Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Decimonónica

Volume

16

Issue

1

Publisher

Decimonónica

Publication Date

2019

First Page

39

Last Page

55

Abstract

Our epigraph comes from the closing scene of the opening chapter of Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta (1885). Here Vetusta’s resident erudite, Saturnino Bermúdez, shows the local cathedral to a provincial couple visiting “la heroica ciudad” (I: 135) while he clumsily flirts with Obdulia Fandiño, the town’s most scandalous citizen. This first chapter of La Regenta famously begins with all of Vetusta taking its daily siesta while it “descansaba oyendo entre sueños” (I: 136), as Fermín de Pas, canon theologian and vicar general, ascends the cathedral bell tower to survey his drowsing domain. The multiple symbolic functions of Vetusta’s geography have received ample analysis in the rich scholarship on La Regenta (Turner; Oleza “Introducción”; Nuñez Puente; Nanfito; Iglesias Villamel; Gilfoil; y Vieira). Space indeed serves to organize La Regentain metaphorical and narratological ways, but it also demonstrates the novel’s engagement with processes of the unconscious. As we first meet Vetusta in a state of somnolence and then survey the city, we encounter three linked notions, which previous scholars have not connected: the city’s semi-conscious state, its subterranean depths, and the erasure of the inscriptions within these depths. Obscurity, illegibility, erasure, and an unwillingness to illuminate the hidden recesses of the city’s most important monument give the “cripta cavada” (I: 181) profound psychic resonance. Obdulia and Saturnino’s flirtation there, which arouses without satisfying, links this underground space to the repressed sexual desire with which all Vetusta seethes.

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