Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Decimonónica

Volume

3

Issue

1

Publisher

Decimonónica

Publication Date

2006

First Page

28

Last Page

43

Abstract

In his day, Felipe Trigo (1864–1916) was a polemical yet widely appreciated author. In both his essays and fiction, he proposed and actively promoted solutions for the hysteria, melancholy, and latent violence produced by the nineteenth-century gender construct of the ángel del hogar, the initially middle-class ideal that established marriage and the home as the place for all women. Yet, in 1983, Ángel Martínez San Martín could justifiably write: “El desprecio y el olvido han sido, hasta hace muy poco, los dos más fieles compañeros de (su) obra literaria” (239). Today, most critics dismiss his work or apologize for analyzing it. For example, Roberta Johnson’s most recent book, Gender and Nation in the Spanish Modernist Novel, only states of the extremeño: “[. . .] because some of Trigo’s themes would take my discussions in diffuse directions, I do not include his works in this book” (viii). Ricardo Krauel’s discussion of suicide in Si sé por qué begins with a profuse apology for reading Trigo’s novels and a critique of his style in the mode of the most established negative criticism of Trigo’s work, in his own time and since.

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