resurrected a different creature. As Feal Deibe points out, the "nest" applied to Tristana's nose implies a desire to end her flight. Tristana has to be brought back to the nest—or the fold—from which she tried to escape.^[36] Don Lope's self-congratulatory meditations on the immobilizing of Tristana make this point clearly: "¡Pobre muñeca con alas! Quiso alejarse de mí, quiso volar; pero no contaba con su destino, que no le permite revoloteos ni correrías; no contaba con Dios, que me tiene ley" (Poor winged doll! She tried to break away from me, to fly; but she forgot about her fate, which doesn't allow for flying or running; and she forgot about God, who's on my side [403–4]).

The disease in Tristana's leg and the resultant amputation are logical developments of many patterns of imagery operating in the novel. For one, the initial evocation of Tristana as a little oriental doll had served to evoke the practice of foot binding, which is later metaphorically realized. As a result of her illness Tristana is both figuratively and literally cut down to size, in a way that fulfils the wishes of Horacio who "se complacía en suponer que el tiempo iría templando en ella la fiebre de ideación, pues para esposa o querida perpetua tal flujo de pensar temerario le parecía excesivo" (liked to think that time would temper the ferment of ideas in her, because such a frightful flow of thoughts seemed excessive to him in a wife or a permanent mistress [379]). Don Lope gloats over the fact that he has "got" Tristana, that she is now immobilized and dependent, using the semantically rich adjective sujeta , which contains all three meanings. The theme of social coercion seen in class relations in Fortunata y Jacinta , in the series of middle-class characters who seek to shape the lower-class heroine for their own purposes, resurfaces in

this novel in terms of gender relations, as Lope and Horacio try to force Tristana into the patriarchal mould of feminine subordination and dependence.

After the operation, the number of diminutives which don Lope uses and the tone of oppressive paternalism which he adopts towards Tristana become quite blatant. He calls her "su cojita," his "enfermita" (little lame one, sick baby), and refers to her leg as a "patita" (little leg [424]). He pays for what he calls "leccioncitas de pintura" and a "carrito" (little painting lessons, a little wheelchair [1416]). Don Lope neutralizes the power of the erotic relation between the young couple by rhetorically allotting Horacio the place of one of Tristana's toys: "cuanto antojo tenga la niña, se lo satisfará su amante padre. Le traje los pinceles, le traje el harmonium, y no basta. Hacen falta más juguetes" (whatever my little girl wants, her loving father will give her. I got her the paintbrushes, the harmonium, and that's not enough. She needs more toys [409]). He is careful to stress the link between Tristana's lost leg and her lost possibility of sexual fulfilment (411). Tristana is, in effect, turned into a "female eunuch," or, to use Orwell's expression, "the real legless angel of Victorian romance."^[37]

She also gives up her revolutionary ideas, as if these had been merely the result of her love affair with Horacio. Tristana becomes the angelic wife, with apparently no mind or inclinations of her own. After her operation Lope's imaginary script for her letter to Horacio has her say that "me hah salido alas" (I've grown wings) and that she is like the "ángeles del Cielo" (angels in Heaven [406]). The immediate effect is to pacify and tame her:

el abatimiento y prostración de la niña eran para causar alarma. No parecía la misma, y denegaba su propio ser; ni una vez siquiera pensó en escribir cartas, ni salieron a relucir aquellas aspiraciones o antojos sublimes de su espíritu. . . . Entontecida y aplanada, su ingenio superior sufría un eclipse total. Tanta pasividad y mansedumbre . . . agradaron a don Lope. (405–6)

(the girl was so depressed and low it was alarming. She no longer seemed the same person and contradicted her own personality; not once did she even think about writing a letter, nor did her mind bring forth any more wishes or wonderful dreams. . . . Dulled and stupefied, her great mind went into a total eclipse. Such passivity and docility . . . pleased don Lope.)

As a result of the operation, Tristana comes to admire the ideal of domesticity, which she formerly spurned, listening with interest and

enjoyment to Lope reading Horacio's eulogies of rural domesticity. "Sin duda," the narrator enigmatically remarks, this change occurs "por efecto de una metamórfosis verificada en su alma después de la mutilación de su cuerpo" (No doubt . . . because of the metamorphosis that had taken place in her soul after her body was mutilated [414]).

The vision of Tristana as angelic interpreter becomes the definitive one: the Tristana who hoped to become an artist-creator herself has been mutilated into an angel-woman who is, through her lack of libido, incapable of being an artist. Desexualized and tamed, she now takes lessons on a prosthetic "organito" (little organ) from a professor who, surely not incidentally, "habría convertido en organista a un sordomudo " (could have made an organist out of a deaf-mute [415; emphasis added]). Don Lope and Horacio in a proprietorial manner discuss which of them should pay for Tristana's medical treatment. Tristana is reintegrated into the establishment, eventually spending so much time in church that she has become "parte integrante del edificio y aun de la institución" (an integral part of the building and even of the institution [418]). Her attempts to become an artist suffer a final, risible metamorphosis. She takes up the one kind of art permitted to women under late-nineteenth-century patriarchy: "el arte culinario" (the art of cooking).

The narrator's repeated descriptions of Tristana as "la inválida" are the culmination of the imagery of sickness and disablement which is associated with sexual roles throughout the novel. The vision of Tristana mutilated in order to fit the pattern of the angel in the house concurred exactly with the vision of Concepción Arenal, one of Spain's most prominent feminist writers. In La mujer de su casa she expounded the theory that the domestic woman idealized by the bourgeoisie was a mutilated being: "lo terrible, es que haya miles y millones que . . . llaman perfección a la mutilación" (the terrible thing is that there are thousands and millions of people . . . who call mutilation perfection).^[38]

At the end of the novel the original narrator returns, but with a significant difference: he has apparently lost his powers of omniscience, and is now only selectively knowledgeable. Although he continues his explanatory commentaries on don Lope and Horacio, he now presents Tristana from the outside only, disqualifying his own exegeses of her conduct with the phrase sin duda (no doubt). He tantalizes the reader with a mocking refusal to elucidate Tristana's constant changes of direction, as she abandons painting and takes

up instead first music, then religion, and finally domesticity, in a way that seems to make her a textbook example of nineteenth-century patriarchal theories on women's innate frivolity and lack of deep creative genius. As a result of this narrative technique, Tristana now appears oddly hermetic, caught up in an unreadable internal world from which the reader is absolutely excluded. The marriage which Tristana passively and indifferently undergoes fits her into the pigeonhole of the angelic wife, "encasillándola en un hueco honroso de la Sociedad" (inserting her into a respectable slot in society [428]). As if to register her effective death as an independent being, the narrative ceases almost entirely to record her private emotions or even her words. She is observed purely from the exterior, as a remote, almost autistic being. It is never clear whether she is resigned to the hopelessness of her situation, or whether a real change has taken place and she now feels at peace, accepting the situation which she had abhorred. It suggests a sort of internal death—a Tristana physically resurrected from the apple-scented surgical grave but emotionally as good as dead.

In the final section, the total exclusion of Tristana's perspective on events—even refracted through the masculinist consciousness of the narrator—is matched by a parallel privileging of the perspectives of the male characters. As the novel progresses, a curious network of complicity emerges between the increasingly misogynistic narrator and the two male characters. The narrator, in his capacity as editor, describes the perplexed recipient of Tristana's letters in a way that presupposes both his own and the reader's solidarity with Horacio: "el efecto que estas deshilvanadas y sutiles razones hacían en Horacio, fácilmente se comprenderá" (one can easily imagine the effect that these muddled and tenuous arguments had on Horacio), whilst mockingly referring to Tristana as "la visionaria niña de don Lepe " (don Lepe 's visionary child [400; original emphasis]). The rapprochement that takes place between Lope and Horacio towards the end of the novel, noted by Noël Valis, is foreshadowed in their shared judgement of Tristana as sick.^[39] The narrator records approvingly that Horacio is capable of correctly estimating the effect of the "delirios o tempestades" (delirium or storms) of his affair with Tristana, which he comes to view as a "duke enfermedad" (sweet sickness [381]). Horacio's vision of Tristana is corroborated by don Lope, who declares that "no ha sido más que un hervor insano de la imaginación" (it was

just the seething of a diseased imagination [1403]). Tristana colludes with this male perception of herself as sick, drunk, crazy (389); and she perpetuates the diminishing of her stature perpetrated by Lope and the narrator with their constant use of diminutives in her own use of self-deprecating baby language.

Patriarchal order, with the woman safely confined to the home, relative and subordinate, is made to triumph in the novel by dint of the overt machinations of the author. Far from killing the angel in the house to produce the independent woman artist, as Virginia Woolf was later to advocate, this author kills the artist in his heroine in order to create the angel.^[40] His intervention, as well as his portrayal of Tristana as hopelessly fragmented in her own desires, may very well have been motivated by his liaison with Concha-Ruth Morell, who behaved as Tristana does, dreaming of independence and begging for support in the same breath. The author enacts upon his female creation the patriarchal Spanish proverb: "la mujer, la pata quebrada y en casa" (woman should have her leg broken and stay at home). What is deliberately left unclear, however, is what kind of response Galdós anticipates from the reader. As an affirmation of feminine domesticity, Tristana is highly complex and ambiguous. The restatement of the domestic ideal made at the end of the novel is dark and bitter: the ángel del hogar has been fitted back into her niche but only after she has been effectively mutilated—even lobotomized. This Pyrrhic victory of patriarchal order stands out in bleak contrast to the cozy, sentimental pictures of domestic bliss which made conventional bourgeois reading.

The figurative insistence upon mutilation, disease, and imprisonment sows doubt about the validity of the patriarchy's authority and the sexual roles enforced by it. The novel's concluding question: "¿Eran felices? Tal vez" (Were they happy? Maybe), implicitly leaves the whole edifice of bourgeois gender roles dangerously undermined. The novel conveys an anxious ambivalence about nineteenth-century sexual roles, which it portrays, with deep pessimism, as cruel but necessary. Tristana dramatizes what Elaine Showalter describes as one of the paradoxes "at the heart of fin-de-siècle culture," namely, that among the men of the intellectual avant-garde, "male rebellion against patriarchy did not necessarily mean a commitment to feminism. Indeed, antipatriarchal sentiments frequently coexisted with antifeminism and even misogyny."^[41]

The enigmatic final words of the novel are thoroughly characteristic of this paradox: even though the novel is so heavily weighted against the heroine's feminist aspirations, the narrator mockingly refuses to validate the conventional gender roles that have been so neatly imposed. He ends instead with an open, ironic question. The marriage of Tristana to Lope that takes place at the end of the novel accords with the social values which the narrator himself has been propounding in the latter half of the work, as he belittles her overweening desires to escape domesticity and become an artist. Nevertheless, the end of the novel is a grotesque parody of a conventional happy ending. Lope may be licking his fingers as he raises his chickens, but Tristana has been unnaturally mutilated and prematurely aged beyond recognition. There is a pervading sense of malady and hopelessness. If we compare Tristana to Tormento, the downward trajectory of the later heroine emerges very clearly. Tormento, although fallen, does manage to escape from the power of Pedro Polo and the Bringas family and leaves with Agustín intent on pursuing a happy life elsewhere. Tristana, in contrast, suffers the sort of lurid novelistic retribution for unchastity more commonly seen in the popular novel, although Galdós's novelistic technique, as we have seen, is so multilayered as to make the reasons for this undecipherable.

Tristana is thoroughly ambivalent on the woman question. It shows a double-edged move by Galdós, on the one hand an obsessive need to shore up bourgeois order—especially its vision of gender-and on the other a destructive, savage questioning of that order. Even though the novel ends in a marriage, that ultimate novelistic symbol of the bourgeois social contract, the route which the heroine has had to travel in order to reach the altar is so brutal that it does just as much to undermine the validity of bourgeois society's power as to celebrate it.

Seeing the Light: Halma's Conversion

Galdós's short novel Halma was published in October 1895. Although it is ostensibly the sequel to Nazarín , which appeared earlier in the same year, a female character, the condesa de Halma, replaces Nazarín in the major role. Halma explores what happens when a woman tries to assume the position of authority that was ascribed to

women in theory but denied them by social and legal practice. Generally considered a minor work, Halma has attracted little attention from critics. The relatively few studies devoted to it tend to follow the periodization scheme proposed by Joaquín Casalduero in the fifties, according to which Halma belongs in a trilogy of ahistorical novels (including Nazarín and Misericordia ) that deal with spiritual rather than social matters.^[42] In fact, the novel's exploration of the proper role of charity and spirituality in society necessarily involves the question of gender. The work deals not, as some critics suggest, with the spiritual problems of a universal everyman, but specifically with the struggle of an upper-class woman to reconcile the conflicting demands of personal desires and social dictates. Far from transcending history, then, Halma is a didactic novel with a social message prompted by the cultural context in which it was written.

This may seem a strange claim to those accustomed to thinking of Galdós's turn-of-the-century work as increasingly metafictional. In fact, the metafictional elements in this novel are confined to three brief references to Galdós's earlier work Nazarín , and not broadly integrated into the narrative. Halma lacks the ironic texture of Galdós's earlier work, which typically employs repeated slippage from personal to omniscient narrators to destabilize its own message. While Halma does contain a narrative frame using a first-person narrator who is a genealogist, the main body of the narrative follows a straightforward omniscient mode using large amounts of dialogue. The equivocation and ambiguity produced by the author's previous manipulation of narrative personae is largely absent from this text.

Galdós often used names symbolically, and the title of this novel is no exception, since it identifies the heroine, Halma, with the soul (alma ). It is not fortuitous that her name is conferred by men; it is a contraction of her first husband's title, used of her by the man who becomes her second husband. The identification of a woman character with the principle of soul is no cultural accident, for the ascription of greater spirituality to women was an essential facet of nineteenth-century constructions of gender (as we saw in chapter 1). The heroine lives up to her name by manifesting many of the qualities of the feminine angel. The presentation of her first marriage establishes her as a model of womanhood. Like the angels of the conduct manuals, she supplies the principle of moral order: her piety and purity redeem her husband from a disorderly and licentious life. Although an aristocrat,

she exhibits all the qualities required of bourgeois women: devotion, thrift, piety, and self-sacrifice. She nurses the count when sick and redeems him spiritually: "[era] valerosa y sublime como enfermera, amantísima como esposa, diligente en el manejo de la humilde casa. . . . Del absoluto menosprecio de toda religión positiva había pasado [el Conde] . . . por influencia de la angelical Catalina, a un ferviente ardor cristiano" ([she made] a valiant and sublime nurse, a loving wife, and a diligent housekeeper. . . . From totally despising all forms of religion, the [count] . . . had moved to fervent Christian piety, through the influence of the angelic Catalina [580–81]).^[43]

In widowhood, Halma once again demonstrates angelic qualities of patience and abnegation. Unlike some of Galdós's earlier heroines, she actively seeks enclosure. She shuts herself up within the family home, even arranging it like a convent cell (586). She devotes herself to feminine activities in the domestic sphere: reading, needlework, and prayer (587). There are repeated allusions to her as an angel. She is represented as ardently domestic, constantly engaged in activities such as sewing, cooking, cleaning, and sweeping. When nursing the priest Flórez, she insists on doing humble domestic chores, solicitously filling cupboards with clean clothes and folding sheets (613).

In a pattern familiar to the readers of Gloria , Halma enters the novel as the epitome of domestic feminine virtues but transgresses these as the novel proceeds. Federico Carlos Sáinz de Robles's characterization of Halma as a thin-skinned soul who bleeds at the slightest brush with reality is a more accurate description of the conventional angel than of this character, who, far from bleeding at brushes with others, proves undaunted by her family's effort to make her conform to their vision of her gender.^[44] Her deviance from the angelic role occasions a series of conflicts involving gender and power. The first of these occurs between Halma and her domineering brother, the marqués de Feramor, who attempts to force her to remarry, arguing that her sex disqualifies her from deciding her own future. She laconically refuses and states her alternative plan: she wishes to found a religious institution, an idea which her family receives as scandalously inappropriate for a single woman.

The narrator's presentation of Feramor is sardonically negative. He is an unpleasant Anglophile, cold and overly correct, in marked

contrast to the sympathetically portrayed Moreno Isla of Fortunata y Jacinta . He is also an absolute conservative on gender roles, to the point that his wife is an absolute replica of him. Feramor lectures Halma that, as a woman, she is excessively influenced by imagination, and that her proper role in life is a passive and submissive one in the private sphere. He finally declares that he will not reclaim her dowry if she persists in her intent to use it on something he considers to be inappropriate:

Por no haber sabido a tiempo amaestrar la imaginación, ésta te desfigura los hechos. . . . Concrétate a un papel puramente pasivo, pues no naciste tú para la iniciativa ni la actividad. . . . Temo mucho tus ambiciones de fundadora. . . . Tú no posees ni ese capital encefálico que se llama razón, ni esa razón suprema de los actos colectivos que se llama capital. (588–89)

(Since you didn't control your imagination when you should have, it's causing you to distort the facts. Stick to a purely passive role, because you weren't born to take the initiative nor to do things. . . . I'm very much alarmed by your ambition to be a founder. . . . You don't have the brain capital called reason, nor any real capital, that supreme argument for collective acts.)

Galdós enlists the reader's sympathy for Halma by stressing that she is materially powerless against her brother. Only thanks to the intervention of the family priest, Manuel Flórez, will Feramor allow his sister to go ahead with her plans. Halma decides to spend her dowry, once granted, redeeming two men. She puts a great deal of money into the affairs of her feckless cousin, José Antonio de Urrea, and spends the rest founding a retreat at Pedralba. Her charitable project stretches the conventional feminine role to its limit, for instead of merely donating to charities from within a married home, as was expected, she has founded and created an institute of her own, rather as Guillermina of Fortunata y Jacinta does. Although philanthropic social work, if undertaken as a part-time extension of the duties of wife and mother, was an acceptable, and indeed a necessary part of the nineteenth-century middle-class woman's ideal agenda, by the end of the century increasing numbers of women were using the ideology of woman's superior moral nature and social concern in order to engage in work outside the home.^[45] By thus expanding the province of their angelic duties beyond the family household,

women were beginning to deconstruct the notion of separate gendered spheres of activity, generating social anxieties that are recorded in this Galdós novel.

Halma causes a scandal by declining to give any money to the middle-class ladies who approach her for the usual donations:

Consuelo Feramor, María Ignacia Monterones y la marquesa de San Salomó eran al modo de presidentas, vicepresidentas, o secretarias en esas o las otras juntas benéficas señoriles que reúnen fondos, ya por medio de limosnas, ya con el señuelo de funciones teatrales, rifas o kermesses , para socorrer a los pobres de tal o cual distrito, edificar capillas o atender al inconmensurable montón de víctimas que los desatados elementos o nuestras desdichas públicas acumulan de continuo sobre la infeliz España. No hay que decir que las tres cayeron sobre la solitaria y triste viuda con el furor de piedad que desplegar solían en semejantes casos. (611)

(Consuelo Feramor, María Ignacia Monterones, and the marchioness of San Salomó were acting as presidents, vice-presidents, or secretaries of this or that ladies' charitable society, raising funds through donations or by luring people to contribute through plays, auctions, or fêtes to help the poor of this or that neighbourhood, build chapels or attend to the huge pile of victims which is constantly building up in this unhappy nation, because of the cruelty of the elements or the problems of society. It goes without saying that the three ladies descended on the sad and lonely widow with the frenzy of piety which they tended to exhibit in such cases.)

The narrator's throwaway expressions—"this or that" society or neighbourhood—indicate that these philanthropical societies are not to be taken seriously, as does the presence of the marchioness of San Salomó, whose spendthrift habits are familiar to readers of Galdós's earlier novels. Even her supporter Flórez feels uneasy at Halma's departure from the conventional interpretation of woman's redemptive mission:

¡Cuánto mejor que esta buena señora siguiera los caminos ya hechos y despejados, en vez de empeñarse en abrirlos nuevos, desbrozando la trocha salvaje! ¡Cuánto más cómodo para todos que acatara lo establecido y se echara en brazos de los que ya tienen perfectamente organizados los servicios de caridad, las juntas de damas, las archicofradías, as hermandades, mis colectas para escuelas, mis . . . ! (613)

(How much better it would have been had this good lady followed clear, ready-made paths, instead of insisting on making new ones, by

hacking her way through the undergrowth! How much more convenient for everyone if she'd only stick to the rules and leave it to those who have their charitable systems all organized: the ladies' philanthropical societies and religious organizations, the guilds, my appeals for the schools, my . . . !)

Yet within the terms of the narrative as a whole, the narrator's irony at the expense of this complacent bourgeois attitude to charity creates a contradiction, for it is precisely this socially accepted manifestation of female charity that Halma must, in the end, adhere to. Not only the characters within the novel, but ultimately the novel itself registers anxiety about the dangers of women taking their culturally ascribed moral superiority seriously enough to assume its logical corollary: power and authority over others.

Negative reactions to Halma's unconventional behaviour begin to extend beyond the family to the priest, whose grudging admiration for her talent at creative initiative is heavily admixed with fear (607). He eventually resorts to passing off Halma's ideas as his own, in order to regain his ascendancy (608). The reversal of the usual gendered hierarchy of power between Flórez and Halma is expounded at length by the narrator in the second part (chaps. v–vi). Flórez's reaction to her is that she is both an angel and, because of her unpredictable surges of inspiration, the devil (609). He fears the gradual erosion of his authority, praying that her next move will be of a kind easy to understand and control (609). Flórez, who is portrayed as temperamentally ill-suited to the position of power which his sex and his office as priest confer upon him, gradually gives up all pretence at dominance:

Las iniciativas de él casi nunca cuajaban; las de ella venían con tal fuerza que al punto conquistaban al maestro, y no había más remedio que seguirlas, componiéndolas y retocándolas después para conservar las preeminencias exteriores del poder gobernante. En suma, que si al principio Halma parecía una reina constitucional a la moderna, que reinaba y no gobernaba, poco a poco iba sacando los pies de las alforjas y picando en absoluta soberana. (609)

(His ideas almost never came to anything; hers were so forcefully held that they would overwhelm her teacher instantly, and he would have no option but to go along with them, fixing them up and adding his own touches later to preserve the appearance of being the ruling power. Thus, although Halma initially seemed like a constitutional monarch of the modern variety, who presided over but didn't

govern the country, she gradually became bolder, verging on absolute sovereignty.)

Halma's power is represented as destructive of male vitality. The narrator records, without comment, that once Flórez's power of command is removed, he suddenly declines through inexplicable weakness and "lúgubre congoja" (melancholy anguish) into illness and thence to death, a phenomenon reminiscent of the sapping of Feijoo's vitality by his young protégée Fortunata:

Hízose todo como Catalina de Artal deseaba. . . . Notaban en [Flórez] . . . una gran decadencia física, la cual parecía más grave por la pérdida de la jovialidad. Además, claramente se advertía cierta inseguridad en las ideas y dispersión de las mismas en el momento de querer expresarlas. . . . No era ya el mismo hombre; en pocos días su cuerpo perdió la derechura que le hacía tan gallardo; su cara se había vuelto terrosa, sus manos temblaban, y cuando quería sonreírse, su habitual expresión afable le resultaba fúnebre. (627)

(Everything was done according to Catalina de Artal's wishes. . . . [Flórez] . . . began to show signs of great physical decline, which seemed all the more serious because he had lost his sense of humour. Furthermore, he was clearly becoming muddled in his thoughts, and would forget them just as he tried to speak. . . . He was no longer the same man; in a few days his body lost the uprightness which had given him such a noble air; his face was ashen, his hands shook, and when he attempted to smile, his usually affable expression looked funereal.)

Flórez's failure to assert his will over Halma is associated with two negative results: his own destruction and death, and Halma's misguided path thereafter, which undergoes correction at the end of the novel. Flórez's death scene is the first of a series of redemptions which take place in a novel concerned above all with patterns of rightful order disturbed and reestablished. He dies reciting the passage from the Confessions in which Saint Augustine describes seeing the true light, which dissipates the cloud of error under which he has been labouring (638). The passage prefigures the later redemption of Halma, whose "conversion" is also a process of being made to see correctly the error of her ways.

The significance of the many allusions to the Confessions in Halma lies largely in the enormous popularity of Saint Monica, Augustine's mother, as a model of womanhood. For nineteenth-century Catholics, Saint Monica, like the Virgin Mary, represented the ideal of Christian

motherhood. They saw in her an icon of suffering love and humility, totally devoted to the redemption of her son, as she appeared in the popular Life of Saint Monica by Emile Bougaud (1865). Her special virtues were those of the angel: humility, service to others, and redemptive moral influence upon errant male relatives.^[46] Halma's desire to play a Saint Augustine, founder and initiator, inevitably conflicts with the identification her gender offers with Saint Monica as loving supporter of a man. Unfortunately, the only commentator to recognize the allusions to Saint Monica in Halma reinforces the patriarchal gender codes operating in the novel; he castigates the heroine for not following Saint Monica's example to women, arguing that Halma has failed to understand the true message of Augustine's Confessions . If she had, he argues, she would have learned from Monica's model humility, submissiveness, and altruism.^[47]

Halma's relationship with her cousin Urrea, the first of her redemptive projects, has all the attributes of redemptive maternal love represented by Saint Monica. They repeatedly define their relation to each other as that of mother and son. Halma corrects Urrea's anger, his impatience, his spendthrift ways, and his promiscuity, employing "la medicina de la caridad" (the medicine of charity [6171]) in order to redeem him both materially and spiritually, first by paying off his crushing debts, and second by demanding an improvement in his conduct. Her generosity prompts a transformation in Urrea, who becomes a "perdis redimido" (redeemed roué), like Halma's first husband.

The narrative employs a complex set of associations between Halma and archetypes of woman as superior moral being, the object of a venerating male gaze. Apart from the association with Saint Monica, it establishes clear parallels with the Virgin Mary, the mistress in the courtly love tradition, and Dante's Beatrice, all of whom are incorporated into the nineteenth-century ideal of the angel in the house, the "queen" of the domestic sanctuary eulogized by Ruskin and Sinués de Marco.^[48] The network of associations between Halma and the Virgin Mary is carefully constructed. Many male commentators offer enthusiastic encomiums of Halma comparing her to the Virgin: "mi santa, mi Virgen Santísima" (my saint, my Holy Virgin [614]). Elsewhere the narrator refers to her "immaculate virtue" (613). After Halma puts a stop to Urrea's womanizing, he begins to think of her in devotional terms: "Halma era una diosa, un ángel femenino, . . .

glorioso y paradisíaco" (Halma was a goddess, a female angel, . . . glorious and heavenly [646]).

Urrea's adoration of Halma corresponds to the medieval cult of the Virgin as all-nurturing intercessor and refuge. Halma creates a haven at Pedralba for care and healing. Like an angel in the house, she offers a maternal space in a hard, cold, materialistic world, where people can be healed and set right. However, by attempting to create a female sphere outside the bourgeois married home, Halma transgresses gender lines. While Urrea strives to construct Halma's redemption of him as maternal—as both metaphorically giving birth to Urrea and nurturing him—he occasionally acknowledges that her role is rather more masculine, since she has reformed him, like a female Pygmalion: "Soy hechura tuya; soy un hombre nuevo, que has formado entre tus dedos, y luego me has dado vida y alma nuevas" (I am your creation; I am a new man, whom you have modelled with your fingers, and then you gave me a new life and soul [630]).

Halma temporarily succeeds in establishing an island of matriarchy at Pedralba, acting as the mistress of Pedralba and financial guarantor for Urrea. Despite her disingenuous claim that there will be no power hierarchy at Pedralba, her position as the head is acknowledged by all. Urrea leads a cult of slavish devotion and obedience to her, while don Remigio flatters her that "usted es aquí la santa madre, usted manda, y los hijos . . . , a obedecer calladitos" (you are the holy mother here, you give the orders, and the children . . . are to be silent and obey [653]). She rules the organization with a firm hand, and for a while all appears to be running along smoothly.

Halma even holds power over the Christ-figure of the preceding novel, Nazarín, who pursues a policy of respectful devotion towards her. But there are indications that this is only a temporary state of affairs, not long destined to continue. Even within her own domains, the countess herself insists on rigid sexual separation and the symbolic submission of women to men: "Lo más extraño de aquella singular comida fue que las mujeres no se sentaron a la mesa. Las tres, funcionando con igual destreza y alegría, servían a los señores. Luego comían ellas en la cocina. Esta era una costumbre medieval, que Halma no alteraba jamás por consideración alguna" (The strangest thing about that memorable meal was that the women didn't sit at the table. All three of them served the gentlemen skilfully and cheer-

fully. Then they ate in the kitchen. It was a medieval custom which Halma refused to tamper with for any reason whatsoever [651]).

This indication of the instability of Halma's power is rapidly substantiated by events. Patriarchal society intervenes in the novel, with massive authority, to overthrow Halma's rule. The insurrection is mounted by the three male satellites of Pedralba—the priest, don Remigio; the doctor, Pedro Laínez; and the bailiff, José Amador. Their intervention is sponsored by none other than the marqués de Feramor, Halma's brother. Their determination to force Urrea to leave Pedralba, against Halma's will, for the nominal sake of her reputation, springs from the undisguised wish to end Halma's appropriation of power. As don Remigio acknowledges, they have lost track of their original complaint, "para meternos en una cuestión constituyente, que . . . al menos hasta ahora, la ilustre dama no nos ha consultado sobre la manera de organizar el Instituto Pedralbense" (and got ourselves mixed up in a constitutional question, the fact that . . . so far, at least, the noble lady has not consulted us on how to run the Pedralba Institute [665]). In conversation with one another, they reveal that the elaborately courteous rhetoric of submission which they use toward Halma is a pose. In their view, a woman ruler is equivalent to no ruler: "la primera deficiencia que noto aquí es que no hay cabeza. Y esto no puede ser" (the first problem I see here is that there is no leader. And this can't go on [663]). The truth that she must accept, according to them, is the need for a masculine director (666). Their discussion of Halma reveals the disguised assumptions of the bourgeois ideology of domesticity, which idealizes woman as queen and priestess, setting her up as a moral authority whilst simultaneously denying her any power outside the domestic sphere. As Amador declares, "la Condesa es un ángel, y como ángel no debiera andar suelto" (the countess is an angel, and as an angel she shouldn't be given such a free rein [663]).

The problem posed in the narrative by Halma's desire for independence is resolved by the pronouncement of Nazarín, the wandering antiestablishment Christ figure of the previous novel. Up until this point, Nazarín has been a silent and enigmatic figure, declining ever to challenge Halma or to proffer advice. Yet, at the end of the novel, he throws off the cloak of what turns out to be assumed humility and courteously, but implacably, proceeds to correct Halma.

He announces that her system was wrongly conceived from the outset, and that she must make a radical change in her manner of practising charity and in her life-style. Her choice of a holy way of life is unacceptable, he tells her; she must gave it up and accept the new way that he is about to propose (676).

The correct path for the condesa de Halma, according to Nazarín, is that first proposed by the marques de Feramor: marriage and family. "¡Cuánto más sencillo y práctico, señora de mi alma, es que no funde cosa alguna, que prescinda de toda constitución y reglamentos, y se constituya en familia, nada más que en familia, en señora y reina de su casa particular!" (How much simpler and more practical it would be, my dear lady, if you stop being a founder, if you throw aside all constitutions and rules and form a family, nothing more, and become mistress and queen of your own household! [675]).

She can continue to practice charity, but from within the boundaries of the bourgeois household. Nazarín casts doubt upon the genuineness of Halma's spirituality, seeing it as merely the unhealthy product of an overactive imagination (675). Furthermore, he too decrees that she must have a husband in order to conduct her life properly: "su vida necesita del apoyo de otra vida para no tambalearse, para andar siempre bien derecha" (Your life needs the support of another life so as not to stumble, to be able to walk upright [676]).

Nazarín claims that the change he prescribes will give Halma absolute freedom from authority. Church and state, he claims, would no longer have any leverage over the condesa, an analysis seconded by critics such as J. E. Varey, G. G. Minter, and Casalduero, who argue that through marriage Halma will be "freed from the constraints of society."^[49] Yet although Nazarín claims that the system he proposes is a liberatory option, belonging to no system (675), his stance is rooted in the ideology of domesticity, which promoted the commonplace that the proper sphere for woman's rule is the home: "es el hogar doméstico el Estado que reclama de un modo inmediato su dirección y su gobierno" (the home is the state which urgently requires your rule and guidance).^[50]

These ideas are delivered as an almost uninterrupted monologue from Nazarín, disrupted only by the outbursts of the countess, who is shown in a state of mounting perturbation. Halma does not accept these judgements instantaneously. In fact, she shows every sign of being mortified by them. She is described as "nerviosa," "sofocada,"

"perpleja y aturdida" (anxious, panting, perplexed, and dazed [675]). As Nazarín nears the crux of his sermon, her reactions become brutally rebellious. Halma's body expresses her extreme emotion: her hair stands on end, her eyes start from their sockets, she wrings her hands. At the climax of the novel, when he commands her to marry, Halma is suddenly described not as a serene and composed lady, but as grotesquely animalistic. She emits a guttural cry and falls writhing to the ground in the throes of a hysterical attack: "lanzó la Condesa un grito gutural, y llevándose la mano a corazón, como para contener un estallido, cayó al suelo atacada de fieras convulsiones" (the countess gave a guttural cry, put her hand to her heart, as if to stop it from bursting, and fell to the ground, in the grip of severe convulsions [676]). In her delirium she snarls her dissent: "está loco, y quiere volverme loca a mí" (he's mad, and he'll drive me mad too [676]).

Galdós shows his heroine in the throes of classic hysteria, with the well known and much commented symptoms of the globus hystericus , a sensation of suffocation or choking, and seizure.^[51] The episode of hysteria provides the novel's only major moment of narrative ambivalence about gender categories. Mainstream critical interpretations of the episode concur with the patriarchal point of view of the medical profession of the time, reaffirming the novel's message that Halma's "true path" is marriage and maternity. The explosion which the countess tries to contain implicitly derives—in this reading—from the subconscious rising of her womb, formerly condemned to childlessness by her mistaken zeal for independence.^[52]

Yet the narrative offers a subliminal reading, more welcome to the "resisting reader." Halma's reactions throughout the interview and her choking and convulsions point to an explosion of frustration. As Showalter points out, "the globus hystericus , which doctors had interpreted as the rising of the womb, may have been a physical manifestation of [women's] choked-off speech."^[53] Like Abelarda in Miau , the countess suffers hysteria in reaction to male manipulation. Significantly, Halma's companion Beatriz also contracts hysteria when she realizes the impotence of the women to resist the incursions of the men (671).

If we read the hysterical attack as a sign of protest on Halma's part, however, it is the last sign of rebellion she shows. Although she has already had the strength to reject the command to marry once, this time she accedes. Halma symbolically loses consciousness and her

old, independent self apparently dies. After a while she comes round, in both senses, even more drastically than Tristana. Her conversion to domesticity has all the attributes of a religious one. She signals her entire abandonment to Nazarín's will, which she declares to be the will of God: "ese hombre es el santo, ese hombre es el justo, el misionero de la verdad, el emisario del Verbo Divino. Su voz me trae la voluntad de Dios. . . . Me ha dicho la gran verdad" (that man is a saint, he's a just man, the missionary of truth, the messenger of the divine word. His voice brings me the will of God. . . . He has told me a great truth [677]). No longer the ruler, she now embraces her new role as adoring follower and loving wife, adoring God, like Milton's Eve, in her husband: "no fundo nada. . . . Mi ínsula no es, no debe ser, una institución. . . . Sea mi ínsula una casa, una familia" (I'm not a founder. . . . My little island isn't and shouldn't be an institution. . . . It must be a home and a family [677]).

From this point on, power is transferred to Urrea. Halma is shortly to lose the very name which constitutes her identity and the novel's title. She is no longer described as "la organizadora" or "la soberana" (organizer, sovereign) but is eclipsed by a radiant Urrea, "futuro señor de Pedralba" (future lord of Pedralba [678–80]). Nazarín gives thanks that Halma has seen the light and followed the natural order: "Da gracias a Dios por haber iluminado a tu prima. Al fin comprende que debe llevarse la corriente de la vida por su cauce natural. Su determinación resuelve de un modo naturalísimo todas las dificultades que en el gobierno de esta ínsula surgieron" (Give thanks to God for enlightening your cousin. At last she understands that life must flow along its natural course. Her decision solves all the difficulties of governing this island in the most natural way possible [678]).^[54]

This decision cuts the Gordian knot, which is how the fiction constructs Halma's independence. In one stroke it accomplishes three redemptions: Halma redeems the error of assuming an independent and not a relative destiny; Urrea takes his "natural" place in the hierarchy as head of Pedralba; and Nazarín no longer bears the stigma of madness. Characters within the narrative and critics outside it agree in reading his judgement as incontrovertible proof of his wisdom and sanity. Even the narrator now replaces the diminutive "Nazarín" with the more reverential "don Nazario": "¿Qué prueba más clara del perfecto estado cerebral de don Nazario que su incomparable consejo y dictamen en el asunto?" (What clearer proof could there be of don

Nazario's perfect mental health than his invaluable advice and judgement on this matter? [679]). The five-part construction of the novel is reminiscent of the five acts of classical drama, in which problems are posed and resolved. Pedralba, which Halma envisioned as a place where order would be restored and people restored to their rightful selves, works its healing magic in the end against its transgressive female founder.

In the contemporary novels of the 1890s—in particular the Torquemada series, Angel Guerra (1890–1891), La loca de la casa (1892), Halma (1895), and Misericordia (1897)—Galdós portrays the women protagonists as redeemers, with a greater amount of psychological power over their male counterparts than at any previous stage in his novelistic production. In terms of gender ideology, Halma makes an intriguing counterpart to Angel Guerra . In the earlier novel, the narrative was structured around a woman as femme fatale, a tantalizingly seductive but remote nun who inspires the hero but also disturbs him by being a tormenting and forever unobtainable will-o'-the-wisp. In Halma , however, Urrea is allowed, in the end, to possess his redemptrix and to defuse her power over him, so that the tables are turned. The ideal female role inscribed in this novel is not one of independence but of integration into middle-class society through marriage. The text implies that, ideally, female power needs to be redefined as "influence," exerted from within and on behalf of the female sphere of home and family. The "happy-ever-after" ending of Halma, with its evocations of a future of domestic rural bliss for the married couple, is reminiscent of the moralistic endings of the conduct novels, and of the happy ending Galdós appended to La Fontana de Oro when he rewrote the novel. Like the writers of the fictionalized conduct manuals such as Sinués de Marco and Sáez de Melgar, whose work he had earlier parodied, Galdós is here using the novel as a fable of the proper roles of the sexes.

The didacticism of Halma makes it somewhat similar to Galdós's thesis novels, with their Manichaean world view.^[55] As Francie Cate points out, in Halma , as in his early novels, the fictional world represented and the narrative techniques used are subordinated to the ideological message of the novel.^[56] In Galdós's initial work, the individual's rebellion against social norms was sponsored. In Halma , however, the lesson offered is that of the individual's acceptance of those norms through her visionary conversion to domesticity. As in

Tristana , the text suggests that conformity to the current construction of gender is inevitable, but the narrative in Halma goes one step further, presenting it as a law of nature.

As Valera's Pepita Jiménez (1877) does, Halma directs its male and female protagonists towards more "masculine" and "feminine" roles respectively, finally staging what Lou Charnon-Deutsch terms a "salubrious transformation" that acts as a "celebration of gender specific roles and behavior patterns" seen in Galdós's novel in the restoration of the three main characters, Halma, Urrea, and Nazarín, to "true womanhood" and "true manhood" respectively.^[57] Both novels reinforce the assumptions that love and marriage are the goal of women's lives, whilst men are designed to dominate. Halma is grounded in the assumption that being the angel in the house is woman's natural and rightful mission. It thus maps out the proper place for female spirituality in society: the home.

Prior to the 1890s, Galdós presents his female characters both from without and within, exploring their reactions to the confining role prescribed for them. However, beginning with Angel Guerra in 1890–1891, Galdosian female protagonists are portrayed almost exclusively from the perspective of fascinated or perplexed male onlookers. Enigmatic, hermetic women characters such as Leré, Tristana, Halma, and Cruz del Aguila are accessible to the reader only through the perceptions of male characters or a male narrator. In Halma the heroine is enclosed not simply at the level of plot but also at the level of narrative presentation. One of the aspects contributing to the richness and complexity of Galdós's writing during his mature period is the presence of a feminist subtext composed of recurring patterns of imagery of enclosure, oppression, and mutilation, as well as a style of narrative presentation that delighted in contradicting and undercutting its own judgements and generating plurivocal irony. Viewed from the perspective of gender, Galdós's writing in Halma is far more univocal; the subtext has disappeared. In its absence, the patriarchal discourse that informs the novel's ending is unchallenged and unmitigated.

Critics of Halma often assert that it proposes regeneration of a society in decline. John Sinnigen sees Galdós's later novels as part of a "search for new values to renovate a decaying society."^[58] Others comment that Galdós sought regeneration in a renewal of timeless, universal values and institutions: "Galdós . . . sought to understand the

nature of Spain's malady and to find a possible remedy which might regenerate his country. . . . For Galdós, the antidote to Spain's infirmity is charity, a selfless, disinterested love nurtured within the most natural and basic human institution: the family."^[59]

Halma reaffirms concepts that are neither new nor timeless, reinforcing the bourgeois ideology of separate spheres that had been part and parcel of the creation of the middle classes. At a point where middle-class women's entry into public life was beginning to destabilize gender roles, Galdós jettisoned the covert resistance to the gender categories of his class that was so much in evidence in his earlier writing. At the end of the century, in novels like Halma, Misericordia , and El abuelo , we find Galdós celebrating women's "natural" destiny as humble redeemers and nurturers.