In graduate schools from coast to coast, it has long remained an undisputed tenet that Benito Pérez Galdós, Spain’s foremost novelist of the late nineteenth century, was the creator of a steady series of strong women characters. The common corollary is that his outspoken anticlericalism and liberalism, in later years increasingly socialist in expression, must betoken a progressive feminist outlook.
Catherine Jagoe, in her closely argued study, has convincingly questioned this facile assumption. In rebuttal, she states, “In many Galdós novels we find an oscillation between the idealizing, utopic vision of bourgeois patriarchy which posits women as domestic angel, and a feminist vision of women as caged bird” (p. 11). Galdós, in his self-chosen role of equivocal narrator and observer, is often difficult to pin down with any certainty, a literary Artful Dodger who seeks the best of both characterizations. With singular determination, Jagoe sets about tracking down the contradictions and paradoxes embedded in the texts and seeks to reveal the latent biases.
By 1870, the date of Galdós’ first novels, Spanish women, partly in reaction to the notorious peccadilloes of Queens María Luisa and Isabel II, as well as those of majas with their cortejos (common women with their lovers), were collectively cast in the role of ángel del hogar (angel of the home). They were supposed to be submissive to men and to incorporate the ideal of madre, esposa, e hija. Women were now viewed as radically different from men: emotional, fragile, devout, and nonintellectual. They were assigned the role of guardian angels of bourgeois domestic havens to which their erring husbands could return with full confidence.
This reassuring ideal was increasingly threatened by the rise of a “new woman” who, in her hunger for lujo—excess in both the material and the physical realm— threatened to breach feminine decorum and lead the nation toward moral decadence. A growing misogynist tone is discernible among writers at the end of the century, and Galdós was not immune. A café habitué, the novelist inhabited an allmale world, and his personal library contained many antifeminist books. His later novels in particular depict “flawed angels,” including cases of consumption, cancer, hysteria, and passionate extremes resulting in madness.
Yet in many of his greatest novels — Gloria and Fortunata y Jacinta come immediately to mind—disobedience involving gross breaches of feminine decorum leads to a new definition of the angel role by strong-minded women, veritable “devils in skirts” who are prepared to strike out on their own, at times with their creator’s vacillating approval. Often the dilemma is unsatisfactorily resolved only through the protagonist’s death, or through the stark choice between a loveless marriage or the convent—hardly true emancipation.
As Jagoe shows, the result is far from a strong statement of feminist support on Galdós’ part but rather a series of unresolved contradictions. In her penetrating study, Jagoe makes a convincing reassessment of the novelist’s attitudes toward Spanish women, showing Galdós in a human—all too human—light as a man of his times and prejudices.
