City, Country and Adultery in La Regenta
1986; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 63; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/1475382862000363053
ISSN1469-3550
Autores Tópico(s)Spanish Culture and Identity
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeBSS Subject Index: ALAS, LEOPOLDO (‘CLARÍN’) (1852–1901)REGENTA, LA [L. ALAS]WOMEN/GENDER ISSUES — SPAIN & PORTUGAL Notes 1. Francisco García Sarriá's biographical disclosures in Clarín o la herejía amorosa (Madrid: Gredos, 1975) and Sergio Beser's investigations of Alas’ journalism in Leopoldo Alas, crítico literario (Madrid: Gredos, 1970) are particularly informative. Other critics who have related La Regenta to Alas’ personal beliefs are: Frank Durand, in his useful article ‘Leopoldo Alas, “Clarín”: Consistency of Outlook as Critic and Novelist’, Romanic Review, LVI (1965), 37–49; William E. Bull, in his less useful articles ‘The Naturalistic Theories of Leopoldo Alas’, PMLA, LVII (1942), 536–51, ‘The Liberalism of Leopldo Alas’, HR, X (1942), 329–39, ‘Clarín's Literary Internationalism’, HR, XVI (1948), 321–34; and Gerald G. Brown, in his unpublished doctoral thesis The Novels and Cuentos of Leopoldo Alas, Oxford, 1962. José María Martínez Cachero's critical anthology Leopoldo Alas, ‘Clarín’ (Madrid: Taurus, 1978) devotes three out of its five sections to Alas the man and critic. Practically all critics have felt obliged to raise the issue of the relationship of La Regenta to Alas’ views on Naturalism: it is disappointing to find so much attention paid to this now exhausted subject in two recent and otherwise excellent critical introductions: that by Gonzalo Sobejano to his edition of La Regenta, 2 vols. (Madrid: Castalia, 1981: see particularly pp. 16–29); and that by Sergio Beser to his anthology Clarín y ‘La Regenta’ (Barcelona: Ariel, 1982) (see particularly pp. 38–58). 2. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins U.P., 1979. 3. The notion that Ana is a social misfit has been argued most forcefully by Gonzalo Sobejano in his critical study ‘La inadaptada. (Leopoldo Alas: La Regenta, capítulo XVI)’, in Clarín y ‘La Regenta’, ed. Sergio Beser, 185–224. Sobejano makes the same point in the introduction to his edition of La Regenta (51): ‘Ana no se adapta a Vetusta. Ha sido siempre la inadaptada, y en su caída catastrófica […] demuestra ser la inadaptable’. García Sarriá (Clarín o la herejía amorosa, 101–13) suggests that Ana comes close to affirming the legitimacy of adultery as an ‘auténtico acto de rebeldía’. Gemma Roberts, in her perceptive analysis ‘Notas sobre el realismo psicológico de La Regenta’ (in Leopoldo Alas, ‘Clarín’, ed. José María Martínez Cachero, 199), insists that ‘la realidad es algo antagónico para la protagonista, algo de lo que sólo puede evadirse por medio del pensamiento’. 4. See, in particular, William E. Bull, ‘The Naturalistic Theories of Leopoldo Alas’; and Byron P. Palls, ‘El naturalismo de La Regenta’, NRFH, XXI (1972), 23–39. Beser (Clarín y ‘La Regenta’, 47–50) argues that Alas is an advocate of determinism, but that he shows Ana to be pulled in opposing directions by moral influences as well as physical ones. 5. See Clarín o la herejía amorosa, 71–82, 93–95, 112–14 in particular. 6. See Frances W. Weber, ‘Ideology and Religious Parody in the Novels of Leopoldo Alas’, BHS, XLIII (1966), 197–208, and ‘The Dynamics of Motif in Leopoldo Alas's La Regenta’, Romanic Review, LIX (1966), 188–99. Weber's views have been taken up without significant modification by Michael Nimetz, ‘Eros and Ecclesia in Clarín's Vetusta’, MLN, LXXXVI (1971), 242–53; and John Rutherford, Leopoldo Alas: ‘La Regenta’ (London: Grant and Cutler, 1974), 22–27. 7. Judith Armstrong (The Novel of Adultery [London: Macmillan, 1976], 14) points out that the Napoleonic Code decreed marriage to be no longer a sacrament but a contract. Armstrong's book anticipates that of Tanner in its emphasis on the novel of adultery as a response to man's fear of disorder, but her largely sociological analysis prevents her from picking up the complex networks of imagery which, in Tanner's book, afford so many insights into the underlying implications of adultery. 8. See Tanner, 10–11, 18–24, 66–72, 86, 148. 9. See Tanner, 12–18, 91, 113–17, 156–58, 163, 172–74, 200, 204–05, 312–20, 367. 10. See Tanner, 14–16, 79–86, 305. 11. See Tanner, 72, 75, 161–62, 175. 12. All references are to the seventh edition published by Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 1974. 13. Biruté Ciplijauskaité (La mujer insatisfecha: el adulterio en la novela realista, [Barcelona: Edhasa, 1984], 130) observes that a large number of nineteenth-century adulterous heroines were brought up by their fathers in the absence of a mother 14. Michael Nimetz (‘Eros and'Ecclesia in Clarín's Vetusta’, 246–53) notes the number of references to sexual ambiguity in the novel, but attributes this to the decadence of a society which is based on man-made laws and represses natural needs. In a curious (if interesting) discussion, Nimetz argues that the root of this perversion lies in the supplanting of male social authority by matriarchy: male and female roles, he suggests, have been reversed in that it is women who dominate society and a male figure (Frígilis) who represents nature. Nimetz is right to regard the sexual ambivalence of so many characters as a metaphor for an unhealthy relationship between nature and society; my view is that this unhealthy relationship consists not in the repression of nature by society but, on the contrary, in the impossibility of keeping nature and society apart. 15. Beser (Clarín y ‘La Regenta’, 86) echoes the unease of many critics over their interpretation of Frígilis’ role when he states that he is the character ‘cuya interpretación presenta mayores dificultades’. Beser goes on (87) to suggest that Frígilis, as a naturalist, represents ‘la defensa de una vida armónica con lo natural’; previously (56–57) he had seen Frígilis as a spokesman for the deterministic theories underlying literary Naturalism. Emilio Alarcos Llorach (‘Notas a La Regenta’, in Clarín y ‘La Regenta’, ed. S. Beser, 244) states that ‘don Tomás Crespo es lo más opuesto que puede darse a Vetusta. Es su contraste. Si Vetusta representa el mundo civilizado, Frígilis es la naturaleza, el mundo natural, incontaminado de vicios, puro’. Alarcos Llorach concludes (245): ‘Del juego de Frígilis con las fuerzas de la novela, resulta una enseñanza clara, fuera o no consciente de Clarín: sólo en la alegría, bondad y sencillez de la Naturaleza puede encontrarse el sosiego’. Mariano Baquero Goyanes (‘Exaltación de lo vital en La Regenta’, in Leopoldo Alas, ‘Clarín’, ed. J. M. Martínez Cachero, 174–77) puts forward a similar view: ‘Frígilis es algo más que un ser ligado a la tierra, al campo […]. Es la naturaleza hecha hombre […]. La salud que de Frígilis se desprende junto a Ana, enferma, no es sólo salud fisiológica, sino mental, moral. Su ligazón a la naturaleza ha hecho de Crespo un islote de montaraz ingenuidad y pureza, en medio de las mezquindades y vicios de la sociedad vetustense’. Baquero Goyanes notes Frígilis’ ‘manía a la aclimatación’, but sees thi as the expression of ‘un afán vital’ (174). Similar suggestions are made by Byron P. Palls (‘El naturalismo de La Regenta’, 36–37), and Michael Nimetz (‘Eros and Ecclesia in Clarín's Vetusta’, 252). John Rutherford (Leopoldo Alas: ‘La Regenta’, 16–17) observes that Frígilis is not depicted as an entirely positive character, but does not question the assumption that he represents nature. 16. Sobejano (in his edition of La Regenta, 36–38) discusses the literary antecedents of the term ‘alma hermana’. 17. Rutherford (Leopoldo Alas: ‘La Regenta’, 72), despite his analysis of the opposition country/town, notes that El Vivero ‘is in fact an extension of Vetusta’. Other critics have seen Ana's convalescence at El Vivero as a healthy return to nature: for example, García Sarriíá (Clarín o la herejía amorosa, 102–03) regards the ‘mundo campestre’ of El Vivero as an exaltation of the ‘libertad natural’ that Ana had read about in her father's books on Greek mythology. The point is, precisely, that El Vivero offers Ana a version of the countryside derived from books. 18. One is reminded here of Tanner's analysis of the blurring of distinctions caused in Madame Bovary by a society in which everything has become a form of repetition. See Adultery in the Novel, 254–65. 19. Rutherford (Leopoldo Alas: ‘La Regenta’, 74) interprets this curious, repeatedly-mentioned incident as symbolic of ‘the fall back into the base material reality of the human condition’. 20. The recurrence of images of viscosity in the novel is noted by Sobejano in his edition of La Regenta, 40–41. 21. Rutherford (Leopoldo Alas: ‘La Regenta’, 72) notes the link made in this chapter between food and sex. Tanner (Adultery in the Novel, 53–55) undertakes a suggestive analysis of the perverted relationship between the natural (the raw) and the social (the cooked) that exists in Petronius’ description of Trimalchio's feast in the Satyricon. 22. Compare Tanner's analysis of ‘the fog in Emma Bovary's head’ (Adultery in the Novel, 233–35). 23. See Weber's articles ‘Ideology and Religious Parody in the Novels of Leopoldo Alas’, 201, and ‘The Dynamics of Motif in Leopoldo Alas's La Regenta’, 192–93. 24. Sobejano (in his edition of La Regenta, 46–47) sees the toad as a symbol of the devil, derived from St Teresa's autobiography.
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