La Regenta
Authors: Carmen Pinto
Journal: BMJ (2008)

Ana Ozores, “La Regenta,” is a character who has often been compared to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Flaubert’s Emma Bovary. Like them she is a young woman who becomes involved in tempestuous relationships in an oppressive society where she struggles to find her place. Clarin, who was well informed about trends in psychiatry at the time, created a magnificent case study in his character. By coincidence, her first name and initial are almost the same as those chosen by Freud to write about Bertha Pappenheim (“Anna O”) 11 years later in his Studies on Hysteria (1895).

Clarin masterly describes the contemporary notion of the “hysteric,” starting with the causative factors in Ana’s presentation: early loss of her mother, followed by a harsh loveless childhood with aunts and a governess, and finally an arranged marriage with an older man who treats her like a daughter.

The novel begins when Ana is 28. The local playboy is pursuing her to consolidate his Don Juan reputation. At the same time her old confessor, “overwhelmed by her psychological complexity,” transfers her to the younger and ambitious new priest, “the Magistral.” The womaniser and the new confessor both wish to dominate her, sexually or spiritually, and their open competition played out before the eyes of the parochial community has terrible consequences for Ana, who has a mental breakdown. Today’s psychiatry would diagnose Ana’s condition as a dissociative disorder characterised by sudden onset and loss of integration of her memories, of awareness of identity and immediate sensations, and of control of body movements and tending to remit after weeks or months.

Ana recovers with the help of Dr Benitez, a young physician who represents the opposite of the fear, superstition, and dogma personified by the “doctor of the soul,” her confessor. Dr Benitez, the scientist, uses reason and logic to treat Ana’s disorder, recommending among other measures that she move from the suffocating provincial town to the countryside. Through Ana’s letters to Dr Benitez, Clarin reveals two of his basic sources of investigation into mental illness: he describes her reading “Maudsley and Luys, with all their pictures on brains . . . without disgust or fear.” Maudsley believed in the physical basis of mental illness and was influenced by evolutionary theory and neurophysiology. Luys worked in La Salpetriere in Paris with Jean-Martin Charcot, famous for his work on hysteria, and was interested in the anatomy of the brain and hypnosis. Quoting these two psychiatrists, Clarin takes the side of science against religion.

La Regenta is the best novelistic description of a 19th century European woman whose illness was, as the historian of psychiatry Henri F Ellenberger said of Anna O, “the desperate struggle of an unsatisfied young woman who found no outlets for her physical and mental energies, nor for her idealistic strivings.” Freud’s Anna O eventually overcame her symptoms to become a leader of the women’s movement in Germany. You may well know how Karenina and Bovary ended their days. I am sure you won’t regret reading this fascinating novel to find out how Ana Ozores resolves her plight.