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.