Ambiguous Angels: Gender in the Novels of Galdós

By Catherine Jagoe

The contradictory nature of the work of Benito Pérez Galdós, Spain's greatest modern novelist, is brought to the fore in Catherine Jagoe's innovative and rigorous study. Revising commonly held views of his feminism, she explores the relation of Galdós's novels to the "woman question" in Spain, arguing that after 1892 the muted feminist discourse of his early work largely disappears. While his later novels have been interpreted as celebrations of the emancipated new woman, Jagoe contends that they actually reinforce the conservative, bourgeois model of frugal, virtuous womanhood—the angel of the house.

Using primary sources such as periodicals, medical texts, and conduct literature, Jagoe's examination of the evolution of feminism makes Ambiguous Angels valuable to anyone interested in gender, culture, and narrative in nineteenth-century Europe.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.
The contradictory nature of the work of Benito Pérez Galdós, Spain's greatest modern novelist, is brought to the fore in Catherine Jagoe's innovative and rigorous study. Revising commonly held views of his feminism, she explores the relation of Galdós's n

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520914179

Catherine Jagoe

Catherine Jagoe is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Northern Illinois University.

Book preview

AMBIGUOUS ANGELS

AMBIGUOUS

ANGELS

GENDER IN THE NOVELS

OF GALDÓS

CATHERINE JAGOE

University of California Press

Berkeley ■ Los Angeles ■ London

The Publisher gratefully acknowledges a grant from the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 1994 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jagoe, Catherine.

Ambiguous angels: gender in the novels of Galdós Catherine Jagoe.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-08356-3 (alk. paper)

1. Pérez Galdós, Benito, 1843-1920—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Women in literature. 3. Sex role in literature. I. Title.

PQ6555.Z5J34 1994

863’-5—dc20 93-8458

CIP

Printed in the United States of America 987654321

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

For June and Robin

In those days—the last of Queen Victoria—every house had its Angel. And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room.

—Virginia Woolf

Contents

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Woman’s Mission as Domestic Angel

BOURGEOIS GENDER IDEOLOGY AND THE ÁNGEL DEL HOGAR

WOMEN WRITERS AND THE DOMESTIC IDEAL

PROBLEMS AND PARADOXES

2 Galdós and the Woman Question

GALDÓS'S AFFILIATIONS WITH THE PRENSA FEMENINA

GALDOSIAN REFLECTIONS ON WOMAN'S PLACE

ENGENDERING THE NOVEL: GALDÓS'S VISION OF REALISM

3 Suffering Women

GENDER AND REPRESENTATION IN THE EARLY NOVELS

THE BIRD-ANGEL IN GLORIA

LEÓN ROCH'S WIFE

4 Struggling with the Angel

CONSUMING PASSIONS: LUXURY AND THE SEXUAL POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION IN THE CONTEMPORARY NOVELS

IN SEARCH OF THE IDEAL WOMAN: EDUCATING MANSO

THE ANGEL IN MIND: REREADING FORTUNATA Y JACINTA

5 Gender Trouble

FEMINISM AND THE FIN DE SIÈCLE IN SPAIN

TRISTANA AND THE LEGLESS ANGEL OF VICTORIAN ROMANCE

SEEING THE LIGHT: HALMA'S CONVERSION

6 New Women

DECADENCE AND THE NEW WOMAN

THE NOVELAS DIALOGADAS: LA LOCA DE LA CASA AND EL ABUELO

TEACHING WOMEN

Epilogue

Appendix 1 List of Galdos’s Novels

Appendix 2 LA MISIÓN DE LA MUJER

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the many people whose intellectual contributions and practical assistance helped me to research and write this book. A number of scholars generously shared their work in progress, critiqued sections and drafts of the manuscript, sent hard- to-locate offprints or texts, and, most important of all, provided support and inspiration over the years. I wish to thank in particular, for their comments and enthusiasm at various points along the way, Alison Sinclair (who supervised the genesis of this work as a doctoral dissertation at Cambridge University), Alda Blanco, Jo Labanyi, Chad Wright, Becca Karoff, Maryellen Bieder, Lou Chamon-Deutsch, Bridget Aldaraca, Beth Bauer, Librada Hernandez, Catherine Jaffe, Stephanie Sieburth, Susan Kirkpatrick, Janice jaffe, and Ellen Sapega.

I also wish to express my gratitude to the institutions that provided travel grants which enabled me to carry out research in Spain at the Casa-Museo Pérez Galdós, the Biblioteca Nacional, the Hemeroteca Municipal, and other Madrid archives. Northern Illinois University Graduate School provided me with summer research and travel support for 1989, and the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Philosophical Society funded a further trip to gather more material in Spain in 1992.

Parts of the manuscript have already appeared in substantially similar form as articles. "The Bird-Angel in Gloria" originally appeared in Crítica Hispánica 13, no. 1 (1991) as "Gloria: A Re-Vision; León Roch’s Wife" in Romance Quarterly 39, no. 1 (1992) as "Kraus- ism and the Pygmalion Motif in Galdós’s La familia de León Roch"; and "The Angel in Mind: Rereading Fortunata y Jacinta" in Anales Gal- dosianos 24 (1989) as "The Subversive Angel in Fortunata y Jacinta"

I would like to thank Ned Sibert most of all for his incurable optimism, one of whose many sustaining forms was an unflagging faith that this book would indeed see the light of day.

Introduction

As a feminist cultural critic writing in North America about a Spanish author, Benito Pérez Galdós, I find myself in an ironic double bind: I am offering a rereading of a body of novels whose reputation does not extend to the English-speaking world. Galdós’s works, as well as the century-long tradition of critical interpretations of them, are still largely unknown outside Hispanic culture, despite the existence of a growing number of translations.¹ For some readers of this book, then, a few introductory words about this author may be in order. Benito Pérez Galdós (1843-1920) occupies a leading role in the Spanish literary canon. Between 1867 and his death he produced a prodigious total of seventy-eight novels, in addition to twenty-four plays and a considerable corpus of articles, short stories, and essays. Galdós occupies a place second only to Cervantes in histories of the Spanish novel, which generally cite him as the main proponent of realism in the nineteenth century, one who rivalled or even surpassed his early models, Dickens and Balzac. What these studies usually fail to add is that Galdosian realism is highly complex and ironic, shot through with self-reflexive challenges to the notion of the novel as mirror of society. Galdós experimented with many different genres and produced numerous historical, naturalistic, and dialogic narratives. I have chosen to confine my observations to the most widely studied section of his work, the thirty-two novels that span the period from 1870 to 1915 and are known as the novelas de la primera época (early novels) and the novelas contemporáneas (contemporary novels), in which Galdós set out to provide a broad canvas of life in Spain at the end of the nineteenth century.²

The lack of world recognition afforded Galdós rests on a number of factors, including Spain’s marginalized position in Europe, the freakishly selective nature of the canonization process, and Galdós’s politics. Critical studies of the European novel have tended to focus on a handful of English, French, Russian, and German authors; Spain, it seems, is only lately coming to be accepted as part of Europe. Until recently, Galdós’s work was rarely mentioned by comparatists, with some notable exceptions, such as C. P. Snow.³ Galdós’s leftwing leanings contributed to his being denied national and international honours that should naturally have fallen to him, for his fiercely anticlerical stance earned him the implacable opposition of the Catholic establishment in Spain.⁴ In 1912, for example, conservative lobbyists in the Spanish Royal Academy defeated his nomination for the Nobel prize, and under the Franco regime the majority of his works were relegated to obscurity because of their author’s reputation as a liberal crusader. Although there has been a recent boom in Galdós studies, Galdós scholars continue to labour under disabilities not encountered by other students of canonical nineteenthcentury authors. When this introduction was being written, there was still no good edition of Galdós’s complete works, no comprehensive annotated edition of his correspondence, and no definitive scholarly biography of his life.

The importance of women in Galdós’s novels, as in his life, has become something of a truism. He has acquired a reputation as the creator of more strong women characters than perhaps any other author in Peninsular fiction. The feminocentric nature of his contemporary series in particular has long been recognized; Galdós named a large proportion of these novels after women and located the exploration of the relation between subjectivity and society that is so characteristic of his work primarily in feminine rather than in masculine experience. As Susan Kirkpatrick comments, it is Galdós’s female protagonists who embody for him the most poignant contradictions of consciousness and the world.⁵ Galdós’s novels are undoubtedly important and intriguing material for feminist critics, but they are also much more complex and problematic than has been commonly assumed. Feminist readings of Galdós can no longer continue to be slotted into anthologies and conference panels as the token approach on images of women in a still rather conservative area of Hispanism, but are ineluctably redefining the field of enquiry in various ways. The kind of reading undertaken here has far-reaching implications for the way we perceive and write about Galdós’s themes, subjects, and characters; the way we envisage the overall shape and stages of his work; the conception of the role of the author in relation to his textual productions; and the articulation of the relation of his work to history and to class issues that have traditionally ruled our critical approaches in Galdós studies.

Since feminist scholarship is such a heterogeneous and rapidly evolving field, I would like to begin by outlining the kind of feminist criticism practised here and discussing some of the terms that will be central to this book, such as gender and ideology. Modern feminist criticism long ago outgrew the process of celebrating strong women characters or decrying the lack of them with which others sometimes reductively equated it. It is part of a broad-based interdisciplinary movement that posits gender as a fundamental category of organization and analysis. The notion of gender itself as a problematic category is one of the major advances in feminist theory.⁶ In recent Anglo-American feminist discourse it stands for the social, cultural, and psychological meanings imposed on biological sexual identity, meanings that have historically been construed to serve the political ends of patriarchy by distributing power asymmetrically.⁷ The multiple branches of feminism(s) have very different and in some cases mutually exclusive understandings of how gender is constructed, and therefore of how to transform its operations. Feminist theorists of a primarily poststructuralist and metaphysical orientation tend to ascribe gender to linguistic and psychic determinants. They consider that the crucial arenas of resistance to patriarchy are language and subjectivity: to deconstruct language is to deconstruct gender.⁸ Materialist critics, in contrast—and here I include my own work—see gender as one component in a web of historical processes and social practices where categories such as class, race, sexuality, and nationality all intersect and interact. This form of feminist critique focuses on the ways that gender ideology is inscribed, represented, and reproduced in a variety of cultural practices, including literature, the mass media, film, and popular culture.⁹ This book participates in the project by deciphering some of those ideological inscriptions in Galdós’s representations of Restoration society. The readings offered here situate Galdós’s novelistic narratives within the context of the multiple narratives of sexual difference seen in the burgeoning print culture of his day, a juxtaposition which highlights his novels’ ambiguous and ambivalent relation to bourgeois ideology, and in particular to bourgeois notions of woman, epitomized in the figure of the angel in the house.

I do not mean to suggest that deciphering the operations of ideology in Galdós’s novels—or those of any other writer—is a straightforward process. As Fredric Jameson observes, the term ideology designates a problem yet to be solved;¹⁰ the relation between texts, ideology, and social consciousness has still to be satisfactorily articulated. Recent Marxist and poststructuralist work on ideology indicates that, contrary to our commonsense intuition, texts do not un- problematically express or reflect a set of ideas preexisting in the mind of the author or out there in society. As practices of representation, they play a vital part in reproducing and shaping ideologies and thus of constructing people as subjects; they function to transform and mediate the world through the specific codes [they use] and the institutions of which [they are] a part.¹¹ Ideology, as I shall be using the term, signifies neither false consciousness nor propaganda; it is meant in the Althusserian sense of systems of ideas and representations informing social consciousness, by which and in which we all live. In this book, the cultural role of ideology in (re)producing social institutions and formations is seen as central; at the same time, it is understood as working to cover its own tracks, to present certain conditions as natural and obvious. Ideology must, of necessity, be invisible if it is to perform its function of perpetuating certain power relations in society. Commonsense consensus notions, for example, that people are free, individual subjects, or that women are naturally emotional and nurturing are, from this perspective, instances of ideology at work. Discourses—that is, the multiple ways of speaking and writing a language and of producing meanings in it—are structured by ideology. Any given discourse will inevitably produce certain objects and problems as visible while excluding others from its field of vision. Exploring such lacunae, the absences, the questions not asked, and the answers not heard in [given] theoretical discourses is of crucial importance to feminist scholars, who are striving precisely to make gender visible.¹² The lacunae that prompted the writing of this book concern what Jane Tompkins would call the cultural work that Galdós’s contemporary novels perform.¹³

A central principle of feminist criticism is that no writing is or can be purely objective or apolitical. This principle applies, of course, not only to the texts which we as critics study but also to our own work. Feminist critics are sometimes accused of subjectively imposing their politics on literary texts; yet, if feminism calls anything into question, as Annette Kolodny puts it, it must be that dog-eared myth of intellectual neutrality.¹⁴ Feminist criticism has enriched literary scholarship’s ability to be self-critical and made it increasingly necessary for responsible scholars to analyze the multiple political agendas that may be concealed in their interpretations, by highlighting the ways in which literary critical discourse has often wittingly or unwittingly functioned to reproduce patriarchal assumptions. Consider, for example, the following extract from an article by a renowned Galdós scholar, Stephen Gilman:

For impassioned readers and rereaders of Fortunata y Jacinta Fortunata is the woman who of all women is most profoundly known. We know her from within and we know her at length, from physical and spiritual birth to physical death and spiritual resurrection. That is to say, we know her in a way we can never know women of flesh and blood: our mothers, our sisters, or our wives. Yet it would not be easy to explain to a reader of—say—Madame Bovary what it is that we know about Fortunata, to tell him, as he could tell us about Emma, just what she is like … [the novel has] depths of intimacy in store for us. … In spite of our intimacy with her, we—like many of those who live with her in Galdós’ pages—remain in awe of her mystery. … We enter her mind directly; we know all; and the more we reside there, the more marvellous the experience becomes.¹⁵

The androcentricity of this writing is striking—not only in its appeal to a community of readers who are by implication male (our wives, to tell him, as he could tell us), but more profoundly in figuring the act of reading Galdós’s masterpiece novel as a phallic penetration of the text and the mind of the heroine. Although such was probably far from Gilman’s intent, the female student or scholar reading this canonical critical text senses that her relation to the novel under discussion is not and cannot be quite the same as that of Gilman’s ideal reader. In order to form part of Gilman’s imagined community of "impassioned readers of Fortunata y Jacinta," she must read as if she were a man. Feminist reader-response criticism has begun to develop strategies for contesting what Judith Fetterley terms the immasculation of the female reader. Fetterley argues that feminist critics need to be resisting rather than assenting readers if we are to avoid absorbing the values in texts, both literary and critical.¹⁶ Adrienne Rich describes the performance of such revisionary rereadings, in a much-quoted statement, as the act of looking back, of seeing anew, of entering an old text from a new critical direction.¹⁷

Perhaps because of the pervasive androcentricity of much Hispanic literary criticism, and its tendency to hagiography, feminist studies of Galdós—in contrast to, say, the many feminist critiques of Dickens or James—have been slow to appear. Some recent studies equate the undeniable centrality of women in Galdós’s novels with an undefined feminism on the part of Galdós himself, thus making the putative intention of the author the privileged factor in determining how a work should be read.¹⁸ They also share the widely held premise that Galdós’s work evolved ideologically according to a linear trajectory, from less to more feminist. Even if one discounts the fact that the appeal to authorial intentionality has been attacked by literary theorists, both New Critics and postmodernists, since the 1940s, this view is, even in a purely textual sense, an oversimplification. Like those of other male realist writers of the nineteenth century, Galdós’s texts depend on what Naomi Schor terms the binding of female energy.¹⁹ His novels may explore female sexuality, desires for independence, strength, mobility, and creative urges, but the female protagonists’ story still frequently ends with closure in the form of marriage or death (or, in some cases, insanity). Even though Galdós’s texts use women as the focus for a liberal humanist anxiety about the power of cultural control, they nevertheless ironically exercise a form of patriarchal narrative control over those same female characters. Although I am not primarily interested in the question of Galdós’s personal view of the polemic on women’s roles, nevertheless I do not treat his writing as a disembodied écriture. I approach his work as a corpus that was produced by a man and on which the pressures of changing social attitudes and historical developments did leave their mark. As will become evident, the issue for me is how the texts mean despite and not because of authorial intention. Galdós did not have total control over his writing, or our reading of his writing, which is not to say that he had no control whatsoever.

The nineteenth century, writes Lou Chamon-Deutsch in her illuminating study Gender and Representation: Women in Spanish Realist Fiction, is one of the favored test periods feminism uses to confront patriarchal values because the ideologies of gender are so heavily inscribed in its discourses.²⁰ It is a vital and fascinating period for feminism because many of the debates about gender, power, and the family which engross us now were at the forefront of social attention a century ago, albeit in some crucially different ways. The years of Galdós’s major novelistic production, 1870 to 1900, also span a tumultuous time in Spanish history. According to the traditional histories of the period, women as a group had no significant part to play in the major events of the period—the liberal revolution of 1868, the ill-fated First Republic of 1873-1874, the Restoration of 1875, and its attendant disillusionment as a bourgeois oligarchy made a mockery of the electoral process, the growing workers’ and anarchists’ movements of the 1890s, and the Cuban separatist war. This view is currently being amended by feminist scholars, who are recuperating women’s role in nineteenth-century history. One crucial link concerns the relation of textuality to cultural and political history. The vast proliferation of representations of gender relations in a wide array of written discourses that took place in the late nineteenth century has become a major area of study. We now recognize that the nature and role of women had become a crucial arena of ideological struggle and contention in nineteenth-century Spanish society, and that these issues cannot be relegated to women’s history but must lead us to revise our notions of the development of culture and the novel too.

Nancy Armstrong, contesting Ian Watt’s theory of the rise of the novel, argues that it was primarily via the written word that gender roles were transformed after the Enlightenment. By the time Galdós wrote his first novels, what Jameson calls the cultural revolution—halting and uncertain though it was in Spain—was well under way. The middle classes had succeeded in discrediting the aristocratic paradigm of personal conduct and replacing it with a middle-class ideal that was both the vehicle and then, later, the emblem of bourgeois hegemony in Spain. The ancient model of gender difference was revised in part through the agency of a barrage of literature on conduct that produced a theory that could not even be recognized as such because its power derived from sheer repetition.²¹ In this literature, woman was no longer constructed as an inferior homologue of man but as man’s complementary antithesis, his binary opposite. At the same time, the home was separated from material production and redefined as a refuge from the competitive workplace of the capitalist world. This idealized vision of home was enormously influential in generating a new construction of femininity. Since midcentury, an ideal of womanhood which constitutes one of the central hallmarks of nineteenth-century western culture had risen to unquestionable prominence in Spain. The middleclass woman was revered as the sacramental figure of the ángel del hogar (or, as she was known in English-speaking countries, the angel in the house). This sentimentalized image of woman as hija, esposa, y madre (daughter, wife, and mother) became a veritable cult. For the first time in western history, woman as a sex was constructed as morally superior to man. The price, however, was the renunciation of female desire. This new construction of womanhood served to create middle-class solidarity in the troubled political atmosphere of the second half of the nineteenth century.

With the notable exception of the pioneering work of Alicia Andreu and Bridget Aldaraca, there are remarkably few studies of this aspect of nineteenth-century Spanish culture, even though there is every indication that it was equally crucial to our understanding of the period as it was to Victorian England, France, and North America, where it has been extensively studied.²² The multitude of texts that produced the angel in the house in the psychic life of the nation over the course of the century have crucial repercussions for the study of the realist novel. According to Nancy Armstrong, the novel served to establish bourgeois cultural hegemony, for by focusing on a struggle to say what made women desirable, novels functioned as part of the drive to create a political unconscious, a state of affairs in which gender, not class, would mark the most important differences among individuals.²³ The representation of women in the realist novel, the plots, themes, and endings, are all inevitably mediated by the dominant theories of gender of the bourgeoisie. One of the premises of this study is that our analysis of the ways Galdós explores issues such as freedom, sexuality, power, and creativity within his female characters must refer to one of the central cultural constructions of the age, the figure of the selfless and domesticated angel. It is striking how often Galdós’s works explicitly and repeatedly refer to angels, allusions that are opaque to the modern reader because we inhabit a different set of ideologies of gender. The set of expectations and imperatives that constituted the nineteenth-century feminine ideal provides a vital intertext for Galdós’s representation of women, one which we must equip ourselves to read if we are to grasp the ideological implications of his novels in the society for which they were written.

The critical perspective I have brought to bear on Galdós’s writing is largely the product of the Anglo-American feminist tradition, which has produced a generation of distinguished literary criticism and scholarship on western European and North American women’s history, running from Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics in 1970 through the work of Nina Auerbach, Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Catharine Stimpson, Annette Kolodny, Michelle Barrett, Tania Modleski, Cora Kaplan, Teresa de Lauretis, Mary Poovey, Jane Tompkins, and Nancy K. Miller, to name but a few. The discoveries and aims of this body of scholarship inform this book so pervasively that I have not always cited individual authors. The tactics I have used for interpreting the texts under discussion are also indebted, to a lesser extent, to certain facets of modern Marxist work on ideology, particularly that of Pierre Macherey and Catherine Belsey, and to Bakhtin’s work on language, particularly his notion of heteroglossia. These have been particularly suggestive for me in indicating a type of critical practice that seeks out not the unity of the work, but the multiplicity and diversity of its possible meanings, its incompleteness, the omissions which it displays but cannot describe, and above all its contradictions. In its absences, and in the collisions between its divergent meanings, the text implicitly criticizes its own ideology; it contains within itself the critique of its own values.²⁴ The formalist approach to Galdós tended to promote a notion of the completeness and coherence of the author’s works as evidence of his genius. However, what made his texts interesting for me, as I read and reread them, was precisely the contradictions and paradoxes in them. Envisioning ideology, in Torii Moi’s formulation, not as a seamless and unified edifice but as a "contradictory construct, marked by gaps, slides and inconsistencies, working precisely to suppress the recognition of its own contradictions, allows us, by struggling to foreground those inconsistencies, to take an active part in transforming [ideology] by producing new meanings."²⁵

This type of approach provides some useful and highly needed tools for describing the often bafflingly contradictory, doublevoiced nature of Galdós’s texts themselves, which are traversed by ideological struggle. The texts studied here position the reader both inside and outside the dominant ideology of gender and thus can be seen as containing—in both senses—the feminist impulse they simultaneously display. The novels can be said to have a feminist impulse at all not because they have strong women characters, as has been adduced almost ad nauseam, but to the extent that they contribute to the denaturalizing of the culture’s feminine ideal. I shall be charting the writer’s dialectical relation with the nineteenth century’s models of gender, both within individual novels and, on a larger scale, over the course of his career.

Chapter i of this book describes how the concept of the angel in the house was constructed in nineteenth-century Spain and also points to the many contradictions inherent in this apparently monolithic discourse, while chapter 2 charts the ideological implications of Galdós’s nonfictional writings on women. Chapters 3 to 6 examine the inscription of and resistance to bourgeois ideology in a number of Galdós’s novels written at various points between 1870 and 1915. Galdós’s work evolved through various phases, which are often seen as fundamentally different from one another. Yet, as I illustrate, there are certain fundamental similarities between such apparently discrete tropes as the suffering woman, the spiritual woman, and the new woman—which became hallmarks of different periods in his writing—and the popular image of woman as guardian angel of the domestic sanctuary.

Given the size of Galdós’s oeuvre, an exhaustive survey of gender in his work would occupy many volumes. I have chosen to work within only two of Galdós’s six series of novels, reserving examination of Galdós’s forty-six historical novels known as the episodios nacionales (national episodes) and his drama for future study. My decision to do in-depth readings of a limited number of what are, for me, key texts among the series selected, rather than touch on a wide number of novels, has inevitably involved a degree of selectivity. Some major works, such as La desheredada, Tormento, La de Bringas and Lo prohibido, receive relatively little attention here, in part because Alicia Andreu and Bridget Aldaraca have already undertaken insightful ideological analyses of their representation of women in groundbreaking books, Galdós y la literatura popular and El ángel del hogar: Galdós and the Ideology of Domesticity in Spain. Yet certain novels that have traditionally been considered minor or flawed hold a great deal of interest from my critical perspective and therefore take the foreground here. The time-honoured method by which we have presented Galdós’s work to generations of students splits the author’s work into four discrete phases: the thesis novels of the 1870s, dealing purely with religious and political issues; the mature work, be ginning in 1881; the spiritual novels of the 1890s, and