6—
New Women

Decadence and the New Woman

At the end of the nineteenth century, an image known as the "new woman" began to circulate widely in the media and literary fiction of Europe. The new woman was a dashing urban gender rebel, who assumed the right to live, dress, and act in defiance of bourgeois norms of feminine behaviour—to live alone, or with other women, to have affairs outside marriage, to work, to enter higher education, to smoke, to cut her hair short, to ride bicycles, to wear short skirts or even the "rational dress" of Amelia Bloomer, the divided skirt. As Michelle Perrot writes, "these liberated, sporting women, known as 'American women,' were a minority, but their attractive image, diffused by fashion magazines, had cultural prestige."^[1] The new woman blurred the oppositional gender system of masculinity and femininity which the bourgeoisie had constructed. The stirrings of a revolution in gender identities which the new woman represented was rejected with extreme violence. Even though the majority of women remained in a dependent relationship to men, the idea that some women, albeit outside Spain, might not do so generated profound resistance. The image served to whip up public anxiety about the consequences of a sea change in attitudes and to encourage conformity to a preexisting code. The backlash took various forms; in the press, writers satirized or pronounced dire warnings against the new woman. Critics accused her of various outrageous acts:

Alpinismos, supresión de contrastes, agilidad de sportman , opresión de los pechos (fuentes misteriosos de la vida), supresión del encanto de la pasión, ingreso libre, semianárquico de la mujer en expansiones de íntima amistad con varios: todo esto produce esterilidad, desencanto y hombres con faldas .

(Climbing mountains, suppressing her difference, athletic agility, flattening her breasts [mysterious fountains of life], suppressing the de-

lights of passion, and freely and anarchically engaging in intimate friendships with men: all this produces sterility, ugliness, and men in skirts .)^[2]

Male novelists, though ostensibly sympathetic, represented the new woman as inevitably doomed to failure and unhappiness.^[3] There was also a widespread move to revive support for woman's role as wife and mother.

Though in some circles the new woman acquired a certain tenuous cachet, she represented for most people one of the most powerful symbols of decadence in a Europe preoccupied with the concept of degeneration.^[4] And if turn-of-the-century Peninsular writers unanimously rejected the new woman, they shared an ideal of a New Spain, "otra España" (another Spain), in the title of Maeztu's 1899 work, populated by the "new men" envisioned by the Krausists. There was widespread agreement amongst those who wrote about national issues during the last decade of the nineteenth century that Spain was in chronic decline and needed "regenerating":

Degenerada es en gran parte nuestra literatura, ligera, alegre, inmoral, cuando no desenfrendada, y causa de relajación, en algunos casos, de las costumbres: degenerada nuestra fuerza militar . . . ; degenerada una parte de nuestro clero . . . ; degenerada en algunos establecimientos la enseñanza, reducida a un mercantilismo sin frenos.

(Our literature is for the most part a decadent one, lightweight, hedonistic, immoral, and often lascivious, and sometimes responsible for the decline in values: our military strength has declined . . . ; part of our clergy is corrupt . . . ; in some of our schools education has been reduced to nothing more than uncontrolled materialism.)^[5]

Like this writer, the wide array of thinkers who participated in the regenerationist movement, such as Joaquín Costa, Macías Picavea, and Lucas Mallada, portrayed Spain as ailing and decadent and preached authoritarian remedies. Costa popularized the notion that the country needed—as Galdós's hysterical feminist Tristana did—the "política quirúrgica" of a "cirujano de hierro" (surgical policies of an iron surgeon). Tuñón de Lara argues that the regenerationist movement voiced the discontent of the middle and lower strata of the bourgeoisie with the aristocratic and upper-middle-class oligarchy of the Restoration.^[6] The regenerationists themselves indirectly acknowledged a further class opponent, in their elitist championing of

a "revolution from above" which, they argued, would act as a "lightning rod" to neutralize working-class revolutionary leanings.^[7] Reading regenerationist writings of the turn of the century, one might think that the question of gender was largely invisible to these men, since it barely appears among all the reforms urged. In fact, however, gender, along with class and race, figures in crucial ways in the discourse of turn-of-the-century regenerationism, which often took on prefascist characteristics. Costa, for example, equated Spain's decadence with feminization, charging that Spain was a nation of women or eunuchs, while César Silió used the now infamous crowd theories of Gustave Le Bon in order to support the messianic call for a heroically virile "Hombre" to lead the imbecilic masses out of their stupor.^[8] Macías Picavea and Costa also used racial concepts such as "Germanization" and "Africanization" to explain what they saw as the denaturalization and sickness of their race. Costa wrote that "Yo me inclino a pensar que la causa de nuestra inferioridad y de nuestra decadencia es étnica" (I am inclined to believe that the reason for our inferiority and decline is ethnic).^[9]

Lucas Mallada devoted some telling pages in Los males de la patria (1890) to the part that women had in the general decline: women were forgetting their mission, while feminine fancy and lujo were being encouraged by a defective education that did not equip them with domestic skills.^[10] The later work of Galdós, which is indirectly infused with regenerationist discourse and ideals, follows Mallada's line of approach. Women assume a central role in Galdós's depiction of the middle-class project to regenerate society. As class conflicts and dissatisfactions intensified and the petty bourgeoisie began to feel squeezed out of a power system that privileged the alliance between the rich industrialists and the aristocratic landowners, the ideology of domesticity received a sudden boost in Galdós's work. The image of naturally domestic, loving, hard-working womanhood resurfaced with some of its early-nineteenth-century intensity as the rallying cry and proselytizing vision of a middle class once more defending its existence and advancing its claim to social power.

The closing decade of the nineteenth century marks a transition to yet another phase in Galdós's career; his election to Spain's Academia Real in 1889 established him among the contemporary canonical figures of the day (even though he did not formally enter the royal academy until several years later), and his writing thereafter began

to evolve distinctively new forms and themes. Moving away from realist narrative, Galdós began to experiment with a hybrid form, part novel and part drama, which he called the novela dialogada ; his first attempt produced the widely acclaimed novel of adultery, Realidad (1889). In the following decade, Galdós became immersed in writing dramas, first adapting Realidad for the stage in 1892 and completing twenty-three more plays over the remainder of his career. Along with the switch in genres came a transformation in the subject matter, structural alignments, representational strategies, narrative resolutions, and ideological implications of his work. Despite his declaration to the Academia Real in 1897 that the novel's function was mimetic, to be an "imagen de la vida," Galdós's later novels rarely pretend to be disinterested reflections of contemporary society, acting instead as parables with regenerationist overtones.^[11] The current of didactic utopianism in Galdós's later fiction is in strong contrast to the ludic refusal to take sides frequently seen in his earlier works.

So prominent and forceful are the heroines of the novelas dialogadas and the drama of the 1890s that some scholars have incautiously described them as new women, welcoming them as evidence of Galdós's fin-de-siècle conversion to feminism.^[12] My concern is that the novelistic and critical celebration of these characters' strength has overshadowed the anti-emancipationist agendas of the novels themselves. Close attention to the way that the representation of gender dovetails with the novels' avowed class objectives makes it much harder to sustain the thesis that these novels are aligned with any feminist project.

The Novelas Dialogadas : La Loca De La Casa and El Abuelo

La loca de la casa (1892), completed only a few months after Tristana , elaborates a contrapuntal structure of dichotomies that Galdós was to employ again and again, in slightly modified forms, in successive novels and plays thereafter. The work is structured around a number of binary oppositions that were frequently explored in nineteenth-century texts. Of paramount importance in this novel is the opposition between the ángel and the loca (madwoman) de la casa to which we shall turn shortly, but a number of others are also at work, including such gendered pairs of concepts as imagination versus reason,

spirituality versus materialism, and the class opposition between the aristocrat and the tradesman. The novel follows the fortunes of a wealthy family fallen upon hard times. Their problems would fall away if their model daughter, Gabriela, would agree to marry the greedy and vulgar Pepet Cruz, a nouveau riche who was once a servant in the household. But Gabriela, who is engaged to an aristocrat, cannot bring herself to make such a sacrifice. The situation is saved by her sister Victoria, the loca de la casa of the title, a would-be nun, who voluntarily renounces her mystical vocation to offer herself to Cruz in her sister's place. Victoria subsequently succeeds in converting her boorish husband into an acceptable middle-class husband and member of society, thus redeeming both her family and her spouse. She finds her true vocation in wife- and motherhood and assistance with the family bookkeeping.

This novel strives to convince us that it has inverted the value of the antinomy of the madwoman and the angel. The expression "la loca de la casa," as Marvellen Bieder reminds us, used to be synonymous with the imagination and thus stood by extension for female frivolousness, capriciousness, and fantasies. It was one of the negative counterparts of the angel, the self-denying, orderly, restrained woman.^[13] In this text, atypically, it is the romantic madwoman, Victoria, and not the angel, Gabriela, who commits the act of self-sacrifice necessary to save the family. However, the premium on angelic conduct is ultimately reinscribed rather than discredited in this text. La loca de la casa traces the metamorphosis of its heroine from lonely and misguided mysticism to happy domesticity. While it was her morbid fantasy that initially drew her to the notion of sacrifice, her self-immolating act in marrying Cruz becomes a rite of passage in her therapeutic extirpation of fancy and her recuperation as the industrious housewife of bourgeois ideology. In nineteenth-century mythology, the New Testament ideal of Mary, the dreamer, was supplanted by Martha, the home-loving, practical woman. Galdós's text also suggests that Mary must, for her own sake and that of society, sacrifice her dreams and become a Martha.

When Victoria gives up her religious vocation in order to marry, she is converted to the bourgeois world vision. In the antithetical terms of the times, she gives up a "poetic" vision of life for a "prosaic" one. She tells her father what she has come to believe:

que Dios no quiere que yo sea mártir, que fué una chiquillada pensar en tormentos horribles, y que mi destino es una vida pacífica y monótona, labrando sin cesar aquel campo estéril, para obtener de él, poquito a poco, frutos de piedad y hacer algún bien a los que me rodean. Mis aspiraciones se achican; pero son quizás más prácticas. (474)

(that God doesn't wish me to be a martyr, that it was childish of me to think of terrible sufferings, and that my destiny is to lead a peaceful, monotonous life, ceaselessly working my poor soil so that little by little it will yield the fruits of piety, so that I can do some good to those around me. My dreams have shrunk; but perhaps they are more practical.)^[14]

Her practice of this new creed involves a wifely struggle to kindle what Angel del Río terms a spark of goodness in her husband's selfish soul.^[15] She makes it her mission to redeem her husband from his blind worship of money. She prevails upon him to conform to bourgeois notions of piety by providing charity for the spendthrift marchioness of Malavella and by financing the luxury construction of a chapel. Like Cruz del Aguila with Torquemada, Victoria transforms Pepet, raising him from the status of despised upstart into a respected member of the middle classes, from a peasant into a gentleman. The novel, which is laden with allusions to Pepet as an animal and a subject of transformational processes, bears a great resemblance to the myth of the beauty and the beast, which was widely republished in illustrated editions for a nineteenth-century Europe fascinated by the concept of feminine power to effect metamorphoses in men.

Pepet and Victoria come to share a strong work ethic, compounded with the values of thrift, family, domesticity, pragmatism, and charity to the needy. Their marriage is presented as one to be emulated as a paradigmatically middle-class relationship of companionate affection in which the wife holds the moral and the husband the material authority. Like many wives of small businessmen in the early phases of industrialization, Victoria contributes to the family enterprise from within the household by working on the business accounts and keeping house.^[16] The novel endorses female strength and imagination only within the bounds of bourgeois marriage; like Lucas Mallada's Los males de la patria (1890), this work attacks fantasía (the fancy) as one of the ailments of which the protagonist, like the

nation, must be cured. The quixotic Victoria, "la otra, la beata, esa romántica de la fe, esa histérica, visionaria" (the other one, the sanctimonious one, so romantic in her belief, that hysterical woman who sees visions [451]), as she is pejoratively labelled at the beginning of the novel, must be cured of her "mad" fancy, which leads her to disdain marriage and the family; the ritual of self-offering returns her to a normative path as a domestic angel: "la loca de la casa vuelve a la razón y se casa con Pepet" (the madwoman in the house has come to her senses and is getting married to Pepet [454]). The sacrificial abandonment of fantasy through marriage is necessary for the utopic resolution of the novel, in which the heroine's redemption allows her to redeem others. At the end of the novel Victoria can truthfully tell her husband of her own sanctification: "soy tu ángel bueno" (I am your good angel [484]). She is symbolically the matrix of the new class that will redeem Spain, since she carries the child produced by their union of pueblo and aristocracy. Thus, in this work, the union of working-class man and domestic woman generates the future middle class that is to save the country from aristocratic degeneracy and working-class revolution alike. Pepet declares that he intends to generate offspring who will be "robustos, sanotes, para que aventajen a estas generaciones tísicas" (robust and healthy, so they'll surpass these generations of sickly weaklings [435]). His remark provides a quirky echo of the eugenics movements which were on the rise in Europe at that time. Characteristically, Galdós's novel inverts the basic binarism of eugenics: according to Francis Dalton, who coined the term eugenics in 1883, improvement of the race was to be achieved by arranged marriages between gifted men and wealthy women; in La loca de la casa , the gender terms of this equation are switched, since it is Pepet who is rich and Victoria who is distinguished.^[17]

Gender norms, which were once disrupted and opened up by the schizophrenic narrative presentation in Fortunata y Jacinta , are reconstituted as natural in La loca de la casa . The male and female protagonists function as paradigms of the sex roles that Victorian thinkers believed to be universal categories: Pepet stands for reason, strength, acquisitiveness, and Victoria for imagination, feeling, intuition, morality. His role is to make money; hers, to support him, to redeem him from too unthinking a materialism, and to do good around her.^[18]

Galdós's turn-of-the-century work invites its readers to discard the passive, vapid heroines of Victorian literature as misrepresenta-

tions of woman's angelic nature. It does not disavow the ideal of women as redeeming soul of the family, however. The modern Galdosian angel of the house—foreshadowed in Camila of Lo prohibido —is no fragile, decorous young lady but intelligent, determined, practical, hard-headed—while continuing to be faithful, self-denying, inspirational, and utterly devoted to husband and family.

El abuelo (1897) replays the theme of the discovery of natural femininity in the less conventionally angelic of two women. In this nineteenth-century Spanish version of King Lear , the ageing count of Albrit spends the novel trying to decide which of his two granddaughters he prefers—the delicate, fragile Nell or the down-to-earth, robust Dolly. He knows one of them must be the illegitimate offspring of his cruel and hypocritical daughter-in-law, Lucrecia, a heartless, promiscuous society vamp whose behaviour is partly attributed in the novel to her foreign (Irish) origins. Albrit is convinced that virtue is the product of breeding. The good woman, he assumes, will be the aristocratic one; his legitimate heiress will reveal herself by her good conduct. In fact the aristocrat of the two is not a virtuous woman. Nell, who is by blood the true heiress, turns out to be cold, hypocritical, and unloving, just like her mother, while Dolly, her naturally domestic sister, is ironically the one conceived out of wedlock. It is Dolly who loves to cook and clean and nurture others, and she who rescues Albrit when he wanders deranged on the heath. In the end Albrit casts off his aristocratic granddaughter in order to spend the rest of his days with his devoted Dolly, whose Ibsenian name becomes more and more significant as the novel progresses along its anti-Ibsenian route. In its clear-cut opposition between the heartless, immoral aristocrat and the loving, family-centred bourgeoise, Galdós's novel comes very close to the stock in trade of Angela Grassi and the sentimental novelists whose representations of domestic womanhood had been working to enshrine bourgeois values in the heart of the nation since the middle of the century.

The theme of necessary conversion to domesticity predominates in most of Galdós's plays of the fin de siècle, particularly La de San Quintín (1894), Voluntad (1895), and Mariucha (1903). Each features a willful, stubborn heroine who must sacrifice her personal desires and social aspirations for the good of the family and who achieves transformation through marriage into a model woman. The heroines embrace their role as worker-within-the-home, even though two

(Rosario of San Quintín and María of Mariucha ) are aristocrats; they all participate in the family business as bookkeepers and advisers. Each of these women ultimately adopts a bourgeois stance, actively collaborating in managing, converting, and maximizing the family fortunes. Only one of the heroines—María of Mariucha —breaks off relations with her own family, but only because of their intransigently aristocratic viewpoint. She founds a new family unit, based on thrift, hard work, and domesticity, with León.

The women protagonists of these dramas display great strength and decisiveness, taking a central role in regenerating the family unit from within. But despite this fact, and even though the texts themselves use the term "mujer nueva" to describe their heroines, these works in fact appropriate the vocabulary of feminism for their own nonfeminist ends, using a similar tactic to the Catholic women's movement that grew up at the beginning of the twentieth century.^[19] Galdosian new women are defined in terms of their iconoclastic attitudes to class rather than gender. They reject decadent aristocratic values and life-styles to adopt those of the commercial bourgeoisie. They restore family fortunes, in contrast to the plethora of novelistic cursis and spendthrifts who ape aristocratic habits and waste money. Galdós's heroines use their talents to work within the family or marital home at traditionally feminine activities—making flowers, selling dresses, doing the accounts. They function as the private side of the bourgeois couple. Their role is to redeem society by espousing and promoting middle-class ideals. In La de San Quintín Galdós repeatedly uses a domestic metaphor—the mixing of ingredients for rosquillas (doughnuts)—for the mixing of the upper classes with the lower, a process of intermarriage, led by women, which he presented as vital to the nation's health. In gender terms, the characters of the fin-de-siècle Galdós texts are not radical innovations. In keeping with the novels' political aim of promoting the lower middle class as the saviour of society, they re-enshrine an ideology of feminine abnegation and love and woman's relative destiny which was, by then, under attack.

The nonfemmist and indeed antifeminist implications of Galdós's later work are particularly clear in Electra (1901), a play whose deeply conservative position on gender passed unnoticed at the time of its appearance, when its anticlericalism caused riots on the streets of Spain. The play was heralded by the young members of the genera-

tion of 1898 as radically liberal and held up as a banner for the new society: "Yo contemplo en esta divina. Electra ," wrote Maeztu, "el símbolo de la España rediviva y moderna. . . . Saludemos la nueva religión: Galdós es su profeta; el estruendo de los talleres, su himno" (In this divine work, Electra , I envision the symbol for a resuscitated, modernized Spain. . . . Let us hail the new religion: Galdós is its prophet; the din of factories, its hymn).^[20] Yet the play's thesis as regards women is anything but progressive or libertarian. The heroine, initially an infantile, frivolous creature, metamorphoses under the pedagogic attentions of her paternalistic fiancé Máximo into a model little woman, "un angelito cocinero" (an angelic little chef [122]), who plays mother to his children, lovingly cooks his meals, and cleans his house.^[21] The insubordination which Máximo urges her to practice entails disobeying her guardians in order to marry him. The liberty to choose between marriage and the convent is, as Librada Hernández points out, the extent of feminine "emancipation" in this work.^[22] There are two competing male visions of what it means for woman to be an angel in this play: the conviction of Pantoja, standing for the Church, that it means being a nun, and the view of Máximo, standing for progress, science, and liberalism, that it means being a wife. It is the latter concept that triumphs in the play, as the clerical forces of reaction are resoundingly defeated.

In Electra , as in Shaw's Pygmalion and Galdós's own Fortunata y Jacinta , the truly womanly woman is presented as closer to nature than man, and as ruled by instincts, emotions, and the imagination, a being which needs careful cultivation if it is to bear fruit. Electra, an empty-headed, childish creature, undergoes a redemption in the hands of Máximo, who carefully encourages Electra's domesticity and inclination to marry; the play shows how, under his direction, Electra is transformed into a perfect wife, housekeeper, and mother.^[23] The work suggests that Electra only attains womanly maturity when she acknowledges her irrational, dependent nature and confesses the need for the guiding authority of a husband to shape and direct her. Máximo contemplates with ecstatic yearning the product of his labours: "allí [está] el ideal, allí la divina muñeca, entre pucheros . . . juguetona y risueña" (there's the ideal, there's the divine doll, among her pots and pans . . . playful and smiling [122]). While Shaw acknowledged that Galatea might be irritated by Pygmalion's paternalism, Galdós's play shows no such redeeming irony at the expense

of his hero. As in Doña Perfecta and Casandra , in Electra the angel of the house is central to the play's thesis; it succeeded in igniting anticlericalism by depicting woman's "natural" destiny as loving, domesticated wife and mother tragically thwarted by the clergy and their followers. The play's much-touted critique of angelic behaviour is only a rejection of what it presents as the clergy's perverse desire to force Electra into a convent. Thus Electra's complaint that "quieren anularme, esclavizarme, reducirme a una cosa . . . angelical" (they want to disempower me, to enslave me, to reduce me to an angelical thing [54]) cannot be read as a revolt against the angel of the house. In Electra , as in so much of Galdós's later work, the feminine destiny didactically presented to the reader as revolutionary and new is the product of a masculine liberal agenda rather than the feminist one whose language it appropriates.

Teaching Women

It is widely held that Galdós's work reflects the evolution of his political beliefs across the course of his life from a liberal bourgeois stance towards a prosoclalist position.^[24] Galdós did indeed move to the left at the advent of the twentieth century. In 1886 he had accepted a nomination as "cradle" deputy in Sagasta's "Long Parliament," with what his biographer calls "philosophic resignation" at thus collaborating in the Restoration's parody of democracy; yet twenty years later, he had shed this cynicism and saw politics as a mission.^[25] In 1906 he declared himself a Republican, and by 1907 was once again elected a deputy to the Cortes, although in very different circumstances. In 1909 he became titular head of the executive committee of the Conjunción Republicano-Socialista. In 1912 he went so far as to rhapsodize about socialism, claiming that "Por ahí es por donde llega la aurora" (That is the way the dawn lies).^[26] Yet the paradox, at least from our standpoint at the end of the twentieth century, is that the treatment of gender issues in Galdós's novels becomes more conservative at the very point when the writer himself became more left-wing. In fact, most of the early-twentieth-century male socialists and anarchists in Spain still held to bourgeois gender roles and idealized feminine domesticity. La Emancipación , for example, a socialist weekly, described woman's lot after the projected social rev-

olution: "elevada en consideración y en derechos, entrará a ejercer la función que la naturaleza le ha designado, la de jefe de familia encargada de velar por la educación moral de los hijos, de formar el corazón de éstos, de sembrar en él el germen fecundísimo del amor" (given greater rights and more respect, [she] would begin to fulfil the function nature allotted her, that of head of the family in charge of overseeing the moral education of the children, of moulding their hearts, of sowing in them the fertile seeds of love).^[27]

While Galdós's mature work, written while he was politically in the centre, exhibits an uneasy half-consciousness of gender as a problematical category and explores the tensions between gender and class around which nineteenth-century feminism crystallized, his later work evinces a doctrinaire determination to fix such uncertainties and instabilities. It proposes regeneration of the nation's ills—clericalism, caciquismo (political corruption), poverty, illiteracy, a primitive agriculture, a moribund aristocracy—via unquestioning adherence to bourgeois codes of morality, conduct, and gender. By the early twentieth century, education had become a meeting point for would-be reformers of women's position of all political hues. At this juncture, conservatives and socialists took a fundamentally similar view that the modern woman's mission was the improvement of future generations. Both right- and left-wing commentators, in France as well as Spain, advised women against agitating for political goals such as suffrage, and directed them instead to the mission of educating the next generation, which they presented as a more socially useful, less egotistical, and more effective long-term strategy for improving women's position and the state of the nation in general.^[28]

It was in middle-class women's interest to take the idea of woman's nurturing mission seriously, for it allowed them to expand their sphere beyond the home and even to earn a living, which for many single women was a pressing need. However, political and rhetorical control remained in the patriarchal camp. The turn-of-the-century feminization of certain public institutions such as education and health care paradoxically extended women's sphere into the public domain while leaving intact the ideology of the separate spheres of the sexes. As Michelle Perrot notes, professions such as teaching and nursing were absorbed into the concept of the feminine mission, so that "the model of mother was transposed from the private to the

public sphere: a woman teacher or nurse was seen primarily as a mother, and female professions exploited the notion of feminine devotion and sacrifice."^[29] By endorsing women's role in public life in gendered terms, traditional authorities could countenance and appropriate the changes in employment and behaviour patterns. They could interpret women's public appearance not as a gender revolution but as the demonstration of women's true nature, put to the service of the country. Thus, in 1900, a French public school inspector could affirm without any apparent sense of incongruity the contradictory propositions that it was contrary to nature for a woman to go out and earn a living, but that as teacher, she retained her natural role as a mother.^[30] The young woman as teacher, maternally devoted to her young pupils—often as an apprenticeship for her care of her own children later—was a vision that satisfied gender conservatives while also meeting the growing need for teachers and the need of middle-class women to earn a living respectably.

The last two novels in the contemporary series—fantastic, allegorical works—are informed by this vision. Both El caballero encantado (1909) and La razón de la sinrazón: Fábula teatral absolutamente inverosímil (1915) contain heroines who are teachers. El caballero continues the theme of Galdós's drama of the 1891s. A wealthy high-society couple, Carlos and Cintia, are redeemed from their parasitic and aimless lives by being magically transformed into Gil, a labourer, and Pascuala, a teacher. Their experiences as working people alter their outlook profoundly; the novel ends by returning them to their former existence in Madrid and they make plans to regenerate Spanish society.

The novel is both aggressively didactic and defiantly self-conscious, an apparently contradictory conjunction. It is subtitled Cuento real . . . inverosímil and the narrator calls it a "fábula verdadera y mentirosa" (true and mendacious fable [75]). Like Aesop's fables, it has a pedagogical element, but unlike most didactic literature it is manifestly aware of being a fiction, a tissue of inventions. It flagrantly transgresses genre lines, mixing the naturalistic with the fantastic, novel with drama, realism with metafiction. Galdós, incidentally, had indicated in the prologue to Casandra that he approved of such genre "incest" if it would produce a more virile writing: "Casemos, pues, a los hermanos Teatro y Novela . . . y aguardemos de este feliz entronque lozana y masculina sucesión" (Let's marry the theatre to

its sister the novel . . . and wait for lusty male offspring from this happy coupling [906]).^[31]

While the dream and fantastic elements of El caballero encantado link it to the last novels of the fifth series of the episodios nacionales and seem, like them, to militate against interpretation, it also flaunts before the reader its bitter attack on contemporary society. The social protest is inescapable. There is much in the novel that would lead a deconstructionist to read it as an allegory of the instability of the sign and of the unreadability of the novel as history; it clearly offers a caution against what Diane Urey calls the vain attempt to "make connections between characters and society or characters and symbolic meanings."^[32] Yet the parodic elements are directed against contemporary social conditions just as much as against the reader's attempt to make sense of the text; the novel faces both inside and outside, an example of littérature engagée that is also metafictional.^[33] It is densely populated with intertextual echoes of regenerationist writings. For example, as Mallada does in Los males de la patria , Tarsis denigrates art and literature that do not promulgate capitalistic values: "los chispazos, los resplendores de fuegos fatuos que vemos en literatura, en artes gráficas y en algún otro orden de la vida intelectual, no nos invitan a que trabajemos. Todo nos llama al descanso, a la pasividad, a dejar correr los días sin intentar cosa alguna que parezca lucha con la inercia hispánica" (the sparks and gleams of the will-o'-the-wisp we see in literature, in the arts, and some other areas of intellectual life don't encourage us to work. Everything invites us to be inactive, to be passive, to let the days go by without trying to do anything that would seem like a struggle against Hispanic inertia [98]).^[34]

El caballero encantado consciously inverts elements of the plot of Cervantes's Don Quijote . The hero is the enchanted knight from whose point of view the narrative is presented. The novel follows him on an odyssey around rural Spain. But whereas don Quijote's enchantment, under the spell of excessive reading of chivalric romances, consists in falsely imagining "real" working people to be infinitely more noble and interesting than they are, Galdós's hero, who is magically transformed by the author writing, comes to appreciate the "truth" that working-class characters are infinitely more interesting and worthy than the upper-class acquaintances of their former "real" life. Galdós's novel, like Cervantes's, is focused on the masculine pursuit of an elusive feminine figure, but unlike Dulcinea, the heroine of El

caballero is much more attractive in her imaginary and magical lower-class incarnation as the struggling young teacher Pascuala than as her earlier self, a gentlewoman.

The novel contains another important female "character," if the term can be applied to a fantastic construct: the mother, the spirit of Spain, reminiscent of the muse of Spanish history who appears variously in the last four episodios nacionales as Mariclío, Clío, and Madre Mariana. The mother, a novelistic incarnation of the eternal feminine, also represents "nuestro ser castizo, el genio de la tierra, as glorias pasadas y desdichas presentes, la lengua que hablamos" (our real national character, the spirit of the land, of past glories and present misfortunes, the language we speak [173]). She is wise, loving, maternal, but also enigmatic, unknowable, and constantly changing guises, a will-o'-the-wisp. It is she who is credited with decreeing and engineering the magical transformation of the lovers to redeem them so that they can, together, found a new Spain. She is the source of absolute wisdom. The literary history she represents is that of the male canon, seen in the text as a series of allusions to Cervantes, the Cantar de mio Cid , Gonzalo de Berceo, and Larra's pseudonym, "el pobrecito hablador" (152, 290). The mother plays an angelic role, allowing Gil to sleep the night in her lap and permitting herself to be chained and force-marched across the country as a convict, because "no podré ser redentora si no soy mártir" ([can't be a redemptrix if I'm not a martyr [308]). The mother's diagnosis of the nation is that it needs compulsive remasculinizing therapy. Abulia (lack of willpower), inertia, and empty rhetoric, she declares in terms similar to Ganivet's, are feminine vices with which Spain is hopelessly infected: "'los hechos son varones, las palabras son hembras' . . . cuando las palabras, o sean as féminas, no están bien fecundadas por la voluntad, no son más que un ocioso ruido. Y aquí verás señalado el vicio capital de los españoles de tu tiempo, a saber: que vivís exclusivamente la vida del lenguaje" ("deeds are male, words are female" . . . when words or women aren't properly inseminated by the will, they're no more than useless noise. And here you can see the main vice of the Spaniards today: namely, that you live exclusively off language [150–51]). The mother's vision for the redeemed Spain is a paternalistic revolution from above, not below: "no creas que mi ejemplaridad consiste en volver la tortilla , como dice el vulgo, haciendo a los ricos pobres y a los pobres ricos: no. Eso sería trocar los; términos de desigualdad" (don't think my examples consist of "tossing the omelette," as they say,

making the rich poor and the poor rich: no. That would be to invert the terms of the inequality [141]). Instead, the novel suggests that what is needed is a bourgeois revolution in moral attitudes and education, fostering thrift, hard work, and domesticity, led by the ideal man and the ideal woman.

The couple under redemption, Carlos and Cintia, are in their aristocratic lives the bad gender stereotypes of the nineteenth century: a bored señorito and a frivolous society flirt. In their new lives, they become archetypes of their sexes: Gil is strong, brave, daring, and passionate. It is he who is the real centre of the redemption and of narrative presentation. He constantly engages in exploits—sexual, valorous, or work-related. Pascuala's attributes are beauty, sexual control, natural grace and gravity, and maternal love. While Gil enjoys the frankly sexual advances of the lower-class Eusebia, he idealizes the fact that Pascuala contains desire—both his and her own: "Si él, Ilevado de su fogoso temple, acortaba la distancia honesta, ella le contenía con ademán grave, y con su inefable sonreír, que valía por un mandato" (Whenever, because of his fiery nature, he overstepped the bounds of propriety, she would stop him with a grave gesture, and with her sublime smile, which was the same as an order [170–71]). Pascuala fits the contemporaneous ideal of middle-class feminine sexuality, whereby "woman's virtuosity lay in her containment, like the plant in the pot, limited and domesticated, sexually controlled, not spilling out into spheres in which she did not belong nor being overpowered by the 'weeds' of social disorder."^[35] Although later in the novel the lovers elope and spend a few nights in an inn, the consummation of their affair is glossed over by a metafictional device (261). They return to Madrid to become the ideal couple of the future: sexually liberated by their extramarital union but still heterosexual and monogamous.

Cintia is promising material for redemption, since she is a Latin American, representing the New World rather than the inbred Spanish aristocracy. She is also vigorous and beautiful, compared to the plain and sickly noblewoman with the foreign name, whom Tarsis was destined to marry in Madrid: "Mary ostentaba un seno enteramente piano, tabla rasa por la cual resbalaban con desconsuelo las miradas de amor . . . gentileza de palo vestido o de palmera tísica, y de añadidura un habla impertinente arrastrando las erres" (Mary had a chest as flat as a board, a smooth surface over which the lover's gaze slid disappointedly . . . a dressed-up stick of an aristocrat, who

looked like a sick palm tree, who had a peevish voice and drawled her r's [79]). By comparison, Cintia-Pascuala is a lively, young Spanish beauty, whose "incomparables facciones correspondían a la forma encomiástica con que el mozo las había descrito" (flawless features lived up to the praises of the boy who had described her [164]).

Cintia-Pascuala is a licensed primary schoolteacher. Her attitude to her work is presented as an extension of her maternal nature. "Las quiero," she says of her girl pupils, "y ellas me quieren a mí . . . , creo yo que tanto como quieren a sus madres . . . , tal vez más" (I love them, and they love me, I think almost as much as their mothers, maybe more [222]). After three weeks in her first job in a poverty-stricken village, she is desperate to leave, but when Gil tries to elope with her the children emerge, in a dream sequence, to prevent her leaving. She protests: "No me dejan . . . Vete, Gil . . . Ya ves, no puedo . . . Esclava soy de esta menudencia" (They won't let me. Go away, Gil. You see, I can't. I belong to these little ones [229]). She inspires Gil to become a teacher also. Cintia-Pascuala evolves from a maternal teacher into a pedagogic mother. It is she who plans a utopic mission for the couple as educators: "Construiremos veinte mil escuelas aquí y allí, y en toda la redondez de los estados de la Madre. Daremos a nuestro chiquitín una carrera: le educaremos para maestro de maestros" (We will build twenty thousand schools here and there, all over the Mother's domains. We will give our little boy a career: we will raise him to teach teachers [344]). As in El abuelo , this novel offers the moral that the middle-class view of the world is the right one, that "en los tiempos que corren no hay más riquezas que la virtud y el trabajo, y más vale así" (these days the only wealth worth having is virtue and hard work, and that's the way it should be [868]).

La razón de la sinrazón , a short novel in dialogue, was written in 1915, during the first years of World War One; Galdós, by this time almost seventy-two years old and blind, was the querulous beneficiary of a faltering national subscription fund that did not succeed in rescuing him from financial straits. The title of the work evokes Galdós's longstanding love of contradiction, paradox, and antithesis; the work is, like its predecessor, a fantastic parable. Atenaida, a model young woman, "agraciada, esbelta, vestida con modesta corrección provinciana" (graceful, slim, and wearing a modest, proper outfit as befitted a girl from the provinces [1135]) goes to work as a governess for a wealthy family in Farsalia-Nova.^[36] She is reacquainted there

with Alejandro, her former lover who is now a widower. A self-made business man, Alejandro has fallen victim to "la muerte crematística" (financial death) of luxury, and has been driven to ruin by his uncontrollable spending. In an episode reminiscent of Jane Eyre , Alejandro pretends that his recently deceased angelic wife, "toda ternura y abnegación" (all tenderness and self-sacrifice), has been reincarnated as a madwoman, only to find his fiction comes true. His wife returns as a demonic inverse of her former self, "impertinente, irascible" and "varonil" (peevish, irascible, and manly [1157]). In contrast, Atenaida is a model of right-thinking behaviour. Devoted to helping others, she cannot be tempted by el lujo or seduction, but is a serious, grave, loving counselor to Alejandro, whom she wishes to redeem and return to her reign of reason. She proclaims herself the source of the values of work, energy, and love: "El trabajo continuo que ves en mí es creación, radiación de energías. Yo estudio y enseño a los que no saben; yo produzco elementos de vida. A esta acción continua añade un sentimiento poderoso; el amor que te tengo, que sobrevive inalterable a . . . todas tus inconsecuencias y frialdades" (The work you see me doing all the time is creative; it radiates my energy. I study and I teach those who know nothing; I produce life. To this continual employment you can add a powerful feeling; the love I feel for you, which outlives . . . all your fickleness and coldness without changing [1169]).

When Alejandro becomes a minister, Atenaida exercises feminine influence, in the classic nineteenth-century feminine mode, from behind the scenes. She draws up a reformist agrarian law which he passes off as his own. Atenaida's bill is received as so scandalous that Alejandro is forced to resign and unreason takes over the world, eclipsing the sun and producing a cataclysm. All the men, terrified, look to Atenaida. She and Alejandro elope together through the storm, and they resolve to adopt working-class clothes. Alejandro voices their regenerationist doctrine: "la virtud verdadera y permanente consiste no sólo en el cumplimiento estricto de los deberes, sociales, sino en la diligencia, en la actividad, en el trabajo constante" (true, lasting virtue lies not only in strictly fulfilling one's duties in society, but in diligence, occupation, constant hard work [1177]).

The pair encounter a model for their relationship—the housekeeper (who once was a schoolteacher) and the priest, living together in perfect if very unorthodox domestic partnership—who befriend

them. Like the most respectable of housewives, Atenaida and the housekeeper are lovingly if vaguely portrayed busily working away at "domésticas funciones" (domestic chores [1179]). The couple reach their journey's end at the idyllically beautiful land of truth where they visit the also symbolically named patriarch don Juan de Valtierra. Alejandro paints an enthusiastic picture of their future: "Aquí practicaremos la verdadera santidad, que consiste en cultivar la tierra para extraer de ella los elementos de vida, y cultivar los cerebros vírgenes, plantel de las inteligencias que en su madurez han de ser redentoras" (Here we will practice true saintliness, which consists in farming the land to bring forth life from it, and cultivating virgin brains, the seedbed of minds that when they grow up will be a redemptive force [1181–82]). This formula for right-thinking conduct in the Spain of the future is remarkably similar to Costa's 1901 speech in Salamanca, republished in 1914, in which he claimed, "El honor y la seguridad de la Nación . . . están en manos de los que aran la tierra, de los que cavan la viña, de los que plantan el naranjo . . . de los que hacen los hombres y los ciudadanos educando a la niñez" (The honour and safety of the Nation . . . are in the hands of those who plough the earth, who hoe the vines, who plant the orange trees . . . those who make men and citizens by educating children).^[37]

The couple live out Costa's motto of escuela y despensa (education and food), for after marrying and acquiring a farm and a school, Alejandro becomes a farmer while Atenaida is the local school-mistress: "Yo cultivo la tierra, y Atenaida, los cerebros de estas tiernas criaturas" (I till the land and Atenaida tends the brains of these young creatures [1183]). The sexual division of labour is fundamental to the regenerated Spain, as is the assumption of different psychological and emotional realms for the sexes. Alejandro worships his wife as a redeeming angel whose goodness and moral sense have cured him of lujo and abulia : "en mi corazón tienes tu altar. Eres la perfección humana; por tu constante actividad y labor infatigable, vives irradiando energía y comunicándola a todos los seres que te rodean. . . . Tú me sacaste del pantano de la mentira y de los convencionalismos sociales" (I have made an altar for you in my heart. You are perfection itself; by your continual and tireless work, you give off energy all the time and you pass it to all those around you. . . . You pulled me out of the swamp of lies and suffocating conventions [1181]).

The last scene of the work is a vignette of the couple in their new home, the fields in the background and Atenaida in the foreground joyfully contemplating the crowd of noisy children in the school gateway. Atenaida is given an enormously idealized projection as the redemptrix of man and society. She is a symbolic, larger than life figure who reminds us of the Statue of Liberty. The Atenaida of the closing pages is seen through Alejandro's eyes as a sublime beauty: "el cuerpo estatuario y arrogante la actitud; imperioso el gesto; circuida la hermosa cabeza con un resplandeciente nimbo de plata" (her statuesque body struck a proud pose; her gesture was imperious; her lovely head was surrounded by a shining silver halo [1182]).

While the equation of woman with reason initially suggests to the reader a transgression of bourgeois gender categories, in fact this assumption turns out to be erroneous. The associations that the narrative draws on are conventional for all their apparent novelty. The narrative presents the ideal woman as wife, mother, and teacher redeeming man from the lujo , corruption, promiscuity, and ignorance of urban society, which are equated in the novel with unreason. The novel's closing vision is of the liberal bourgeoisie triumphant: Atenaida, a hieratic figure, pronounces that lower-middle-class values—work, fidelity, marriage, the sexual division of labour and of mental and physical attributes—are the basis of human happiness:

(Avanzando con solemne arrogancia como personificación de una idea sublime .) Ved en esta mujer humilde el símbolo de la Razón triunfante. (Alejandro y el Cura la contemplan extáticos; y ella, soberanamente hermosa, pronuncia las últimas palabras .) Somos los creadores del bienestar humano . . . (El rostro de Atenaida aparece coronado de estrellas .) (1183)

([Advancing proudly and solemnly like a sublime idea personified .] "Behold in this poor woman the symbol of reason triumphant." [Alejandro and the priest stare at her in ecstasy; and she, supremely beautiful, pronounces the last words .] "We are the creators of human happiness." [Atenaida's face appears to be crowned with stars .])

Galdós's narrative fiction demonstrates the intimate and mutually responsive nature of the relation between gender and class in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In the early years of the Restoration, hostility mingled with attraction to the proselytizing zeal of bourgeois society surfaced in Galdós's work in the self-aborted questioning of the natural and universal status of bourgeois

gender categories. Later, as the bourgeoisie came to seem less secure thanks to its adulteration by alliance with the landed aristocracy and the threat posed to its power by the rumblings of working-class militancy, the reinforcement of a unifying gender ideology centred on the deeply attractive if increasingly anachronistic vision of woman as a timeless haven of maternal love came to play a role of paramount importance in Galdós's novels. Tellingly, it is only in his fantastic novels that women are envisaged as extradomestic professionals or allotted any enduring power. Perhaps understandably, it is the uneasy instability of the mid-Restoration novels that continues to attract modern readers. The late novels' authoritarian certainties about gender ring somewhat hollow to readers grappling with their own ambivalence about the Victorian vision of home and sex roles, which continues to cast its powerful spell over late-twentieth-century society.