Leigh Mercer

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Decimonónica

Volume

9

Issue

1

Publisher

Decimonónica

Publication Date

2012

First Page

34

Last Page

47

Abstract

In this article, I approach Rosalía de Castro’s La hija del mar (1859) and Benito Pérez Galdós’s La sombra (1870) as novels that make use of the Gothic as a way to express concerns about gender and society in the Spanish nineteenth century. Rosalía de Castro developed a proto-feminist Gothic that denounced family violence and the sexual abuse of women in Spain. For his part, Galdós used the tropes of this genre to reveal how malicious gossip and outdated notions of honor were provoking a crisis of masculinity in late-nineteenth-century Spain. Building on Kate Ferguson Ellis’s idea that the Gothic produced alternate masculine and feminine traditions, with the masculine Gothic generally written as a reaction to the feminine (xvi), I examine Galdós’s exploration of the Gothic in La sombra as a direct inversion of the feminine Gothic and a response to Castro’s La hija del mar. By exploring the two authors’ gendered engagement with the Gothic mode, this study ultimately contests the gender stereotyping of nineteenth-century novelistic authorship, “whereby men were seen as active originators, and women as passive consumers or imitators of fashion” (Labanyi 9), as it also questions Galdós’s claim to initiate an anti-sentimental and purely Realist national novel.

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