1. The distinction was one that even contemporary commentators were making. "Gregorio" Martínez Sierra wrote in a perceptive 1905 essay on Galdós that while his first works were didactic, the author had later become a "sutil y sagaz escudriñador de complicadas psicologías" (subtle and wise observer of complicated psychologies) ("Benito Pérez Galdós," in Motivos [Paris: Garnier, 1905], 39-40).

2. Orlando, "Revista literaria: Lo prohibido de Pérez Galdós," Revista de España 104, no. 414 (1885): 299.

3. One late-eighteenth-century tract went so far as to propose a revival of the sumptuary laws, in the form of a national female uniform, to deal with the growing problem of feminine luxury, which it saw as a threat to the national economy through the acquisition of clothing from foreign rather than domestic sources ( Discurso sobre el luxô de las señoras, y proyecto de un trage nacional [Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1788]).

4. Bridget Aldaraca, El ángel del hogar: Galdós and the Ideology of Domesticity in Spain (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 1991), 88. Aldaraca's study appeared after I had written my own analysis of the topic of el lujo .

5. Francisco Alonso y Rubio, La mujer bajo el punto de vista filosófico, social y moral: Sus deberes en relacion con la familia y la sociedad (Madrid: Gamayo, 1863), 148.

6. Terry Lovell, Consuming Fiction (London: Verso, 1987), 30.

7. Werner Sombart, Luxury and Capitalism (1917; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 171.

8. Alonso y Rubio, La mujer , 149.

9. Angel María Segovia, ''Del lujo," fourth lecture in Conferencias Dominicales sobre la educacion de la mujer (Madrid: Rivadeneyra, 1869), 12.

10. María del Pilar Sinués de Marco, "El lujo," Flores y Perlas 1, no. 2 (15 March 1883): 1.

11. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 5, 62.

12. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 229. Krafft-Ebing's influential Psychopathia Sexualis (1889), for example, catalogued a number of new perversions such as nymphomania and homosexuality. Medical practitioners in the 1870s attempted to control excessive desire in "oversexed" women by constructing devices to prevent masturbation and performing ovariotomies or clitoridectomies on such patients.

13. Laqueur, Making Sex , 232.

14. Alda Blanco and Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, introduction to their edition of Benito Pérez Galdós: La de Bringas (Madrid: Cátedra, 1985), 44.

15. This reading is most powerfully presented by Peter Bly, Galdós's Novel of the Historical Imagination (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1983), 66-67.

16. Aldaraca, El ángel del hogar , 91.

17. Aldaraca, El ángel del hogar , 175.

18. Aldaraca, El ángel del hogar , 105.

19. This point has been cogently made by Luisa-Elena Delgado; "Más estragos que las revoluciones: Lo ornamental como construcción de la feminidad en La de Bringas ," paper given at the Midwest Modern Language Association convention, St. Louis, November 1992. Delgado also links the concepts of feminine disorder and revolution, as I do here.

20. Aldaraca, El ángel del hogar , 34.

21. The letter in question was printed in La Nación in 1884; in it Galdós is discussing a ball given by the duke and duchess of Fernán-Nuñez (Peter Bly, "From Disorder to Order: The Pattern of Arreglar References in Galdos'[Galdós'] Tormento and La de Bringas ," Neophilologus 62 [1978]: 405).

22. See my essay "Disinheriting the Feminine: Galdós and the Rise of the Realist Novel in Spain," Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 27. no. 2 (1993): 225-48.

23. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 3.

24. Geraldine Scanlon, "Nuevos horizontes culturales: La evolución de la educación de la mujer en España 1868-1900," in Mujer y educación en España, 1868-1975 (Santiago: Universidade de Santiago, 1990), 727.

25. Page numbers refer to Benito Pérez Galdós, El amigo Manso in Obras completas: Novelas , ed. Federico Carlos Sáinz de Robles (Madrid: Aguilar, 1981), vol. 1. Translations are taken from Robert Russell, Our Friend Manso (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

26. La Discusión , 4 December 1857, 3; Angel Pulido, Bosquejos médico-sociales para la mujer (Madrid: Sáiz, 1874), 26.

27. The equation between the model woman and the honeybee was often drawn. In Antonio Pirala's popular book El libro de oro de las niñas (3d ed., Madrid, 1853), for example, the author declares that "lejos de mí la idea de dar á la mujer la educacion escolástica que al hombre; todo lo contrario, debe enseñársela á ser mujer; previsora como la hormiga, laboriosa como la abeja" (I reject the notion of giving a scholarly education to woman as to man; on the contrary, she should be taught to be a woman; prudent as the ant, industrious as the honeybee [59]).

28. Concepción Sáiz, Un episodio national que no escribió Pérez Galdós: La revolución del 68 y la cultura femenina . (Madrid: Victoriano Suárez, 1929), 17.

29. Congreso nacional pedagógico, Actas (Madrid: Hernando, 1882).

30. Joaquín Sánchez de Toca, El matrimonio (Madrid: A. de Carlos é hijo, 1875), 2:14.

31. Scanlon, "Nuevos horizontes culturales," 721-40.

32. Those who argue for a positive reading of Fortunata's trajectory are Stephen Gilman, in "The Birth of Fortunata," Anales Galdosianos 1 (1966): 71-83, and in Galdós and the Art of the European Novel: 1867-1887 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Peter B. Goldman, "Feijoo and Mr Singer: Notes on the aburguesamiento of Fortunata," Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 9 (1982): 105-114; Geoffrey Ribbans, Fortunata y Jacinta (London: Grant and Cutler, 1977); and John H. Sinnigen, "Individual, Class, and Society in Fortunata y Jacinta ," in Galdós Studies II, ed. Robert J. Weber (London: Tamesis, 1974), 49-68. Those who argue the opposing tragic view of the heroine's fate are Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, "Having No Option: The Restoration of Order and the Education of Fortunata,'' in Conflicting Realities: Four Readings of a Chapter by Pérez Galdós (Fortunata y Jacinta, Part III, Chapter IV ), ed. Peter B. Goldman (London: Tamesis, 1984), 13-38; Julio Rodríguez-Puértolas, Galdós: Burguesía y revolución (Madrid: Turner, 1975); and Anthony Zahareas, "El sentido de la tragedia en Fortunata y Jacinta ," Anales Galdosianos 3 (1968): 25-34.

33. Stephen Gilman speaks in "Feminine and Masculine Consciousness in Fortunata y Jacinta " ( Anales Galdosianos 17 [1982]: 63-70) of her "self-proclaimed spiritual metamorphosis" (64), while John Kronik defines an angel as "pure and everlasting spirit" in his essay "Feijoo and the Fabrication of Fortunata" in Conflicting Realities (68); and Sinnigen says that Fortunata is "tied to religious vocabulary on her death" ("Individual, Class, and Society," 66).

34. Page references to the original text are taken from Francisco Caudet's two-volume edition of the novel (Madrid: Cátedra, 1983). Translations are from Agnés Moncy Gullón's Fortunata and Jacinta: Two Stories of Married Women (New York: Viking, 1987). Mercedes López-Baralt's fascinating study, La gestación de Fortunata y Jacinta: Galdós y la novela como re-escritura (Río Piedras: Ediciones Huracán, 1992), shows that there is a marked difference between the alpha and beta manuscripts of the novel: in the alpha version, Jacinta is extremely voluptuous, but in beta she is transformed into the deli-

      cate, doll-like creature of the published version and the emphasis on sexuality has shifted to Fortunata (60-61).

35. One has only to think of Fortunata's first appearance, rapturously eating a slimy raw egg, or Juanito's memory of her nursing pigeon chicks in her bosom. The bird imagery was originally noted by Gilman in "The Birth," and examined in further detail by Roger Utt, " 'El pájaro voló': Observaciones sobre un leitmotif en Fortunata y Jacinta ," Anales Galdosianos 9 (1974): 37-50; by Agnes Moncy Gullón, "The Bird Motif and the Introductory Motif: Structure in Fortunata y Jacinta ," Anales Galdosianos 9 (1974): 51-75; and by Stephen Hart, "Galdós's Fortunata y Jacinta : An 'Inoffensive Hen'?" Forum for Modern Language Studies 22 (1986): 342-53. Marxist critics such as Caudet interpret the bird imagery as symbolizing the oppression of the working-class Fortunata by Juanito and other members of the bourgeoisie (introduction to Fortunata y Jacinta , 81).

36. Ricardo Gullón, "Estructura: La polaridad complementaria," Técnicas de Galdós (Madrid: Taurus, 1980), 144.

37. Harriet S. Turner, "Family Ties and Tyrannies: A Reassessment of Jacinta," Hispanic Review 51 (1983): 19-21.

38. Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (New York: Methuen, 1980), 92.

39. Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, "On 'The Birth of Fortunata,' " Anales Galdosianos 3 (1968): 13-24. One of the semantic quirks of the term mona leads us back to the bird and egg imagery so prevalent in the novel: monas (de Pascua) are cakes baked with whole eggs on top.

40. Padre Nones and Guillermina believe that Fortunata's statement cannot be treated seriously. But Guillermina has, all along, told Fortunata that she is out of her mind whenever she makes statements that threaten the bourgeois status quo, even at points when she is clearly lucid (e.g., 2:490, 508).

41. Blanco Aguinaga, "Having No Option," 32; Caudet, introduction to Fortunata y Jacinta , 69.

42. Villalonga (1:433), Juanito (1:690, 693), and Guillermina (2:251) each liken the lower classes to a cantera (stone quarry) that supplies the raw materials of civilization, a notion seconded here by the narrator: "el pueblo . . . conserva las ideas y los sentimientos elementales en su tosca plenitud, como la cantera contiene el mármol, materia de la forma. El pueblo posee las verdades grandes y en bloque, y a él acude la civilización conforme se le van gastando las menudas, de que vive" (the common people . . . conserve basic ideas and feelings in their raw fullness, just as a quarry contains marble, the material for forms. The pueblo possesses truth in great blocks, and civilization, when it uses up the smaller pieces it lives on, goes back to the pueblo for more [2:251]).

43. See John H. Sinnigen, "Sexo y clase social en Fortunata y Jacinta : Opresión, represión, expresión," Anales Galdosianos 12 (1987): 53-70. Sinnigen points out that even though Jacinta's rebellious fantasies do not damage patriarchal order, the novel's ending celebrates the "feminine values" of relation and connection posited by Nancy Chodorow (64, 66).

44. Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).

45. Susan Kirkpatrick, "More on the Narrator of Fortunata y Jacinta ," Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 9 (1982): 148.