Krausism and the Pygmalion Motif in Galdós's La familia de León Roch

References

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• Rodríguez quotes the following passage from Michelet which aptly illustrates the point: “L'homme modeme, [est] victime de la division du travail. … Dans ce temps d'apre concurrence ou le jour est plein d'efforts, ou Ton revient chez soi brise, moins de travaux encore que de desappointements, il faudrait une femme au foyer pour refraíchir le front brúlant de l'homme” (Rodríguez, p. 125).
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• Peck , A. L. , ed. 1931 . On the Generation of Animals II London : Heinemann. . Aristotle laid the basis for western civilization's construction of gender by equating the formative artist with masculinity and pliant matter of creation with femininity: “the female always provides the material, the male provides that which fashions the material into shape; this is, in our view, the specific characteristic of each of the sexes; that is what it means to be male or female.” Aristotle, 4, 738b. For feminist interpretations of the history of this idea see Maria Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985) and Susan Gubar, “‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity,” Critical Inquiry 8.2 (1981): 243–63. One of the many to reiterate this view was St. Isidore of Seville, whose sixth-century Etymologiae falsely derived the very word for “woman” (mulier) from the notion of softness (a mollitie) (Warner, p. 65)
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• Almost all of the novelas contempordneás, in varying degrees, evince Galdós's fascination with the notion of molding: we see many instances where not only male but also female characters set out to form their counterparts. Galdós's novels display a cluster of key verbs denoting this process: formar, moldear, modelar, fabricar, labrar, tallar, ensehar, educar, recortar. Fortunata y Jacinta is the most well documented example of the theme, with its plethora of what Stephen Gilman termed “small-time creators” and “would-be scupltors,” irresistibly drawn to the rough-hewn granite, the tabula rasa of Fortunata (Galdós and the Art of the European Novel: 1867–1887 [Princeton University Press, 1981], p. 349). Although what concerns us here is the gendered aspects of molding, the concept in Galdos undoubtedly has its roots in certain well-documented nineteenth-century preoccupations, such as the question of individual rights versus social authority, and the concept of metamorphosis. Galdós's texts reflect earlier influential thinkers: Locke and Rousseau, with their concern for the decisive shaping force of the environment on malleable human beings; Mill, whose work On Liberty of 1859 posed the question of what constituted legitimate encroachment on individuals' freedom; and Darwin, whose On the Origin of Species of the same year proposed that all life on earth had developed in response to environmental pressure.
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• In one episode, for example, the green-eyed María falls aleep convulsively clutching the head of her uncomfortable husband, like Salome with the head of John the Baptist (p. 935).
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• Clarín depicts Anna Ozores's mysticism as intertwined with sensuality in La Regenta (1884–85), as does Palacio Valdes in the characters María de Elorza of Marta y Maria (1883) and Obdulia of La fe (1892). Interestingly, Galdos suggested the title of Marta y María, which inverts the Biblical paradigm by valuing domesticity over religiosity in women.
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• Our reading of the gender ideology in La familia de Leon Roch concurs with the analysis offered by López-Morillas and Gómez Martinez of other aspects of the intertextual dialogue in the novel with Krausism: “el fracaso a que esta destinada [la idea Krausista] no se debe… a un intento de combatir[la] sino más bien a su deseo de bajarla del pedestal en que Azcárate la habiá colocado con la facil solution de un desarrollo ideal” (Gomez Martinez, p. 62).
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• 1980 . Discussed by Jose F. Montesinos in Galdos, , 2nd ed. vol. 2 , ix – xix . Madrid : Castalia. .
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