Marriage, money, and mortality : women in the contemporary novels of Benito Pérez Galdós
Keywords: Iberian and Latin American Cultures.

"Marriage, Money, and Mortality: Women in the Contemporary Novels of Benito Pérez Galdós" reconsiders three novels by the prominent Spanish realist author Benito Pérez Galdós: La desheredada (1881), Fortunata y Jacinta (1887), and Tristana (1892). It seeks to articulate how Galdós's conceptualization of 'women' as a single category or type was realized through the writing of very distinct (and often dissimilar) female characters. Building off scholarship that has shown Galdós's ambivalence toward contemporary societal discourse around gender, particularly that of the ángel del hogar, this project probes the different 'types' of women represented by the female characters in each novel, outlining a broad typology and tracing the evolution of types within this framework. The late arrival of the realist novel to Spain was accompanied by firm beliefs in its role: Galdós and his contemporaries declared that the realist novel should reflect nineteenth-century Spain faithfully, particularly the rich variety of its middle class. Meanwhile, the middle class had strong convictions of its own, developing a rigid gender ideology that confined women to the domestic sphere and laid out a specific set of acceptable feminine traits, values, and conduct. The realist novel's concern with the middle class, and the middle class's concern with gender, placed gender at the center of the realist novel and transformed it into a literary space to represent contemporary gender discourse. In the three novels studied, "Marriage, Money, and Mortality" pays particularly close attention to how Galdós's construction of female characters follows, or deviates from, contemporary gender ideology, noting how those characters' circumstances (be they challenges faced, or problems solved) intersect with their gender, as well as how the presence of the narrator-author colors this presentation. Chapter One conducts a close reading of La desheredada to reveal that Juan Bou rapes Isidora and proposes marriage immediately afterward, forging an association between sexual violence and marriage that motivates her until the novel's end. Chapter Two examines Fortunata y Jacinta to reveal an alternate female pairing, Guillermina and Lupe, whose respective activities in charity and usury place them both at the center of the novel's economy, a positioning that makes them not only responsible for circulating the capital that supports their community, but also emblematic of women acting outside gendered expectations by adopting masculine characteristics. Chapter Three focuses on the tone of morbidity that pervades Tristana, analyzing both how this mood swells to its apex with Tristana's amputation, and how the protagonist herself is a vehicle for the author-narrator's own existentialist anxieties. Each chapter draws on key aspects of contemporary culture - the punishment of rape as outlined in the Spanish Penal Code, the availability of credit and practice of usury, the evolution of the Amazon woman trope in Spain, and the visual iconography of ill or dying women - to better contextualize each novel in its sociohistorical moment. This extra-literary material supports a style of reading Galdós that incorporates a broader and more nuanced view of both society and gender, highlighting the subtleties and contradictions in the portraits he puts forth. Ultimately, this comparative study of the three novels studied in "Marriage, Money, and Mortality" shows Galdós evolving from a proto-sociological style to a more existentialist perspective, all while keeping gender as the core question driving his interrogation, interpretation, and representation of nineteenth-century Spain