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Abstract
The tragic ending of the protagonists in Benito Pérez Galdós’s unfinished novel, Rosalía, exposes the multiple anxieties that economic and technological development produced in Spain at the end of the nineteenth century. The story reveals the symbolic conflict that emerged from the ideological attempt to refashion the past and make it an organic part of the country’s modernization. I show how the text’s negative representations of the trope of conversion—from Protestantism to Catholicism, from landed wealth to finance capital, and from aristocratic authority to bureaucratized power structures—are projections of the uncertainties and fears brought about by material progress. By incorporating train travel and the stock market as the plot’s turning points, Galdós presents two incompatible visions of the world that come into sight in the contrast between England and Spain, thus uncovering the ideological gap between the society of the time and the progressive nation liberals imagined in the future.
Notes
1 For detailed studies on Galdós’s early works see, among others, Gilman, López, or Willem.
2 The fact that Rosalía’s original plotline was abandoned and later refashioned honors the idea of the failed conversion. If the original purpose of the novel was to denounce the common Spanish traits of intolerance and xenophobia, it can be argued that Galdós’s conscious decision to nuance the plot’s original tone represents a failure in his criticism of society during this time.
3 In “Observaciones sobre la novela contemporánea en España” (1870), for example, Galdós remarks: “Pero la clase media, la más olvidada por nuestros novelistas, es el gran modelo, la fuente inagotable. Ella es hoy la base del orden social: ella asume por su iniciativa y por su inteligencia la soberanía de las naciones y en ella está el hombre del siglo XIX con sus virtudes y sus vicios, su noble e insaciable aspiración, su afán de reformas, su actividad pasmosa” (122).
4 Although the 1869 Spanish Constitution had been developed on the basis of liberal views, reaffirming among other personal liberties the freedom of religion, in practice the Church, which in rural areas officiated as an administrative authority, discouraged the profession of faiths other than Catholicism by highlighting their foreign, anti-Spanish nature. See Eaton 215. For more on Galdós’s treatment of religious intolerance in the novel, see Benítez 147–50.
5 From the late eighteenth century, England led the industrial transformation of Europe. This process of social and economic reorganization consolidated capitalism and contributed to the urban expansion of multiple cities, the development of technology, and the construction of transportation networks, among other things. With significant delays and complications, often attributed to cultural reasons, an analogous process took place in Spain, where the British success became an unattainable referent of progress. This disadvantage pushed the country to question its own attachments to tradition and the nature of national identity. For more information on England’s economic status during the nineteenth century, see Mathias 110–65.
6 For detailed analyses of the railroad’s impact on Spain’s social structures and economic development, see Casalduero, Gómez Mendoza, and Ponce. On the symbolic transformations produced by the railroad, see Schivelbusch, and Lawless.
7 In 1862, for example, the renowned medical periodical The Lancet featured an article addressing the topic. Entitled “The Influence of Railway Travelling on Public Health,” the piece singled out speed as a health hazard: “The rapidity and variety of the impressions necessarily fatigue both the eye and the brain. The constantly varying distance at which the objects are placed involves an incessant shifting of the adaptive apparatus by which they are focused upon the retina; and the mental effort by which the brain takes cognizance of them is scarcely productive of cerebral wear because it is unconscious; for no fact in physiology is more clearly established than that excessive functional activity always implies destruction of material and organic change of substance” (52).
8 The case of José María de Salamanca i Mayol, first Marquis of Salamanca, is illustrative in this regard. Accused of speculation and embezzlement, the marquis, as Miguel A. López-Morell explains, took advantage of his position as Ministro de Hacienda (Secretary of Finances) to benefit his personal investment in the railroad. His extra limitations ended up affecting the entire country’s economy and creating a feeling of distrust in the possibilities of modernization (17, 26–27).
9 Materialism was the doctrine that refuted the idea of God as an architect of creation, focusing instead on science as the only valid mechanism to achieve the truth. After their arrival to Spain, ideas of materialists like Ludwig Büchner, Charles Darwin, or Herbert Spencer provoked heated controversies around the possible ways to reconcile faith and reason. Many texts were published in response to what academics, scientists, and politicians considered a threat to the system of values on which national identity was articulated. For a comprehensive contextualization of this controversy, see Cala Vitery and Pohl-Valero.
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Notes on contributors
Óscar Iván Useche
Óscar Iván Useche is Associate Professor of Spanish at Ursinus College. As a specialist in modern Peninsular studies, his research focuses on the interaction between industrial modernization and cultural production in fin-de-siglo Spain. His work has appeared in venues such as the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Siglodiecinueve, and Decimonónica.