Modernity, the Search for Meaning, and the Spanish Streetcar Experience in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Madrid: Clarín, Galdós and Pardo Bazán

Abstract

Using three Spanish short stories set in Madrid, Benito Pérez Galdós’s “La novela en el tranvía” (1871), Clarín’s “Doña Berta” (1892), and Emilia Pardo Bazán’s “En tranvía” (1901), this article speaks to the alienating experience of everyday life in the city. Attention is paid to the movement of streetcars in Madrid and how this movement reflects a defining characteristic of modernity, the search for meaning after the industrial revolution. Mixing urban geography and literary analysis, this article complicates the notion of the city as totalizing ideal of progress and instead stresses the messiness of modern urban experience.

Keywords:

• In-betweenness
• modernity
• streetcar
• urban alienation
• Madrid

Acknowledgements

This article repeats some material from the chapter “Ricardo Mella’s Urbanism: Thought and Practice” published by Palgrave Macmillan in Anarchist Socialism in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: A Ricardo Mella Anthology but adapts it to a new context, namely, the spatial significance of modernity.

Notes

1 Previous work on theorizing Spain’s modern period as constituted by representation and through the lens of visual studies include, but is not limited to, Susan Larson’s and Eva Woods’s edited volume Visualizing Spanish Modernity (2005), Jo Labanyi’s “Modernity as Representation: The Self-Reflexivity of the Spanish Realist Novel” (2012), Vanesa Rodríguez-Galindo’s “On and Off the Tram: Contemporary Types and Customs in Madrid’s Illustrated and Satirical Press (1874-1898)” (2019), and Rodríguez-Galindo’s Madrid on the Move: Feeling Modern and Visually Aware in the Nineteenth Century (2021).

2 Each story has an abundant bibliography. For more recent studies on mobility and modernity in Spain, and the literary representation of the Madrid streetcar in the nineteenth century, see Elizabeth Amann’s “Tram Flânerie: Streetcar Impressions of Nineteenth-Century Madrid” (2017), “En tranvía: Nineteenth-Century Representations of Collective Transportation in Madrid” (2018), “Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera’s ‘La novela del tranvía’ (1882) and the Literature of Urban Collective Transportation” (2018), and “The Omnibus as Social Observatory: Class Encounters in Nineteenth-Century Literature of Public Transportation” (2018). For literary criticism on “Doña Berta,” see Marilyn D. Rugg’s “Clarín’s Allegory of Signification” (1988), Brad Epps’s “Traces of the Flesh: Land, Body and Art in Clarín’s ‘Doña Berta’” (1995), and Elena Peregrina’s “Metáforas de la representación: El retrato de Doña Berta” (2011), among others.

3 Mark Harpring speaks to this disillusionment in “Gossiping and Hysterical Manolo Infante: Traditional Gender Role Crossing as Political Metaphor in Galdós’s ‘La incógnita’” (2007).