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Importing Madame Bovary
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Importing Madame Bovary:
The Politics of Adultery
Elizabeth Amann
IMPORTING MADAME BOVARY
Copyright © Elizabeth Amann, 2006.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or
reviews.
First published in 2006 by

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ISBN-10: 1-4039-7606-6 hardcover

ISBN-13: 978-1-4039-7606-2 hardcover
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Amann, Elizabeth.
Importing Madame Bovary: the politics of adultery /Elizabeth Amann.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-4039-7606-6
1. European fiction–19th century–History and criticism. 2. Adultery in literature.
3. Flaubert, Gustave, 1821–1880. Madame Bovary. 4. Flaubert, Gustave,
1821–1880–Characters–Emma Bovary. 5. Bovary, Emma (Fictitious character) I. Title.
PN3352.A38A43 2006
809.3'93552–dc22
2006046047
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Printed in the United States of America.

Table of Contents
Introduction 1
1 Exhuming Marguerite Gautier 15
2 An Unbridled Bride 65
3 A Marriage Sans-culotte ? 95
4 On Tour 125
5 Grafting 175
Epilogue 215
Acknowledgments 239
Notes 241
Bibliography 257
Introduction
Like many of Woody Allen’s heroes, the title character of his short story
“The Kugelmass Episode” is a New York intellectual who is dissatisfied with
his marriage and his psychotherapy. Kugelmass, however, finds a very
unique solution to his problems: he decides to exchange the services of his
shrink for those of a Brooklyn magician, who calls himself “The Great
Persky.” Persky has invented a special cabinet that projects its contents into
the action of whatever book is enclosed with them. For a modest fee, he of-
fers Kugelmass the opportunity to use this mechanism to commit adultery
with the literary heroine of his choice. Glancing at Perksy’s bookshelves, the
two men quickly run through the canon in search of the ideal lover:
“So who do you want to meet? Sister Carrie? Hester Prynne? Ophelia?
Maybe someone by Saul Bellow? Hey, what about Temple Drake?
Although for a man your age she’d be a workout.”
“French. I want to have an affair with a French lover.”
“Nana?”
“I don’t want to have to pay for it.”
“What about Natasha in War and Peace?”
“I said French. I know! What about Emma Bovary? That sounds
to me perfect.” (44)
Kugelmass enters the magic box with a translation of Flaubert’s novel and
instantly finds himself in Yonville with Madame Bovary, who speaks “in
the same fine English translation as the paperback” (45). With her French
manners and refinement, Emma contrasts dramatically with “the
troglodyte who shared his bed” in real life and soon has Kugelmass under
her spell. Having recently been spurned by Rodolphe, Emma welcomes his
advances. As their affair develops, the English translation of the novel be-
comes strangely distorted: “[S]tudents in various classrooms across the
country were saying to their teachers, ‘Who is this character on page 100?
A bald Jew is kissing Madame Bovary?’” (46). At first, the course of true
love runs smooth. After a while, however, Emma tires of Yonville trysts and
begs Kugelmass to take her with him when he returns to the Big Apple.
2 IMPORTING MADAME BOVARY/ELIZABETH AMANN
Once again, Kugelmass resorts to Persky’s help and magically transports

her in the Bovary carriage to Central Park South, where, installed in the
Plaza, she quickly runs up a bill.
Woody Allen’s plot may serve as a metaphor for the literary trend I
examine in this book: the foreign appropriation and rewriting of Flaubert’s
novel in the late nineteenth century. Like “The Kugelmass Episode,” this
book tells the story of how Madame Bovary “got around.” Our tale begins
in 1878, when the Portuguese author José María Eça de Queirós
(1846–1900) published his second novel, O primo Basílio. Almost imme-
diately, critics accused him of plagiarism. The tale he told—the story of an
adulteress whose moral degeneracy and financial difficulties led to her
death—was clearly an imitation of Madame Bovary, and many phrases and
even episodes were translated almost word for word. Seven years later, sim-
ilar accusations were leveled at the Spanish writer Leopoldo Alas
(1852–1901; known by the pseudonym “Clarín”), whose monumental La
Regenta (1884–1885), inspired in part by Eça’s novel, also echoed
Flaubert’s plot and repeated various motifs. Both writers were accused of
being imitative and, therefore, unpatriotic.1 Like Kugelmass, they flirted
with something foreign; their literary flings with Madame Bovary were in-
ternational affairs.
Paradoxically, both texts now stand at the pinnacle of their respective
national traditions. O primo Basílio is regarded as a masterpiece of
Portuguese realism, and scholars generally concur that La Regenta is, in
Mario Vargas Llosa’s words, “the best nineteenth-century novel [written in
Spain]” (220). Wherever Emma was imported she was given tremendous
import in the national canon. This study attempts to understand what is
at stake in these deliberate and undisguised rewritings. Why did Flaubert’s
novel take hold of the literary imagination on the margins of Europe in the
late nineteenth century? How was it read within these traditions? And why
were such borrowings so often too close for comfort?
By raising these questions, this book addresses a series of theoretical and
literary-historical problems in the study of the nineteenth-century
European novel. On the one hand, the rewritings are a prime example of
one of the most puzzling phenomena of this period: the recurrence of the
plot of female infidelity in nineteenth-century literature and the frequent
canonization of adultery novels. Overlooked in many studies of the genre,
the rewritings of Madame Bovary offer a fresh perspective from which to
consider the social and historical functions of this literary form. At the same
time, these novels are invaluable documents for understanding the recep-
tion of the French masterpiece in its time and, particularly, early readers’ re-
sponses to its innovative textual features such as Flaubert’s fascination with
repetition and jarring forms of citation. Composed themselves of quotations
INTRODUCTION 3
and uncomfortably close repetitions, the rewritings of Madame Bovary

afford a unique vantage point for understanding the function of these tech-
niques and the political meaning contemporaries ascribed to them.
The Politics of Adultery
The Scarlet Letter, Madame Bovary, O primo Basílio, Anna Karenina, La

Regenta, Effi Briest: a glance at the major titles of the period reveals the
prevalence and importance of the adultery plot in nineteenth-century lit-
erature. Not only do all of these novels deal with female infidelity, but also
each is a canonical work in its respective tradition. As Tony Tanner has
observed, “It is such an obvious and legible phenomenon that many of
those nineteenth-century novels that have been canonized as ‘great’ . . .
center on adultery, that, with some exceptions, few have thought it worth
trying to take the matter further” (11). Tanner’s 1979 study, Adultery in the
Novel: Contract and Transgression, was one of the first to attempt to do so.
In it, Tanner raised a series of important questions about the genre and its
social function: Why did the infidelity plot come to dominate the nine-
teenth-century novel, and what historical circumstances allowed it to take
root? In attempting to understand reactions to Madame Bovary, arguably
the most important instance of the genre, such questions are fundamental.
Studies of the adultery novel have addressed these issues in various
ways. Many critics have taken the adultery plot quite literally, interpreting
the nineteenth-century fascination with infidelity as a reflection of the dis-
contents of bourgeois marriage in the period. Bill Overton, for example,
defines the adultery novel as “a form stemming from social tensions
concerning the role of women in marriage, motherhood, the family and
the transmission of property” (14).2 The fact that these works have tradi-
tionally been inscribed within the realist canon has encouraged this type of
assumption. The authors of many of these works consciously set out to
create a mirror of reality, an accurate representation of the social mores of
their time.
As modern criticism of the nineteenth-century novel has shown, how-
ever, it is important not to confuse the project with the product. Despite
their pretensions to objectivity, these novels are generally less transparent
than they seem, laced with allusion and allegory. As art works, they do
not simply reflect but also work, actively interpreting, transforming, and
reimagining the realities they engage. Marital laws and practices (most
notably, the illegality of divorce in France from 1816 to 1884) were
undoubtedly conditions necessary for the emergence of the adultery novel.
As an explanation of its appeal or popularity, of the almost obsessive recur-

rence of the plot in novels of the period, however, such accounts are
unconvincing. If the plot merely reflects the frustrations of domestic life
or the vulnerability of bourgeois marriage, it is difficult to understand
why it was repeated so often, what each version could possibly have
added to this critique that would justify a whole new work. In dealing
with a collective obsession of this magnitude, one senses that there must
be more to it, that the commentaries and anxieties underlying these texts
are somehow more complex. Literal or reflectionist accounts of the genre
disappoint because they reduce the meaning of these works to the surface
of their representations.
One of the consequences of this approach to the adultery novel has
been a tendency to view the genre as a unilaterally subversive current in the
literature of the period. If we take these works at face value, after all, most
of them seem to expose the flaws of nineteenth-century social practices.
The best-known exponent of this view—the idea of adultery as critique—
was Tanner, who not only raised important questions about a genre often
taken for granted but also offered penetrating close readings of three ex-
amples of the form. (I will be drawing on his insights on Madame Bovary
in the chapters that follow.)3 Tanner’s analysis, moreover, avoided the lit-
eral, sociological interpretation (the adultery novel as a mirror of bourgeois
family life) and worked toward a reading of the genre as a symbolic rather
than reflective form. In the early nineteenth century, Tanner argued, mar-
riage was a metaphor for the social contract, the political bond that was the
basis of bourgeois society. A breach of marital vows, consequently, chal-
lenged the social order at its very core. For Tanner, adultery was a symp-
tom of the disintegration of the mediations that constituted bourgeois
society; with the emergence of the infidelity novel, he claimed, “sexuality,
narration, and society fall apart, never to be reintegrated in the same
way—if, indeed, at all” (14). Tanner’s argument was more satisfying than
most because it recognized that the social significance of the adultery novel
went beyond narrow concerns about marital law or family structure. Its
broad scope and clever readings attracted a wide following.
Like the sociological reading, however, Tanner’s thesis ultimately relied
on a passive notion of reflection: it established a parallelism or homology
between marriage and the state in which a disruption in the former mir-
rored the breakdown of the latter.4 This homology was perhaps fitting for
the first work examined in his study, Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse.
Written by the father of the social contract, this novel lent itself to Tanner’s
equation. When applied to later works, however, his thesis became less con-
vincing. By the time Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary, adultery was not a de-
fiance of the most fundamental of bourgeois conventions but a convention
INTRODUCTION 5
itself, the most hackneyed of clichés: “What is the tritest theme of all, worn
out by repetition, by being played over and over again like a tired barrel-
organ?” Baudelaire asked in his review of the novel: “Adultery” (339). To
equate its infidelity with that of the revolutionary Rousseau, consequently,
was problematic. Tanner’s study failed to register the ways in which the
genre developed over time, how it evolved in response to new historical cir-
cumstances. In Jann Matlock’s words, his analysis suffered from an “ahis-
torical time warp” (“The Limits” 342).
Not only did Tanner’s study disregard the differences between the con-
texts in which the novels were written, but it also tended to ignore differ-
ences among the texts themselves. Tanner dedicated half of his book to the
unconsummated loves of La Nouvelle Héloise (1761) and Goethe’s Die
Wahlverwandtschaften (1809) before turning to the de facto adulteries of
Madame Bovary, a text written half a century later (1856).5 My point is not
that intercourse should determine inclusion in the genre, but rather that
the failure to distinguish between variants can result in a static view that
blurs changes in the form and its social significance: it is not coincidental
that transgressions sidestepped in the period of Rousseau and Goethe
come to fruition in Flaubert’s. Tanner in his study set out to historicize, to
relate text to context, but by defining the genre in such an all-embracing
way and reducing its political function to an invariable homology, he was
ultimately more epochal than historical in his approach. His work is im-
portant because it acknowledged the symbolic potential of the form, but
by assigning the plot a single political meaning, it ultimately displaced
agency from authors to the genre itself. In so doing, it overlooked the act
of appropriation implicit in the choice of or allusion to a genre, the way
writers twist conventions to their own ends, play them off other forms and
expose old formulae to new historical contexts. To read these texts and
understand how the genre functions in each, it is necessary to recover the
differences among them.
Imitation and Intertextuality
Whereas accounts of the genre as a whole (usually produced by compara-

tists such as Tanner) have tended to be narratives of stasis or sameness,
studies written by critics of national literatures (for example, readings of
individual adultery novels) often veer toward the opposite extreme: an
insistence upon absolute difference. Until recently, studies of the nine-
teenth-century Spanish and Portuguese novel have, to a large degree, been
concerned with asserting the autonomy of works produced within these
traditions. This insistence on national difference has had an impact on

both interpretation and evaluation: critics have dismissed the importance
of foreign sources for understanding these works and judged harshly au-
thors who found their inspiration abroad.6 An interesting example of the
latter may be seen in the following aside in José Montesinos’s classic 1955
study of the nineteenth-century novel (Introducción a una historia de la
novela en España en el siglo XIX), which adopts a pertinent metaphor:
[Female readers’] souls contaminated by literary passion, which affected

them like a disease, are what most contributed to the triumph of the for-
eign, of what was for them exotic, an evasion, an escape beyond the domes-
tic and the everyday. Pure Bovaryism, crystalized in women’s souls. This is
not the place to say the many things that could be said about how this in-
fluenced customs; we could speak of . . . the infinite numbers of women
whom the literary fever caused to lose their sense of self. But limiting our-
selves to what concerns the history of the novel, we shall emphasize that this
mode of understanding and enjoying novelistic creations made the emer-
gence of a Spanish novel impossible for a long time. (131, my translation)
For Montesinos, to be open to foreign influences is to be (like Madame

Bovary) unfaithful, to betray one’s country. Montesinos voices what might
be called a collective anxiety of influence. His Bovaresque readers have so
immersed themselves in the foreign that they have lost their sense of self
and with it their national identity. It is only when this influence is resisted
that Montesinos can identify the birth of a Spanish novel. Such resistance
has typified Spanish and Portuguese criticism: national scholarship has
generally avoided “contamination”—the influence of foreign texts and
genres—and confined its imagination to “the domestic and the everyday,”
to studying the representation of local reality within these works.
In the chapters that follow, I will draw on Montesinos’s metaphor but
argue against his diagnosis. Iberian readers and writers in the nineteenth
century were indeed Bovaresque, unfaithful to the national and in constant
flirtation with the foreign. It was, however, precisely this Bovaryism that
allowed for the development of the Spanish and Portuguese novel.
Ultimately, these writers are closer to Woody Allen’s Kugelmass than to the
bored housewives whom Montesinos scapegoats. They experience influence
not as a passive absorption—a “contamination” by the “literary passion”—
but rather as an active engagement, an appropriative form of reading. They
step into Persky’s cabinet by choice and revel in rewriting and abducting
from the books they enter.
The metaphor of Bovaryism is fitting for suggesting not only this open-
ness to influence but also the textual infidelity that is common in Iberian
rewritings of Madame Bovary. Like their heroines, these fictions are faithless,
INTRODUCTION 7
neither true to their source nor loyal to a single model: their authors con-
stantly consort with other texts and genres and put them into dialogue with
Madame Bovary. Eça de Queirós’s novel, for example, not only takes up the
Bovary plot but also confronts it with other French texts such as Alexandre
Dumas fils’s La dame aux camélias and Flaubert’s bildungsroman, L’éducation
sentimentale. In La Regenta, Clarín responds both to Madame Bovary and to
Eça’s revision of it and reelaborates many of the Portuguese writer’s second-
ary allusions. Our Iberian Kugelmasses, thus, enter Perksy’s cabinet with
more than one novel. As will become clear in the pages that follow, these
texts are densely allusive works, never simple rewritings.
The complexity of these references may at first seem counterintuitive.
We expect so-called realist fiction to imitate life rather than art, to be
more mimetic than hermetic. Indeed, it is this notion of realism as rep-
resentation that has always allowed critics to defend the autonomy of the
nineteenth-century Iberian novel: Spanish and Portuguese works are
original and authentically national texts, it is claimed, because their ref-
erent is Spain or Portugal.7 Although it is indisputable that Iberian works
respond to a local reality, they ultimately do not reflect it so much as re-
flect upon it. One of the arguments of this study is that to understand
this active reflecting (as opposed to the passive reflection), to grasp the
intellectual engagement and not just the superficial mirror, one must ac-
knowledge and study the textual conversations that mediate it.
Discussing “The Kugelmass Episode,” Jonathan Culler has observed how
by its end, its hero has occupied all possible textual positions: he is a
reader of the novel, a producer of the text (he orchestrates a new episode:
Emma in midtown) and a referent in it (the bald Jew on page 100). Eça
de Queirós and Clarín, similarly, make their local reality the setting of
new episodes (Emma goes to Lisbon and Oviedo), and, like Kugelmass,
reimagine this world through their reading and rewriting of foreign fic-
tion. The encounter with French works allows Kugelmass and the
Iberian authors to understand local reality better. To insist on the ab-
solute difference of national texts, consequently, is to miss much of their
commentary.
Unlike Woody Allen’s hero, however, Spanish and Portuguese writers
never make it to page 100. Whereas Kugelmass and Madame Bovary are
mutually influential (the former changes the text of the translation, and the
heroine of the latter invades his life), Iberian authors exert little to no force
on the foreign traditions that they engage. In nineteenth-century Spain and
Portugal, influence was almost always a one-way street: local writers drew
on French and English works but had themselves virtually no impact on
those traditions. It should, therefore, be clarified that in using terms such
as dialogue and conversation, I am not implying that these relations were
even exchanges: the authors to whom Iberian writers responded were very
rarely the addressees of their responses.
My conception of dialogue should also be distinguished from the con-
temporary theoretical use of the term, namely, Julia Kristeva’s concept of
intertextual dialogue. Since the 1970s, this notion has become tremen-
dously important in the criticism of Flaubert, whose work is often seen as
a precursor of it. In Flaubert studies, the concept of intertextuality was ini-
tially advantageous because it challenged the conventional inscription of
his novels within the tradition of realist objectivity and drew attention to
one of his most important textual innovations: the incorporation of
anonymous, unmarked citations of commonplaces and clichés of the pe-
riod. Neither separated by inverted commas nor attributed to speakers,
these quotations blended disconcertingly with the voice of the narrator
and created an ambiguity as to the subject of enunciation. As Roland
Barthes famously explained in S/Z (1970), “[Flaubert] does not stop the
play of codes (or stops it only partially), so that . . . one never knows if he is
responsible for what he writes (if there is a subject behind his language).” His
technique keeps “the question Who is speaking? from ever being answered”
(140). As Dominick LaCapra has shown, it was this feature of his work,
more than its imputed indecency, that provoked controversy and a trial on
its initial publication. It was this very feature, however, that would later en-
dear Flaubert to post-structuralist critics and help them to develop theo-
ries of intertextuality. Unlike traditional concepts of the relations between
literary works (e.g., imitation, allusion, emulation, or influence), the he-
roes of intertextuality are not readers and writers but texts and discourses,
which seamlessly absorb and contaminate one another: in Kristeva’s words,
“the notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity” (66).
Flaubert’s elision of the subject of enunciation seemed to anticipate this
notion of textual relations that do not depend on notions of authorship,
intentionality, or stable meaning. The theoretical discussions of intertextu-
ality brought this feature of Flaubert’s novel to light and are consequently
important in considering its foreign reworkings, which often exploited
similar techniques.
My approach to the relation between the rewritings and Madame
Bovary, however, should be distinguished from this concept. What I am
exploring is not intertextuality, the passive, subjectless absorption of
discourses, but rather a deliberate act of appropriation by readers and writ-
ers.8 The term “dialogue” is used here in two senses. On the one hand, it
is helpful for describing the relations among Spanish and Portuguese
authors writing in the late nineteenth century. During this period, Iberian
literary circles were relatively small, and many of the major writers—not
only Eça and Clarín but also Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) and Emilia
INTRODUCTION 9
Pardo Bazán (1851–1921)—knew and corresponded with one another. As

Stephen Gilman has shown in a seminal study of Galdós (Galdós and the
Art of the European Novel: 1867–1887), their works were often conceived
as replies to those of their contemporaries and to the problems posed
within them (Gilman’s term for this is “inter-novel dialogue”).9 Within
this tight intellectual circle, literary criticism and literary production were
inseparable. In taking up Eça de Queirós’ idea of rewriting Madame
Bovary, for example, Clarín in La Regenta is implicitly critiquing the
Portuguese writer’s interpretation of Flaubert’s novel and offering his own
reading.
In using the word dialogue, however, I seek to evoke not only the col-
laborative literary context Gilman describes but also the intellectual
method that these writers adopted in approaching other works even when
they had no contact with the authors. Dialogue in this sense evokes the
Platonic use of the word, the idea of questioning or engaging a concept to
probe its validity and implications. The Platonic dialogue is not a real con-
versation—an equal give-and-take—so much as a form of ventriloquism:
Plato does not engage adversaries directly but rather creates fictive en-
counters in which the character of Socrates puts their visions to the test
and explores their ramifications. The sophistical discourses Plato chal-
lenges are made to live again, assigned to human voices and questioned
through a dramatic form that explores how they hold up in relation to the
ideas of Socrates. The Iberian rewritings of Madame Bovary work similarly.
By reviving Emma and making her interact with other plots and dis-
courses, they probe how Flaubert’s ideas apply in different social and his-
torical circumstances. Because of this questioning, these novels are among
the most penetrating readings of Madame Bovary in the nineteenth cen-
tury. Though neglected within Flaubert studies, they are an invaluable
source for understanding the novel and its reception among his contem-
poraries.
One of the aspects of Madame Bovary upon which these literary con-
versations shed most light is precisely the feature that contemporary the-
ory has identified with intertextuality: Flaubert’s innovative form of cita-
tion. As a concept, intertextuality was born of the cultural milieu of France
in the 1960s. For intellectuals such as Barthes and Kristeva, it represented
a textual revolution that expressed at the level of language the social trans-
formations of the period. This tendency to associate intertextuality with
subversion influenced interpretations of both Flaubert and the adultery
novel. In his 1979 study, Tony Tanner argued that the breakdown of tra-
ditional representation and the movement toward destabilized textuality in
Madame Bovary paralleled the breakdown of the bourgeois social order.10
For Tanner, wives and words reclaimed their freedom together, shaking the
yokes that bound them to husbands and referents respectively.

Extrapolating from a series of homologies—an equation of textual jouis-
sance, erotic play and political upheaval—Tanner came to regard the genre
as a whole as a subversive form.11 This political interpretation was a pro-
jection of the cultural presuppositions of Tanner’s and Kristeva’s moment
onto that of Flaubert. The nineteenth-century rewritings of his novel sug-
gest a very different understanding of the political function of Flaubertian
textuality.
1848 and the Problem of Historical Alignment
The political commentary of the rewritings is elaborated through a pointed

use of allusion and literary dialogue. As in Madame Bovary, what sets Eça’s O
primo Basílio into motion is the novel-reading of a bored housewife, Luísa
Mendonça, who at first shares Emma’s love for Sir Walter Scott. After a
while, however, Luísa tires of historical romance and turns instead to
Alexandre Dumas fils’s 1848 novel, La dame aux camélias, the story of the
Parisian courtesan, Marguerite Gautier. What draws Eça’s heroine is not (as
in Madame Bovary) the anachronistic world of The Bride of Lammermoor but
rather French modernity, the reality of Paris in 1848. This shift in literary
catalyst introduces a new political subtext into the Bovary plot. Published
shortly after the June Days, La dame aux camélias takes as its heroine the
iconic figure of the Revolution of 1848—the prostitute—and its plot is a
coded response to the upheaval of its day. In reading and imitating
Marguerite’s story, consequently, the Portuguese heroine is unwittingly en-
tering the plot of 1848: her subsequent infidelity and financial problems in-
troduce into a Lisbonese context the class conflict and disruption of the
French uprising. This historical subtext is reinforced through literary allu-
sion. Framing the story of Luísa’s fall is a series of conversations drawn from
L’éducation sentimentale, Flaubert’s tale of 1848 and its aftermath. Eça, thus,
develops a subtle political commentary by combining foreign texts of par-
ticular historical resonance. In La Regenta, Clarín takes up all of these allu-
sions and by reworking them expands on Eça’s critique. What mediates both
writers’ reflections on Iberian history and society is the plot of 1848.
This fixation might seem surprising in the works of Iberian authors.
Spain and Portugal, after all, were among the few European nations that re-
mained immune to the quick-spreading uprisings of 1848. For an Iberian
intellectual trying to make sense of national history and modernity, this di-
vergence from the rest of the continent represented a significant problem.
As historians and critics from Lukács to Barthes have recognized, 1848 was
INTRODUCTION 11
a turning point in nineteenth-century history and a watershed in European

thought and art. More than any other nineteenth-century political event, it
took hold of the literary and historical imagination, generating a series of
myths and archetypes. Its failure to reach Iberian soil, consequently, raised
important questions: How did the historical experience of Spain and
Portugal line up with that of the rest of Europe? What did such disconti-
nuities suggest about these nations? And how was one to understand later
conflicts such as the Revolution of 1868 (the “Glorious” Revolution) in
Spain? Was this a delayed reverberation of 1848 or, as Clarín speculated in
his late writing, a Spanish equivalent of 1789?12 Finally, what would hap-
pen were the tensions of 1848 to irrupt in an Iberian context?
This study argues that in rewriting Madame Bovary Iberian writers cre-
ated complex literary dialogues to explore these problems of historical mis-
alignment, to make sense of the discrepancies between Iberian history and
that of the rest of Europe. By engaging a series of foreign texts that deal
with revolution, they reenacted historical patterns experienced abroad,
imagined how they might develop in an Iberian context, and sought to de-
fine alternate endings and solutions. Although some studies of Eça and
Clarín have addressed the relation between the rewritings and history, they
have tended to focus on their representation or reflection of reality, their
portrayal of Iberian society at the time. This local context is undoubtedly
the principal focus of both writers. They approach it, however, less as a re-
ality to be reproduced than as a problem to be solved. My study contends
that Eça and Clarín accomplish this problem-solving through the hermetic
side of their work (its allusions and rewritings) as much as through the
mimetic (its reflection of society). In their novels, both writers enter into
dialogue with foreign plots that serve as frames of reference through which
to process and work through the social problems of their day. Having ex-
perienced the idealism of the Glorious Revolution of 1868 as a young
man, Clarín is clearly trying to make sense of its outcome in La Regenta,
to depict and work through the disenchantments of the Restoration,
which followed the uprising and the failed First Republic in Spain. It is his
engagement of the literature of 1848, however, that gives nuance to this
commentary on 1868 and allows him to relate it to broader historical pat-
terns. 1848 and its aftermath were particularly useful for understanding
the moment of Iberian history that Eça and Clarín explored. In the 1870s,
the governments of Spain and Portugal moved toward a form of backstage
politics in which two seemingly opposed parties alternated in power
through a system of fraudulent elections and behind-the-scenes negotia-
tions. This parody of political representation resembled the strategies of
Louis Bonaparte, who similarly collapsed ideological oppositions and dis-
torted republican discourses.
At first, this approach to social commentary might seem needlessly indi-

rect. We may be tempted to ask why these authors resorted to such baroque
conversations, why these concerns could not be addressed directly through
the representation of reality, the mode of critique we associate with the realist
novel. In rereading these texts, however, we will see that mimesis and
hermeticism lend themselves to different types of questions and are never as
mutually exclusive as rigid distinctions between aestheticist and realist art
encourage us to believe. In these novels, mimesis is often used to reflect on
a local reality known to the writer. The opening pages of La Regenta, for
example, offer a panoramic vision of a provincial Spanish capital and the
socioeconomic conditions of the residents of each of its neighborhoods. At
the same time, however, Clarín’s initial sequence is also a rewriting of the
cathedral tour and seduction of Part III of Madame Bovary. As I will show in
Chapter 4, this literary conversation allows Clarín to explore problems of
historical misalignment. Textual dialogue lent itself to this type of question
because it involved a process of comparing and contrasting; the models of-
fered a narrative emplotment of foreign history against which to understand
national experience. As the opening of La Regenta suggests, the mimetic and
the hermetic are often deployed simultaneously: the former captures a con-
text that is then processed and interpreted through the latter.
Recovering these literary conversations and the historical problems they
address will allow us to revise political interpretations of both the adultery
novel and Flaubert’s techniques. These Iberian examples of the genre are not
rebelling so much as exploring revolution—its causes, its effects, and the
ways in which it is carried out. In neither novel, moreover, is it the infidelity
that conveys the subversion that the author analyzes.13 In O primo Basílio, we
will see, the Bovary plot is what allows Eça to reassert the Portuguese hero-
ine’s distance from the story she reads (La dame aux camélias) and from the
history it represents (the plot of 1848): like Emma, Luísa can never fully
enter the fictional world she admires. The Bovaresque model ultimately al-
lows Eça to pull her and, by extension, Portugal out of the plot of revolu-
tion. Similarly, La Regenta identifies the heroine’s adultery not with rebellion
but with its parody, with a reactionary simulacrum of revolution that defuses
the real critique she has the potential to make. In describing this farce, Clarín
draws upon Flaubert’s stylistic innovations, his intertextuality avant la lettre.
This style, however, is not (as in contemporary accounts) a form of textual
jouissance that defies power structures and social norms but rather a danger-
ously decontextualized language that introduces distortion and lends itself to
the abuse of power. Later chapters of this book will relate this feature to the
stylistic practices that Jeffrey Mehlman has identified with Bonapartism, the
manipulation and misapplication of discourses that allowed Louis-Napoléon
to gain influence in France and to squash the very uprising that put him in
INTRODUCTION 13
power. By moving away from the politics of ’68 and toward those of ’48, this
study contests the unquestioned identification of intertextuality and adultery
with subversive stances and attempts to understand how Flaubert’s plot and
textual strategies were interpreted in his moment.
The study takes as its starting point Luísa’s reading in O primo Basílio.
Chapter 1 begins by contextualizing her favorite novel, Dumas’s La dame
aux camélias, within its historical moment—the revolution of 1848—and
then explores how Eça and later Clarin comment on this historical subtext.
Chapter 2 turns to Eça’s reworking of Madame Bovary and examines how
he expands and restructures Flaubert’s character system to introduce a po-
litical commentary into his plot. It also shows how Eça reinforces this cri-
tique by interweaving his tale with an allusion to L’éducation sentimentale,
Flaubert’s story of 1848 and its aftermath. Chapter 3 turns to the Spanish
rewriting to question dominant theories of the adultery novel. Through
close readings of Madame Bovary and Clarín’s La Regenta, it argues that the
collapse of representation in these works was not inherently subversive but
rather lent itself to conflicting political uses in both texts. Chapter 4 deals
with Clarín’s rewriting of Madame Bovary and analyzes three scenes in
La Regenta drawn directly from the French model. Examining these pas-
sages side by side with their French originals, this chapter shows how
Clarín consistently reshapes Flaubert’s episodes to introduce a meditation
on the relation between linguistic and political representation. The final chap-
ter turns from Clarín’s reworking of Flaubert to his dialogue with Eça de
Queirós and the Portuguese rewriting of Madame Bovary. Analyzing char-
acters drawn from O primo Basílio, this chapter shows how Clarín revises
Eça’s account of the causes of revolution as well as his imagined resolution
of these conflicts. I argue that Clarín draws on Eça’s figures and use of the
literature of 1848 and contrasts them with a more idealized vision of rev-
olution modeled on the titanic figures of 1789 and Romanticism. The
book concludes with an epilogue that returns to the source—Madame
Bovary—and explores how the nineteenth-century rewritings may guide us
toward a fuller understanding of Flaubert’s work and its relation to history.
In Woody Allen’s “The Kugelmass Episode,” a Stanford professor is per-
plexed by the way the English translation of Madame Bovary keeps chang-
ing. “I cannot get my mind around this . . . First a strange character named
Kugelmass, and now she’s gone from the book. Well, I guess the mark of a
classic is that you can reread it a thousand times and always find something
new” (50). In the second half of the nineteenth century, Madame Bovary
was read and rewritten many times, and in each successive version, “some-
thing new” was added or brought into greater relief. It is by studying these
additions and revisions that we may come to a fuller understanding of
Flaubert’s novel and of nineteenth-century literary history.
1
Exhuming Marguerite Gautier
“It is remarkable,” wrote Kierkegaard in 1842, “that the whole of

European literature lacks a feminine counterpart to Don Quixote. May
not the time be coming, may not the continent of sentimentality yet be
discovered?” (Either/Or, 210). As it turned out, the discovery was not far
off: 15 years later, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary would launch a tradition of
female quixotism that included some of the most important novels of the
nineteenth century: Eça de Queirós’s O primo Basílio, Tolstoy’s Anna
Karenina‚ and Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta. Like Cervantes’s knight, Emma
Bovary longs to enter the stories she reads. And in each case, this reading
sets the plot in motion and is the key to the protagonist’s development. To
understand either the knight or the adulteress, one must know the literary
works and conventions the author has set out to deflate. Just as Cervantes’s
novel depends on the reader’s familiarity with chivalric fiction, pastoral lit-
erature, and Greek romance, to read Madame Bovary one needs a map of
the “continent of sentimentality.”
As the catalyst of the Bovaresque adultery novel, the heroine’s reading
is a natural point of departure for approaching Madame Bovary and its
rewritings. Like genetic code, it is an index of both parentage and indi-
viduality. It is the centrality of the quixotic female reader that most clearly
marks O primo Basílio and La Regenta as offspring of Madame Bovary. In
the Portuguese novel, for example, Luísa Mendonça’s literary tastes coin-
cide with Emma’s and are the first indication in the text of Eça’s source:
both heroines are fans of Sir Walter Scott and long to exchange their
mundane existence for Scottish castles with pointed arches and knights
sporting feathers in their caps. Eça’s borrowing from Flaubert is not dis-
guised. Indeed, it is so blatant that many early readers dismissed his novel
as derivative.
The adulteress’s reading, however, not only reveals Eça’s source but is
also the key to his departure from Flaubert, to the individuality of the
Lisbonese heroine. In each novel, the literature the adulteress reads deter-
mines the particularity of her development: a woman drawn to Lamartine
evolves differently from one inspired by St. Theresa of Avila. In O primo
Basílio, Eça’s allusion to Flaubert serves to establish his heroine’s difference
from Emma Bovary as much as it does their similarity. Although Luísa be-
gins by reading Scott, her taste quickly moves in another direction:
But now it was the modern that captivated her, Paris, its furniture, its senti-
mentalities . . . It was a week now that she had been interested in Marguerite
Gautier: her unhappy love gave her an enervated melancholy; she imagined
Marguerite as tall and thin, with her long cashmere shawl, her black eyes
eager for passion and flaming with consumption; even the names of the
book—Julie Duprat, Armand, Prudence, gave off the poetic flavor of an in-
tensely amorous life.(18)
Emma is like Don Quixote not only in the way she reads but also in what
she reads: both the adulteress and the knight long for an idealized past. What
Cervantes and Flaubert are deflating is anachronism. Luísa, in contrast, does
not need to look backward to find a desirable, exotic world. For her, the
modern itself is as remote as the past is for Emma. Her Amadis of Gaul will
be a contemporary novel: Alexandre Dumas fils’s La dame aux camélias.
Through this shift in reading material, Eça points to the marginal po-
sition of his heroine. In comparison to France, modernization in Portugal
was slow and uneven.1 Whereas Don Quixote and Emma Bovary escape
the banality of the present through fantasies of a more glorious past, Luísa,
mired in backward Lisbon, longs for the present itself. Eça’s departure from
the Bovary model, however, is still perplexing: if what Luísa desires is the
modern, if she avoids the foolish anachronisms of her predecessors, why is
her reading condemned? What is so threatening about the modernity she
longs to enter in reading La dame aux camélias?
Dumas and the Translation of the Courtesan
We may begin to answer these questions by opening Luísa’s book:
It is my considered view that no one can invent fictional characters

without first having made a lengthy study of people, just as it is impos-
sible for anyone to speak a language that has not been properly mastered.
Since I am not yet of an age to invent, I must make do with telling a
tale. (1)
EXHUMING MARGUERITE GAUTIER 17
The first words of La dame aux camélias, which was published in 1848
shortly after the June Days, recall the introduction of the text that most fa-
mously chronicled the Revolution of 1848. Like the novel’s narrator,
Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), distinguishes
between two forms of expression and uses language acquisition as a
metaphor for the more advanced method, which he privileges:
Luther donned the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789 to
1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman republic and the Roman em-
pire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody,
now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793 and 1795. In like man-
ner a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into
his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and
can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without re-
calling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new. (15–16)
Both Marx’s immature revolutionary and Dumas’s naïve narrator stumble

in the foreign tongue and resort to a crutch, to something they grasp
and master: the “beginner” in the Brumaire translates back into his own
language—the ideological baggage of bourgeois revolution—whereas the
narrator relies on reality, the repetition of what is known. Creation (as
opposed to representation) in Dumas and proletarian (as opposed to bour-
geois) revolution in Marx are unachieved goals, which to be accomplished,
depend on forgetting. As Derrida puts it in Specters of Marx, the full mas-
tery invoked in the Brumaire requires “the forgetting of the maternal in
order to make the spirit live in oneself ” (109). Neither Dumas’s
narrator nor the forty-eighters are ready to be so possessed. For them,
translating back, merely representing, is a way of maintaining a distance,
of conjuring away the spirits they conjure up.
Derrida’s necromantic imagery is fitting not only for Marx’s work but
also for Dumas’s. Both texts begin with an “awakening of the dead” (Marx
34) but rouse them only to rebury them and translate them back into a fa-
miliar and safer language. In the Brumaire, the revolutionaries fail to in-
carnate the spirit of the new language because they cannot move beyond
the past. “In order to arrive at its own content,” Marx wrote, “the revolu-
tion of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead.” The
forty-eighters fell short because they insisted on doing so themselves, be-
cause they translated back into an older and less threatening language.
Translating back is a way of containing a danger: “As in the work of
mourning,” Derrida observes, glossing Marx, “the conjuration has to make
sure that the dead will not come back . . . Quick, a vault to which one
keeps the keys!” (97). This metaphor is literalized in Dumas’s work where
translation is similarly represented as a form of mourning. Early in the
novel, the young Armand Duval undertakes to have the corpse of his cour-
tesan lover, Marguerite Gautier, exhumed from a five-year plot in the
Montmartre cemetery and moved to another with an eternal lease (30).
Concerned about Armand’s physical and psychological health, the narra-
tor urges him to wait: “Croyez moi, attendez pour cette translation que
vous soyez bien guéri” (63; italics mine; “Take my advice: wait until you
are properly fit before having the body transferred,” 34). Yet the despair-
ing lover insists: that “translation” he believes, is “the only thing that can
make me well. I must see her” (34). Like the Brumaire, Dumas’ novel be-
gins with an awakening followed by a reburial.
As in Marx, moreover, this translation is a translating back. To the dis-
may of the relatives of those buried near Marguerite’s new grave, bourgeois
ground is to be desecrated by the corpse of a fille de joie. Armand’s mourn-
ing and his narrative in general are attempts to “translate” Marguerite’s story
back into his own bourgeois frame of reference: he seeks to distinguish her
from countless, nameless others, “poor girls here of the same sort [genre]
and the same age that get thrown into a pauper’s grave [fosse commune]”
(31) and to recast her life as poignant bourgeois tragedy. The perpetual plot,
in this sense, is the vault to which one keeps the keys: it contains the pros-
titute’s body more securely than the temporary one. By preventing her from
revisiting, it allows Armand to inscribe her in a different genre. Just as
Marguerite is moved from the fosse commune to a bourgeois grave, the signs
of her profession—the language of prostitution—are carefully masked in
the narrator’s masterful translation into bourgeois sentimentality. The two
men venture to represent and thus approach the prostitute but do so on
their own terms, which protect them from being overpowered by her ghost,
by the spirit of her language. They conjure up her otherness in order to
defuse it, to rebury it in a bourgeois plot.
I begin with this juxtaposition of Marx and Dumas for two reasons.
On the one hand, it suggests the context that informs La dame aux
camélias. My contention in this chapter is that Dumas’s and Marx’s pro-
tagonists are ultimately conjuring away the same spirit: the specter of gen-
uine proletarian revolution. It is this backdrop, we will see, that makes
Luísa’s reading in O primo Basílio so threatening. On the other hand, the
metaphor of translation also reveals the struggle between languages that is
at the heart of both La dame aux camélias and Eça’s and Clarín’s responses
to it. In what follows, we will see that the protagonists of both rewritings,
like Armand, translate back into bourgeois clichés the threatening political
reality that the prostitute introduces.
Marx’s and Dumas’s shared metaphor of translation is a useful starting
point for reevaluating La dame aux camélias. Though ubiquitous in
the nineteenth century and the inspiration of countless adaptations
(from Verdi’s La Traviata to Baz Luhmann’s Moulin Rouge), Dumas’s novel

is surprisingly understudied. Often, it has been dismissed as ahistorical,
lachrymose, or monochromatic, as a saccharine idealization of love. If we
focus on the metaphor of translation, however, a more complex picture
emerges; translation, after all, always presupposes at least two languages.
La dames aux camélias, we will see, is not a monochromatic or monologic
work but rather a dialogic text in which opposing voices coexist.
Roland Barthes, in a three-page essay in Mythologies (1957), was the
first to recognize this dialogue, the conflict of languages or discourses, at
the heart of Dumas’s novel. For Barthes, the work is torn between two in-
compatible social visions. Armand’s approach to his relationship is typi-
cally bourgeois: his is a possessive love, “that of the owner who carries off
his prey” (103). Marguerite, in contrast, is an “archetype of petit-bourgeois
sentimentality” (104). Her goal is not to possess but to be recognized, to
be approved of by the bourgeoisie. For this recognition (the acknowledg-
ment of both Armand’s father and Dumas’s reader), she must sacrifice her
love. Though Armand and Marguerite may seem alike in their idealism
and the purity of their affection, their perspectives are irreconcilable.
Whereas other critics registered only the traces of bourgeois ideology
(Armand’s glorification of romantic love), Barthes’s reading recognized the
dialogic nature of the novel, the dissonant voices that comprise it. For
Barthes, however, this alternate vision ultimately did not subvert the hero’s
worldview. Though Marguerite is conscious of her alienation, she is still
servile: she recognizes her exploitation but accepts the role the bourgeoisie
assigns her and makes its values her own. This submission, Barthes argued,
takes the edge off her critique: “Patently stupid, she would have opened
[the public’s] petit-bourgeois eyes. Magniloquent and noble, in one word
‘serious,’ she only sends them to sleep” (105).
Dumas’s prostitute, however, is not without her bite. As Marx observes
in the Brumaire, the petite bourgeoisie is a “transition class, in which the
interests of two classes are simultaneously mutually blunted” (54).
Although Barthes has shown how Marguerite’s desire to behave like a
bourgeoise blunts her proletarian interests—her consciousness of her own
alienation—it remains to be seen how bourgeois ideology is undermined
by Marguerite’s lower-class perspective. She may now put Barthes’s petit-
bourgeois to sleep, but in her moment, we will see, she had a subversive
force as well.
This subversion will become clear if we situate the work in its histori-
cal context. The social conflict that Barthes identifies in the novel (the op-
position between two class perspectives) is ultimately informed by a very
specific political situation: the revolutionary struggles of 1848 during
which the novel was published. As Jann Matlock observes, Dumas aligned
the death and burial of Marguerite Gautier with the outbreak of the
Revolution of 1848. Whereas the real-life model for the heroine, Marie
Duplessis, died on February 3, 1847, Marguerite meets her end on
February 20 and is buried on February 22, the date of the outlawed op-
position banquet that set off the revolution in 1848 (109).
This historical commentary is underscored by the choice of a prostitute
as heroine. As Maurice Agulhon and Jann Matlock have shown, the fille de
joie was the iconic figure of 1848. One of the rebels’ first feats was to lib-
erate the prostitutes imprisoned in Saint-Lazare, and the storming of the
Tuileries was presided over by a streetwalker posing as Liberty, a scene im-
mortalized in Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale.2 It was in 1848, more-
over, that the figure of Marianne became associated with the prostitute.
Initially, the forty-eighters embraced the fille de joie as a companion in mis-
ery and a sister in struggle. As the new government attempted to reimpose
order, however, the attitude toward prostitution gradually changed: if in
February the fille de joie was a fellow victim, after the June Days she be-
came a figure of terror (Matlock 100). Embraced and then rejected, the
prostitute embodied the fate of the revolution and came to stand for what
it sought and lost.
Dumas’s novel holds up a mirror to 1848 and offers in its opening scene
an inverted image. At the beginning of La dame aux camélias, the narrator
happens upon a viewing of Marguerite’s apartment and possessions, which
are to be auctioned off after her death. Unaware of the circumstances, he
is struck by the presence of many society ladies in the crowd who seem to
marvel “with astonished, even admiring eyes” (2) at a luxury that was for
them only normal. Once he learns that the apartment belonged to a cour-
tesan, however, he immediately understands why they have come:
Now if there is one thing that ladies of fashion desire to see above all else—
and there were society ladies present—it is the rooms occupied by those
women who have carriages which spatter their own with mud every day of
the week, who have their boxes at the Opera or the Théâtre-Italien just as
they do, and indeed next to theirs, and who display for all Paris to see the in-
solent opulence of their beauty, diamonds and shameless conduct.(2)
The viewing in the apartment is a jarring spectacle, at once a scene of prof-

anation—curious onlookers intrude on a space of mourning—and a mo-
ment of transgression—the women have entered a forbidden space, the
courtesan’s world. In its combination of death and amusement, its confu-
sion of social spheres, and its triumphant reversal, the episode verges on
the carnivalesque. Most important, however, it is a scene of class tourism.
The women explore the world of the high-end prostitute and attempt to
see how it is different from their own. They seek “traces of the secret life
of a courtesan of which they had doubtless been given very strange ac-
counts.” What they confront, however, only disappoints them.
“Unfortunately,” the narrator quips, “the mysteries had died with the god-
dess, and in spite of their best endeavours these good ladies found only
what had been put up for sale since the time of death, and could detect
nothing of what had been sold while the occupant had been alive” (2).
Dumas’s opening episode is an inverted image of one of the most mem-
orable moments of the February Days: the storming of the Tuileries.
Whereas La dame aux camélias opens with the rich wondering at the
wealth of the poor, the Revolution of 1848 begins with the proletariat
marveling at the riches of royalty. Like the literary episode, the historical
scene is an instance of class tourism, a moment of profanation, transgres-
sion, and carnivalesque reversal: the masses invade a forbidden space, pry
into the ways of a social other, and deck themselves with kingly attire. It
is, like Dumas’s, a scene of triumphant curiosity.
In each episode, however, the triumph and reversal are only partial. In
L’éducation sentimentale, Flaubert evokes the frustration of the masses as
they explore the Tuileries: “With obscene curiosity they rummaged in all
the closets, prying into every nook and cranny, leaving not a single drawer
unopened. Hardened criminals thrust their arms into the princesses’ beds
and rolled all over them, to console themselves for not being able to rape
their occupants” (315). Just as Dumas’s society ladies have to make do with
what is up for sale after Marguerite’s death and are unable to find traces of
what was sold during her life, so Flaubert’s masses are frustrated by an ab-
sence. The criminals miss the princesses’ bodies; the ladies of fashion miss
Marguerite’s. In each instance, the former occupant and social other is an
unattainable object of lust. The revenge and reversal, consequently, are al-
ways incomplete. In Marguerite’s apartment, the bourgeois women seek to
reassert social distinctions but encounter a disconcerting sameness: the
“traces” of difference elude them. In the palace, the masses can don royal
garb and raise a fille de joie to the exalted position of Liberty but cannot
reduce princesses to whoredom or make the queen a grisette. The tables
turn but only partially; they never make a full revolution. Like Dumas’s
narrator, who can only translate back, the masses and the femmes du monde
never completely master the worlds and signs they explore.
Taken together, the scenes at the Tuileries and the auction illustrate the
two sides of the “mutual blunting” to which I alluded before. In Flaubert’s
representation of the February Days, the rebels celebrate their newfound
freedom and equality, but their desires reproduce the power structure they
reject. Their revolution does not eliminate but merely inverts the existing hi-
erarchy as the oppressed seek to oppress their oppressors. The forty-eighters’
critique and claims of equality are undermined by their social aspirations and
aristocratic role-playing, by their desire to experience life on the other side of
the social divide. The viewing in Marguerite’s apartment, in contrast, is a
scene of privilege undermined by a disturbing equality. The femmes du
monde triumph over the dead prostitute, an upstart who surpassed them in
riches and beauty. They are looking for vestiges of her difference, attempting
to read the class hierarchy in the traces of her life. What they find, however,
is a mirror of themselves. Their triumph is subverted by the similarity of
Marguerite’s world to their own. Dumas’s opening scene does not (to return
to Barthes’s phrase) close the public’s eyes but rather forces it to stare at a dis-
concerting reflection of itself, at an eerie simulacrum.
The femmes du monde may not find traces of the courtesan in Marguerite’s
apartment, but signs of her prostitution and of 1848—subversively “blunt-
ing” elements—do make their way into Armand’s and the narrator’s
translation. One of the first examples of this in the text is the heroine’s nick-
name: Marguerite is called “La dame aux camélias” because she wears white
camellias for 25 days of every month and red camellias for 5. The narrator
finds this habit baffling: “No one ever knew the reason for this variation in
colour which I mention but cannot explain” (9). Dumas insists on the narra-
tor’s naïveté, on the fact that he is representing rather than creating. The com-
ment emphasizes the gap between the two worlds and languages portrayed in
the novel. From the outset, elements of Marguerite’s sign system—marks of
her prostitution—leak through the narrator’s story. Capable only of translat-
ing back, he misses the nuances of the language he is representing. Later,
Marguerite defers intercourse with Armand by handing him a red camellia—
he may sleep with her, she promises, when it is a different color. Once again,
the narrator is confused. Armand hints that it is easily understood but his in-
terlocutor misses the nuance, the subtext, of Marguerite’s signs. Throughout
the novel, Marguerite reveals a material and economic reality that Armand
ignores: “Alongside the ideal life,” she reminds him at one point, “there is the
[material life] to think of” (135).
An allusion, no matter how covert, to the heroine’s menstruation, par-
ticularly as a reason to defer intercourse, clearly does not fit with that
“ideal life,” with the sentimental and idealistic Dumas fils we are often
served by the novel’s critics and adapters. In Verdi’s melodramatic version,
this bodily subtext is, not surprisingly, silenced: the lovers of La Traviata
will meet again not when the flower changes color but “quando sarà ap-
passito”—when it wilts. Marguerite’s signs are threatening and must be
contained in some way. Verdi filters them out altogether. Dumas resorts to
ignorance: keeping his narrator in the dark, he prevents Marguerite’s men-
struation from contaminating the story. The narrator represents the pros-
titute and her language, but always from a distance.
The result, however, is that Marguerite’s voice and signs always seem to
infiltrate the narrator’s translation. Because we notice them in spite of him,
they have the effect of deflating his lofty tone. As the example of the red
camellias suggests, the meaning lost in translation is that of Marguerite’s
promiscuous body, the existence of the prostitute beneath the elegant cour-
tesan. It is this underlying materiality—the physical, grotesque, and even
carnivalesque side of her profession—that most resists translation.
Armand’s first impression of Marguerite illustrates this unassimilable as-
pect of her nature: “She leaned across, whispered something into her com-
panion’s ear, and both of them burst out laughing. It was only too obvious
that I was the cause of their mirth: my embarrassment deepened as a re-
sult” (46). The lovers’ first encounter is not sentimental but farcical; it of-
fends the romantic sensibility of Armand, who “would have preferred her
to be sad” (45).
Armand recovers from his embarrassment but only by attributing
Marguerite’s behavior to her class:
Anyone who has spent any time at all in the company of girls of
Marguerite’s sort [genre] is quite aware of what pleasure they take in making
misplaced remarks and teasing men they meet for the first time. It is no
doubt a way of leveling the scores for the humiliations which they are often
forced to undergo at the hands of the men they see every day. (46)
Marguerite’s laughter is, like the fosse commune, a sign of her “genre,” her
prostitution. It is threatening and subversive because it momentarily levels
social hierarchies. Armand’s and the narrator’s project is to exhume
Marguerite from this dangerously indifferentiating world, to silence her
laughter by translating it into a bourgeois plot.
The most unassimilable image the narrator must confront is, of course,
Marguerite’s exhumed body:
It was terrible to behold and it is horrible to relate. The eyes were simply
two holes, the lips had gone, and the white teeth were clenched. The long,
dry, black hair was stuck over the temples and partly veiled the green hol-
lows of the cheeks, and yet in this face I recognized the pink and white, vi-
vacious face which I had seen so often. (38)
Like the allusion to her menstruation, the grotesque image of the heroine’s
corpse jars with the sentimental and idealizing tone of the story. At first, the
narrator is most struck by the indifferentiation and absence of features.
Lacking eyes and lips, the body is an inverse mirror of Armand’s chaste sister,
Blanche, for whom Marguerite has sacrificed her love (Blanche’s suitor
objected to Armand’s affair). The novel closes with a description of the virgin’s
“clear-eyed gaze and serene mouth which point to a soul that conceives only
saintly thoughts and lips that speak only pious words” (201). The features sin-
gled out in this final portrait (the eyes, the mouth) are precisely those lacking
in the corpse with which the novel opens. Marguerite begins to lose these fea-
tures even before her death. After she sacrifices Armand and resumes her life
of prostitution, she gradually loses her sight and voice due to illness. Eyes and
speech are signs of individuality. As Marguerite returns to her “genre,” to the
world of prostitution and later to the fosse commune, she is more and more in-
distinct. She becomes the opposite of the bourgeois ideals embodied in the
name and figure of Blanche. Within the logic of the plot, the grotesque, in-
differentiated corpse is a consequence not only of Marguerite’s death and
decay, but also of her social demise, of the degradation she has accepted with
her sacrifice.
Armand’s and the narrator’s role in exhuming her body and in the novel
at large is to recognize Marguerite despite the indistinction of her “genre”:
“and yet in this face I recognized . . . ” The two men undertake to trans-
late her to a different plot, which is at once a plot of difference, one that
restores class hierarchy. In so doing, they repel what is threatening about
her body and class. The image of physical decay is a horrifying reminder
of the leveling forces of death. By burying the prostitute in a bourgeois
plot, a vault to which they hold the key, the two men protect not only her
individuality but also distinction itself.
This effort to recontain Marguerite, however, is never complete.
Unassimilable elements of the grotesque and the low constantly infiltrate
the narrator’s translation. The novel is pervaded by liquids and smells that
seep through boundaries. Even before Marguerite’s corpse is revealed, “[a]
foul odour emerged, despite the aromatic herbs with which it had been
strewn” (37). Like the (notably white) camellias Armand has placed on her
grave, the plants function to cover up, to disinfect, but the odor of decay
still seeps through. This description is echoed later in inverse terms:
Marguerite’s nature emits “a bouquet of sensuality, just as flasks from the
Orient, however tightly sealed they might be, allow the fragrance of the
fluids they contain to escape” (60). The narrative has moved from odor to
scent—it has translated the physical reality of Marguerite’s decaying body
into an Orientalist bourgeois fantasy—but in both cases something is leak-
ing through. Marguerite confuses the boundary between the interior and
the exterior and introduces an element of indifferentiation into the text.
At times, it is the translation itself that brings Marguerite’s signs to light:
to rebury the prostitute in a bourgeois plot, after all, it is necessary to exhume
her body, to reveal momentarily the indistinction she represents. On these
occasions, Armand works against himself: he attempts to cover up the pros-
titute, to distinguish her from what she is, but his translation exposes the gap
between his phrases and her reality. Marguerite is acutely aware of the con-
tradictions of his translation. When Armand asks her to dress opulently—“It
may be ridiculous, but I’d rather have you lavish than frugal” (139)—she
objects: “You want to keep me in the luxury to which I was accustomed, but
you also want to maintain the moral distance between us . . . Do you really
think I compare a carriage and bits of jewelry with your love?” (140). The
lovers’ quarrel epitomizes the conflict between the two languages of the
novel. Armand constantly seeks to use phrases that exceed the reality of
Marguerite’s life, to translate her into bourgeois signs and dress. As she points
out, however, this habit only reveals the moral distance between them, which
is at once the social difference: the heroine’s past as a prostitute. Marguerite
prefers for her inner worth to exceed her outer signs, for her virtue and good
intentions to lie unstated beneath simple clothing.
The heroine’s approach to language is clearest at the turning point of
the novel. To support their quiet life in the country, Marguerite has grad-
ually sold her possessions without his knowledge. Armand is horrified
when he discovers her secret, but Marguerite dismisses his objections:
Girls of my sort, at least those of us who still have some feelings left, take
words and things further and deeper than other women. I repeat: coming
from Marguerite Gautier, the means which she found of repaying her debts
without asking you for the money it took, was an act of great delicacy of
which you should now take advantage without another word.(111)
Marguerite’s meaning goes beyond her words. Never having mastered her
language, however, Armand misses its nuances. Once again, the content
that exceeds her phrases escapes his understanding. Rejecting Marguerite’s
gesture, he begins to gamble in order to support their lifestyle. This spec-
ulation reflects his own approach to language: just as his winnings are built
upon nothing and can quickly collapse, his phrases—the bourgeois plot—
exceed the reality they represent.
Armand’s and Marguerite’s conflicting approaches to language reenact
the historical struggle that is the subtext of the work. Reflecting on 1848
and its failure in the Brumaire, Marx would draw a similar opposition be-
tween surplus signs and surplus meaning: “Earlier revolutions required rec-
ollections of past world history in order to drug themselves concerning
their own content. In order to arrive at its own content, the revolution of
the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead. There the phrase
went beyond the content; here the content goes beyond the phrase” (18).
Marguerite’s approach to language is revolutionary in that her content does
go beyond her phrase. To be understood, she requires a reader who forgets
her history, who sees through her signs and masters their spirit. As she
warns Armand, he must accept her “without thought for the past” (87).
Armand, however, is unable to do so. Like the bourgeois revolutionaries,
he is stymied by historical analogy, able to understand Marguerite’s story
only by refiguring her as another Manon Lescaut.
The treatment of Marguerite in the novel captures the ambiguity of the
figure of the prostitute in 1848. The fille de joie posing as Liberty at the
Tuileries is a revolutionary icon because her spirit exceeds her outward
dress. To understand the subversion of her gesture, one must appreciate the
allegory that transcends the body, the content that goes beyond the phys-
ical sign. It is the humility of the sign that gives her pose its revolutionary
force, that allows its spirit to go beyond it. Marguerite’s secret project—
what makes her threatening to Armand—is similarly a gesture in which
meaning exceeds expression. Both Marguerite and the fille de joie, however,
are misunderstood. Conservative accounts of the scene at the Tuileries re-
jected and deliberately misread the fille de joie’s allegorical pose: they
ridiculed the revolution by pointing to Liberty’s prostitution. The body
was taken not as the sign but as the content itself, a content that compro-
mised the revolutionary phrases and posture of the fille de joie. The coun-
terrevolutionary reading reduced the allegory to its body, to the poverty of
its signs. Like Armand, it never got beyond her past.
The flowers of the title capture this tension. In nineteenth-century
Paris, the camellia was a luxury item worth more than the daily pay of
most working Frenchmen (Coward 204). It is also, however, the sign of
Marguerite’s menstruation. The flowers encode not only the stable hierar-
chies of status but also the cycles of the body, the revolutions of female
anatomy. It is this duality that is the key to Luísa’s reading in O primo
Basílio. Through Dumas’s novel, Luísa attempts to enter the luxurious
world of the courtesan only to confront her revolutions, the plot of 1848.
Luísa Mendonça and La dame aux camélias
The femmes du monde in Marguerite’s apartment miss what was once up for
sale. It is precisely this economy, however, that drives Dumas’s plot. The
drama of his novel is not the love story—Marguerite and Armand’s passion
never wavers—but rather the problem of the lovers’ financial subsistence:
the turning points in the novel (Marguerite’s escape to the country, her sac-
rifice, and return to Paris) all relate to this economic question. Eça’s hero-
ine, however, is not reading for the plot; like the femmes du monde, she
misses the traces of Marguerite’s economy. What attracts Luísa to Dumas’s
novel is its milieu, the luxury and voluptuousness of the courtesan’s world.
Her impressions are lyrical: she admires “that whole destiny” with its “din-
ners, delirious nights, money troubles and days of melancholy in the back
of a coupé, when the first snows fall silently over the avenues of the Bois,
under a dark and elegant sky” (8). The “vie fièvreuse” (99; feverish life) of
the courtesan is filtered through a lens of ennui, through the eyes of the
bored bourgeois adulteress. The result is a stilling of motion: Luísa takes in
an impression of a life rather than its energy. It is as though Marguerite and
her world have been placed under a snow globe, frozen in the wintry land-
scape of the Bois de Boulogne. Although her list includes “money troubles,”
they are part of the atmosphere, the romance of the scene. Beneath the
snow globe, they have no urgency.
These money troubles are somewhat more pressing, however, in the
first reference to Dumas in O primo Basílio. Before he meets Luísa, Jorge
Mendonça is distinguished from his schoolmates, who are all, like his fu-
ture wife, admirers of Marguerite: “His fellow students, who sighingly read
Alfred de Musset, and longed to fall in love with Marguerite Gautier, called
him prosaic and bourgeois . . . He admired Louis Figuier, Bastiat, and
Castilho, had a horror of debts, and thought he was a very lucky man” (4).
Whereas Jorge’s friends read the romantic poet Musset, he himself prefers
the reactionary classicism of the Portuguese writer, António Feliciano de
Castilho. This is not only a distinction between literary movements but
also an opposition between the foreign and the national, between French
and Portuguese literatures. From the outset, Marguerite is identified as an
imported threat, a disruption of bourgeois routine and economy (Jorge has
a “horror of debts”). Curiously, however, this threat is identified with what
we have seen to be the least subversive register of Dumas’s novel: its senti-
mentalism. Jorge’s peers may be more bohemian because they reject bour-
geois convention and aspire to love a Marguerite Gautier, but what they
appreciate in the novel is not the heroine’s voice but Armand’s, the narra-
tor’s glorification of romantic love. The students identify with precisely the
bourgeois plot into which Armand and the narrator translate the prosti-
tute. In his treatment of Marguerite Gautier, Eça has inverted the values of
Dumas’ novel.
The nature of Marguerite’s threat in O primo Basílio becomes apparent
as Luísa attempts to step into the text she reads. Luísa’s affair with Basílio
is clearly framed as an attempt to relive La dame aux camélias. Right before
the seduction, Luísa discusses Dumas’s novel with her friend Leopoldina as
they hear a barrel organ playing La Traviata on the street below. When
Leopoldina leaves, Basílio enters and, without saying a word, seduces
Luísa. As Dumas and Verdi have already prepared the seduction for him,
no real effort is necessary on his part. The juxtaposition of the seduction
and the conversation about La dame aux camélias defines Luísa’s adultery
as an attempt to experience the romance of Marguerite’s life. More than

the sentimentality, however, what draws the heroine to the courtesan’s ex-
istence is its luxury. Luísa’s longing for refinement and elegance is clear in
her behavior with Basílio. Whenever he is present, she is painfully con-
scious of the commonness of her acquaintances and surroundings, which
Basílio ruthlessly disdains. His strategy for seduction is to heighten Luísa’s
embarrassment about her class and to present himself as a vehicle for so-
cial advancement: he makes adultery seem “an aristocratic duty” (98).
Although Luísa’s affair is an attempt to experience the aristocratic re-
finement of Marguerite’s, what she encounters after her seduction is its
economic realities. She experiences precisely the “money troubles” that she
naïvely romanticized while reading Dumas. The irony of her reading is
that she mistakes literary slumming for social ascent. La dame aux camélias
is a novel about class tourism: Armand, the femmes du monde, and the
reader all explore the world of their social inferiors. Luísa, however, is mis-
led by the translation, by the false representations of the courtesan’s world,
by its indistinguishability from the aristocrat’s. In entering the courtesan’s
world, she is slumming but believes she is ascending.
This confusion of descent and ascent is clear in Luísa’s attitude to the love
nest Basílio has found for them. Although Basílio dubs it the “Paradise,” the
room he has rented is a squalid space: with its stained bedspread and kitschy
decorations, it has clearly been the site of the most degraded trysts. Entering
this paradise, Luísa steps into the world of prostitution. Her literary precon-
ceptions, however, blind her to her descent. As she travels there for the first
time, she recalls a novel by Paul Féval in which a duke and his lover meet in
a hut, which in its apparent misery inspires compassion in passersby, who
never suspect the plush tapestries and exquisite vases that decorate its interior.
Luísa is so taken with this idea that as she approaches the “Paradise,” she
experiences “a withdrawal into shyness, as with a plebeian who has to climb,
among solemn halberdiers, the staircase of a palace” (145). The brilliance of
this juxtaposition of images is that social degradation (the bourgeoise in a
sleazy flat) is converted into an ascent (the plebeian in the palace) through the
mediating notion of aristocrat slumming (nobles in a hut). In attempting
to enter the world of Marguerite Gautier, Luísa is descending, but it seems to
her ennobling.
Her misreading, the confusion she introduces into the class hierarchy in
her imagination, leads to inversions of social roles in her actual life. Her
literary slumming is answered by a much more sinister version of the ple-
beian in the palace. At about the time that Luísa starts to visit the
“Paradise,” her servant, Juliana, discovers several compromising letters and
begins to blackmail her. Juliana is an old, bitter, and unsightly woman who
has attempted but never managed to rise socially. Resentful of her leisured
mistress, she decides to use the letters to avenge a life of servitude. At first,
her demands are moderate: she contents herself with a mild parasitism, ap-
propriating Luísa’s dresses and linens and requesting time off. Gradually,
however, she becomes greedier, and her demands more and more unrea-
sonable. It is not enough to wear the heroine’s newest dresses; Luísa herself
must be reduced to the servant’s level. Juliana begins to leave the most me-
nial household chores to her mistress, who has no choice but to assume
ironing and cleaning duties. What Luísa encounters when she enters
Marguerite’s world, thus, is class struggle. Luísa begins like the femmes du
monde at the auction—drawn to the trappings of the courtesan and unable
to distinguish them from the aristocrat’s—but once she enters the plot of
1848, she confronts an inverse mirror: the masses who deck themselves in
royal garb at the Tuileries. Juliana is the plebeian at the palace, the revolu-
tionary threat, that answers Luísa’s aristocratic slumming.
As Luísa’s “money troubles” worsen, her plight recalls that of Emma
Bovary, whose debts lead her to desperation and suicide. At Leopoldina’s
advice, Luísa summons the banker, Castro, who has always desired her and
is conveniently about to move to France. The episode is a direct rewriting
of Emma’s appeal to the notary, Guillaumin, in Part III of Madame Bovary.
Both adulteresses find themselves in financial straits, appeal to lustful fin-
anciers for help, and are repulsed by the men’s advances. Eça’s version dif-
fers from Flaubert’s, however, in the way it is incorporated into his novel.
In Madame Bovary, Emma’s debts have little to do with her adultery.
Moralistic critics have at times complained that her infidelity is never truly
punished: her debts and subsequent death result from shopping sprees and
financial mistakes that have little to do with her erotic transgressions. It
may be the same exploratory and insatiable side of her personality that
leads her into adultery and debt, but the latter is neither a consequence of
the former nor a necessary development of the plot: it is purely supple-
mental. Luísa’s financial straits, in contrast, are overdetermined: they fit
neatly into the moral, social, and literary commentary of the novel. Unlike
Emma, Luísa would not have money problems were it not for her adultery
(her troubles result from the blackmail plot, which is a consequence of her
sin). As the punishment for her crime, these financial worries introduce a
moralism into the plot that is absent in Flaubert’s. At the same time, her
troubles are clearly determined by class struggle: Juliana is out to avenge
past exploitation, to overturn the social hierarchy. Finally, Luísa’s financial
problems are related to her reading, to the literary influence that is the cat-
alyst of the plot. This is made clear through another departure from
Madame Bovary: the appeal to the banker is represented as a form of pros-
titution. Before she summons him, Luísa is prepared to go to any length
to achieve her end, even if she must “be vile like the women of the Bairro
Alto [a red-light district]” (258). Later, Castro looks forward to living

among French women, whom he judges “by six prostitutes of a café-chan-
tant, who had cost him dearly and bored him immensely!” (262). This ges-
ture toward French prostitution points back to Luísa’s reading: the “money
troubles” for which she envied Marguerite are now her own, and to liqui-
date them she must assume the position of the prostitute.
By reinforcing the causal links between Luísa’s predicament and her ac-
tions, Eça is able to insert a political commentary on the origin of revolu-
tion. This historical subtext is clear in the episode in which Luísa appeals
to the banker. The portrait of Castro in O primo Basílio is almost identical
to Flaubert’s description of Guillaumin: both men are blond, balding, and
lascivious. Eça, however, has given his banker a very particular and recog-
nizable feature: “His full moustache ended in sharp points, glued with
moustache-wax like that of Napoleon III” (263). This detail clarifies Eça’s
historical commentary. Luísa has stepped into Dumas’ novel and exposed
herself to the plot of revolution, to the inversions of social hierarchy and
class struggle of 1848. Like the French bourgeoisie during the Second
Republic, she is terrified of the proletariat and is desperate to reestablish
her economic position. Her appeal to Castro explores one possible solution
to her difficulties. Struggling with the lower classes after the February
Days, the French bourgeoisie turned to the philandering Louis-Napoléon,
who upon assuming power deprived them of influence in the body politic.
To preserve its economic position, the bourgeoisie prostituted its political
power. In her encounter with Castro, Luísa is poised to repeat this pattern,
to sacrifice her control over her body to a libidinous Louis-Napoléon fig-
ure, prostituting herself to preserve her social and economic position. Eça,
however, rejects this solution. When Castro begins to make advances,
Luísa recoils and beats him over the head with his own cane. Eça will ex-
tract his Portuguese heroine from the plot of 1848 without Napoleonic in-
tervention.
What saves Luísa is the trickery of Sebastião, Jorge’s best friend, to
whom she confesses her sins. To cover up Luisa’s infidelity, Sebastião sends
the couple to the opera, and while they are away, visits Juliana with an off-
duty policeman and demands that she forfeit the compromising letters. At
first, Juliana resists the two men’s threats. She denounces a system of ex-
ploitation and accuses her mistress of being “like the women of the Bairro
Alto [the red-light district]! And I—she shouted—am a respectable
woman” (290). Her words sum up the inversion she has introduced: she
styles herself as the virtuous bourgeoise and associates Luísa with lower-class
prostitutes. As at the Tuileries, however, this reversal is incomplete and only
temporary. Terrified by Sebastião’s threats of jail or exile, Juliana suffers a
fatal heart attack, which gives him the opportunity to burn the letters.
Through the intervention of Jorge’s friend, Luísa is translated back into

a bourgeois plot. At the opera, she wears a bouquet of red camellias, which,
like Marguerite’s, are a code that covers up an economic and bodily reality.
In this case, they are a euphemistic translation of what is occurring at her
home: Sebastião’s encounter with the proletarian body, with the vengeful
masses. The threat of revolution is buried in the signs of luxury. Luísa has
dangerously exposed herself to the prostitute’s world—the life of the Bairro
Alto, the fate of the fosse commune—but Sebastião exhumes her from the
plot of 1848. It is Juliana rather than Luísa who ends up in “the poor peo-
ple’s grave” (298).
Eça exposes his heroine to revolution, but the reversal she experiences
is incomplete. Ultimately, what allows him to reestablish the distance be-
tween his heroine and her reading is the same Bovaresque character that
has introduced the danger in the first place:
It was with two tears trembling on her eyelids that Luísa finished La dame
aux camélias. And stretched out on the voltaire, with the book dropped in
her lap, pulling back her cuticles, she began to sing in a low voice, with ten-
derness, the last aria of La Traviata:
Addio, del passato . . .
She remembered suddenly the news in the paper, the arrival of her cousin
Basílio . . .
A vague smile spread over her full, scarlet lips. He had been her first love,
cousin Basílio! (19)
Luísa goes on to reminisce about her youthful flirtation with Basílio and
recalls how, after he abandoned her to go to Brazil, she mourned their
romance by singing the ending of La Traviata at the piano (20). Luísa’s
reflections in the scene are clearly Bovaresque: she attempts to find
equivalents to fiction in her life and adopts the stance of her literary
model. Just as Violetta laments the end of her country idyll with Alfredo,
so Luísa, citing Verdi’s “Addio del passato,” bids adieu to her youthful af-
fair with Basílio in bucolic Sintra.
At the same time that Luísa’s Bovaryism draws her life and reading to-
gether, however, it also pulls them apart. In the aria “Addio del passato,”
Violetta laments the end of her romance with Alfredo. When Luísa hums
the same aria after reading Dumas, however, she is not pining for Basílio’s
love but pining for her pining of it: she is reenacting a past reenactment of
the ending of La Traviata. Luísa’s humming, in other words, is a nostalgia
for nostalgia, a melancholy once removed. It is in this degree of removal
that Emma’s influence is most palpable. Flaubert’s heroine is always pos-
turing and often admires the stance for its own sake: mourning her
mother’s death, “Emma was privately pleased to feel that she had so very
quickly attained this ideal of ethereal langour, inaccessible to mediocre

spirits” (45). With both Emma and Luísa, affect is subordinated to effect:
they are more aware of the aesthetic impressions they make than of their
actual feelings. In O primo Basílio, it is this literary posturing, this degree
of removal, that separates Eça’s heroine from her text. For Luísa,
Marguerite is more role than reality. The adulteress is attracted to the cour-
tesan’s life but never fully enters it.
Eça uses the figure of the Bovaresque adulteress at once to explore and
to distance the threat of the prostitute. What makes Marguerite seem so
subversive in La dame aux camélias is the fact that her voice seems to leak
through Armand’s and the narrator’s translation into bourgeois sentimen-
tality. The distance between the bourgeois protagonist and the prostitute
in O primo Basílio, in contrast, is not linguistic (the distance between two
languages) so much as textual (the distance between the reader and the
page). Whereas it is possible for languages to become confused—we have
seen that Dumas’s novel is a heteroglossic work—it is ultimately impossi-
ble for Luísa to become a character of the book she reads. In both La dame
aux camélias and O primo Basílio, economic reality deflates the sentimen-
tal register, but the two texts differ considerably in the way they handle this
opposition. As we have seen, Eça inverts the values of Dumas’s novel. In
the latter, it is Marguerite’s economic reality with its revolutionary over-
tones that destabilizes the bourgeois sentimental vision. In Eça, in contrast,
the deflating economic reality is associated with bourgeois vision (the pro-
saic Jorge), while the deflated sentimentality is what introduces the threat
of class struggle. Marguerite’s perspective is in La dame aux camélias an ide-
ology that leaks through and that must be silenced through translation.
Eça’s Bovaresque structure, however, represents it as ignorance or illusion
that must be corrected through deflation. The Bovaryism recontains the
threatening subtext of Dumas’s novel. By stressing that Luísa is reenacting
or posturing, Eça keeps the plot of 1848 in check.
To distance Luísa from her reading, Eça revises Flaubert’s treatment of
the heroine’s quixotism. Emma’s reading is always anticipatory: her novels
reveal the exciting adventures she hopes to have. In much of Madame
Bovary, the heroine is waiting for an event: “Deep down, all the while, she
was waiting for something to happen . . . Other people’s lives, drab though
they might be, held at least the possibility of an event. One unexpected
happening often set in motion a whole chain of change” (72–73). Emma
reads for the plot, for action: whereas poetry becomes “tiresome in the long
run,” “stories full of suspense” sustain her interest (99–100). Eça’s heroine,
in contrast, veers toward the lyrical. As we have seen, she extracts from
Dumas’s novel not an adventure but an impression: she places it under a
snow globe. Whereas Emma is always waiting for an event, Luísa’s reading
is a catalyst for nostalgic response.3 After finishing the novel, she does not
project Marguerite’s story onto an urban future but rather applies it ret-
rospectively to a country idyll of her past. Her application of her reading
contrasts with her choice of text. As we have seen, Luísa avoids Emma’s
anachronism: whereas Flaubert’s heroine longs to step back into Scott’s
Middle Ages, Eça’s reads a text about modernity. When they apply their
readings, however, their positions invert. Emma imagines the future,
while Luísa looks back at her past. Eça’s inversion of Emma’s habits is part
of his attempt to distance the political threat he is exploring. Emma’s
dream, the utopia imagined in the text, is to realize in the future an ideal
vision of the past. Flaubert’s novel shows that such historical repetition is
impossible. Eça’s heroine, in contrast, does not impose the past on the fu-
ture but rather projects modernity onto her own history. The plot of 1848
is for her but a nostalgia for nostalgia. The degrees of removal drain it of
the energy and enthusiasm it once possessed. Whereas Flaubert shows us
that the past is an anachronism, Eça encourages us to regard the present,
the plot of 1848, in the same way: as a distant and ultimately irrepro-
ducible threat.
Both Eça’s adultery novel and Dumas’s story of the prostitute with a
heart of gold exhume and rebury the revolutionary body. The revolution
that Eça represents, however, is a retributive one, an attempt to invert
rather than to reform an economic system. Juliana is a plebeian at the
palace, but she is not the icon of a principle as is the fille de joie. Eça’s novel
ultimately resembles not the viewing of Marguerite’s apartment but its in-
verse image, the masses at the Tuileries. Just as the latter undermine their
revolution when they begin to assume the roles of their oppressors, so
Juliana in her plotting is motivated by the same social aspirations as her
mistress. Her revolution, Eça’s rewriting of 1848 in Portugal, is one that re-
volves and then reverts to the status quo.
From Margaret to Marguerite
In La Regenta (1884–1885), Leopoldo Alas (Clarín) takes up Eça’s ex-

ploration of Madame Bovary and La dame aux camélias and offers his own
commentary on the French novels as well as Eça’s reaction to them.4 Both
Eça and Clarín examine the relationship between the adulteress and the
prostitute. Clarín’s version of this encounter, however, allows for greater
ambiguity. O primo Basílio stresses the distance between Luísa and
Marguerite, the textual divide that separates reader and character: though
Luísa might wish to enter Dumas’s tale, she never can. Clarín allows his
heroine to come much closer to the figure of the prostitute. Since Ana is
never a reader of Dumas’s novel, she is not separated from its heroine (as
Luísa is) by a textual divide. Nevertheless, Clarín’s portrayal of Ana recalls
Marguerite in a number of ways, the most notable of which is his insis-
tence on the heroine’s difference. La dame aux camélias concludes with a
disclaimer: “Marguerite’s history is an exception, I say again” (202). Its en-
tire narrative serves to show how Marguerite differs from other women of
her sort. Eça, in his portrayal of Luísa, does not insist on this notion of ex-
ceptionality, but it is central to La Regenta, where at every turn characters
debate whether Ana is (as even the seducer secretly suspects) morally ex-
ceptional or whether she is merely, in Clarín’s phrases, una de tantas (“one
among many”) or como todas (“like all women”).
Paradoxically, Ana’s difference lies in her ability to be the same. When
we first meet her, she is in the process of changing spiritual advisors. The
drama of La Regenta will be a tug of war for Ana’s soul between her seducer,
Álvaro Mesía, and her new confessor, the powerful and prepossessing
canon theologian Fermín de Pas. From the outset, Fermín is puzzled by his
spiritual charge. Although it is the custom of upper-class Vetustans to con-
fess by appointment, Ana visits his chapel unannounced, leaving Fermín
to wonder at the meaning of her gesture:
“Was it pride? Was it that the lady thought he would move heaven and earth
to discover whether she was going to honour him with her visit? Or was it
humility? Was it that, with great delicacy and with a Christian good taste
which was not common among the ladies of Vetusta, she wished to be lost in
a crowd of common people [confundirse con la plebe], confess anonymously,
be one among many?” This hypothesis pleased the canon theologian. (57)
Fermín’s task throughout the novel will be to preserve Ana’s difference, her
spiritual exceptionality. He must keep her from falling into the sameness
and clichés of adultery. Ironically, however, he locates her distinction pre-
cisely in her indistinction, in the fact that she can be confused with the
masses (confundirse con la plebe). Her ability to be una de tantas in this un-
usual sense distinguishes her from other Vetustan women such as Obdulia
Fandiño and Visita Olías de Cuervo, who are como todas in their common
promiscuity.
In O primo Basílio, Luísa’s descent into Marguerite’s world leads to her
moral fall (her adultery) and introduces an economic threat, the inversions
of hierarchy that result from Juliana’s blackmail plot. Ana’s slumming, in
contrast, is itself a defiance, a gesture that challenges the Vetustan norm
and hierarchy. By lowering herself, she rises up—she rises up against the
status quo. One of Fermín’s strategies with Ana will be to encourage her in
this descent that is an uprising, to inspire a revolution of sorts. His attitude

toward this character trait, however, is not without ambiguity. At the same
time that he appreciates Ana’s humility and willingness to descend, he aes-
theticizes it, seeing it as a mark of Ana’s “good taste” (57). In this sense, his
appreciation of Ana as “one among many” approaches Armand’s view of
Marguerite’s prostitution. Just as Dumas’s lover shrouds Marguerite in a
rarefied melancholy, Fermín in this passage prizes Ana’s aesthetic distinc-
tion, the tastefulness of her gesture. From the outset, Clarín establishes an
ambivalence in de Pas’s attitude toward his spiritual charge: is he drawn to
her aesthetic or her moral difference?
Fermín’s speculations also raise questions about Ana herself. Has she
sincerely become “one among many” or is she posturing? Is she Marguerite
or Bovary-as-Marguerite? This ambiguity does not exist in O primo Basílio.
Luísa is clearly separated from the prostitute by her act of imitation; like
Armand, she is always just “representing.” Clarín, however, allows for the
possibility that Ana could be like all women in either the moral sense (of
promiscuity) or the social sense (of confusing herself with the masses). She
could be like Armand and Luísa, who merely represent the prostitute, or
she could truly master Marguerite’s language. To maintain this ambiguity,
it is essential that Ana not be a reader of La dame aux camélias: it must
remain unclear on what side of the text she stands. As a result, the role of
reacting to and interpreting Dumas is transferred to other characters in the
novel. In Part I, Paco Vegallana, Álvaro’s friend and protégé, reads La dame
aux camélias, and Fermín later listens to music from its operatic adapta-
tion, La Traviata. The two men’s reactions to the prostitute’s story exem-
plify the different options that Ana may choose in Part II. By rehearsing
these possibilities with male characters, Clarín is able to lay out the polit-
ical significance of the prostitute’s story before returning to the question of
Ana’s exceptionality in the climactic scene of the novel (the Nazarene pro-
cession of Chapter 26). Paco’s and Fermín’s reactions decode the senti-
mental plot, the private life of a woman (Dumas’s Marguerite or Verdi’s
Violetta), into political and social terms, into the logic of a male-domi-
nated public sphere: they translate prostitution into revolution.
In Chapter 15, Fermín de Pas gazes at the moon from his balcony while
a neighbor plays strains from Gounod’s Faust and Verdi’s La Traviata on a
violin. The music is the culminating moment of an introspective scene in
which Fermín reflects on the pent-up longings and frustrations of his life
as a priest. As he reflects on the music, Santos Barinaga, a bankrupt mer-
chant, walks by his house and gives a drunken soliloquy with the ending
of La Traviata as an accompaniment. Santos, who once sold religious arti-
cles, has been driven out of business by Fermín, who requires local priests
to patronize another store from which he secretly profits. Now destitute
and an alcoholic, Santos has renounced the church and is dependent on

his daughter, a beata (religious fanatic) who shows him no mercy.
Overhearing Santos from his balcony, Fermín is like a spectator at the
opera: Santos’s soliloquy—some of his last words (he dies in Part II)—res-
onates with the agony and final thoughts of Verdi’s Violetta Valery.
The musical interlude, a turning point in the novel, anticipates its dé-
nouement. Placed at the conclusion of Part I, it is juxtaposed in the ring
composition of the novel with the balcony scene that opens Part II. In the
latter, Ana Ozores, like Fermín before hearing La Traviata, ponders the
emptiness of her existence and feels in need of spiritual fulfillment. Just as
Fermín’s reflections are answered by Verdi’s music and Santos-as-Violetta,
so Ana’s are interrupted by the appearance of Álvaro, who (as we will see
when we turn to Paco’s readings) is identified as a “Marguerite Gautier of
the male sex” (156). Both scenes are moments of temptation. Although
Fermín does not identify the first aria he hears with Faust’s seduction of
Gretchen, he nevertheless feels that his emotions are perfectly expressed by
its alluring melody. The scene at the beginning of Part II also involves
temptation. Álvaro recognizes that this unplanned encounter with Ana is
a “quarter of an hour” (362), his term for a moment propitious for seduc-
tion. Though he is unable to take advantage of it (because he is on horse-
back), the episode anticipates his successful seduction of her at the end of
the novel, which also occurs on a balcony and during the same time of the
year (the so-called false summer of Saint Michael). Fermín’s observation of
Santos from the balcony is a rehearsal with male characters of Ana’s temp-
tation and seduction by Mesía. It models stances she may adopt and clar-
ifies the politicial implications of each.
The scene with Santos not only points ahead to the seduction scene in
La Regenta but also gestures back to that of O primo Basílio. Clarín calls at-
tention to his dialogue with Eça by adopting the sound track of the
Portuguese novel. Both Fermín’s reverie and Luísa’s seduction are played to
the tune of “Al pallido chiaror” from Gounod’s Faust and the ending of
La Traviata. The characters’ reactions to this music are also similar: both
Luísa and Fermín are seduced by it but then sharply disillusioned. Clarín,
however, subtly revises Eça’s use of operatic allusion. Whereas Luísa hears
Violetta’s final lament followed by Gounod’s aria, Fermín listens to Faust
before La Traviata.
The seduction scene in O primo Basilio begins with a conversation be-
tween Luísa and her childhood friend Leopoldina, a voluptuous and sen-
sual woman who has one affair after another. While they are discussing
Leopoldina’s latest romance, the ending of La Traviata is played on a bar-
rel organ below and provokes a discussion of the novel (126). As in
Fermín’s balcony scene, the music is in the background and heard from
above. Reminded of her earlier reading of Dumas, Luísa feels tempted by

the street music and Leopoldina’s tales; she longs to descend to the world
below, the world of Marguerite Gautier. By the time Basílio arrives shortly
afterward, all of his work has been done for him: he is able to seduce Luísa
without uttering a word. The sequence concludes with “Al pallido
chiaror”:
To break the silence, [Basílio] sat down at the piano, played some measures
at random, and raising his voice a bit, began to hum the aria from the third
act of Faust:
Al pallido chiarore
Dei astri d’oro . . .
Luísa, through the last vibrations of her nerves, was returning to reality; her
knees trembled. And then, hearing that melody, a memory took shape in her
still half-asleep spirit. It was a night, years ago, at S. Carlos [the Lisbon
opera house], in a box with Jorge; an electric light gave the garden on stage
a livid shade of otherworldly moonlight; and at an ecstatic and sighing high
tone the tenor invoked the stars; Jorge turned around, he said to her: “How
beautiful!” And his glance devoured her. It was in the second month of their
marriage. She had on a dark blue dress. And returning in the carriage, Jorge,
putting his hand around her waist, repeated:
Al pallido chiarore
Dei astri d’oro . . .
And he pressed her to him. (130)
By juxtaposing Luísa’s fall with the conversation about La Traviata, Eça

makes it clear that Luísa is attempting with her adultery to experience the
world of Dumas’s novel. As we have seen, her illusions about the courte-
san will be deflated by economic realities, by the demands of the vindic-
tive proletarian Juliana. Before this threat even emerges, however, Luísa is
already disappointed. In yielding to Basílio, she has sought something
other than the conventionality of marriage and bourgeois life. The alter-
native, however, disturbingly resembles her prosaic husband. She has at-
tempted to enter Dumas’s novel, to penetrate the textual divide between
the reader and the fictional world, but what she encounters is layer upon
layer of textuality that separates her from the origin of her fantasy: Basílio
repeats the husband repeating Gounod repeating Goethe. For Luísa, the
plot of 1848 is not a novelty but a repetition of a repetition.
The order of the arias reinforces this decontextualization. What is in
Faust the prelude to seduction here follows the erotic conquest, for Basílio
sings the love song after the fact. The aria, thus, is distanced not only from
its origins but also from its function, the task of seducing. This inversion
clarifies the cause of Luísa’s fall: she is seduced not by Basílio but by her
conversation with Leopoldina. The attraction is not the lover so much as

the role he allows her to play. What appeals to her is not the beginning of
Faust—the new, meaningful, and ideal existence the hero imagines—but
rather the ending of La Traviata, the nostalgic pose of the lovelorn
Violetta. As the aria is decontextualized, moved from one speaker (Jorge)
to another (Basílio), and from one occasion (seduction) to another (post-
coital lethargy), its content is trivialized, drained of earnestness and force.
The Faust aria reappears in the novel at the moment when Luísa exits the
world she has partially entered through her adultery. To confront Juliana,
Sebastião sends Luísa and her husband to the opera to get them out of the
way. As it happens, what they see there is a production of Gounod’s Faust.
Hearing “Al pallido chiaror” again, Luísa remembers Basílio’s hummed ren-
dition. The repetition of the aria marks the opera scene as the conclusion of
the process begun with Luísa’s seduction. The theater episode resembles the
scene of her fall in the way it drains the serenade and Goethe’s character of
their original force. Faust—the great hero of Romanticism, nurtured by the
energy and idealism of the French Revolution—appears in the opera as a
mannequin sporting costumes, wigs, and stage jewelry (280–281). Eça,
thus, uses the aria to frame Luísa’s textual experiment: it marks her entrance
and exit from the plot of 1848. The emphasis on reiteration on both sides
of this frame (Basílio’s repetition of Jorge and the tenor’s watered-down
version of Faust) suggests that Luísa can never fully enter the world of the
prostitute: the Bovaresque adulteress is always repeating a repetition, de-
contextualizing signs, diluting meaning. In O primo Basílio, “Al pallido
chiaror” serves as a safety net of sorts: it reestablishes the distance between
the heroine and the dangerous text she reads; it removes her from the
economic threat she has encountered.
In La Regenta, however, the aria functions differently. Whereas Eça re-
duces the Faust myth to silly bourgeois amusement, Clarín recuperates the
energy and potency of Goethe’s hero. In his inversion of the arias, Faust
becomes an inspiring model, the quixotic ideal, that is deflated by the
realities of La Traviata. Fermín de Pas is in many ways a Faustian figure;
Clarín even calls him “a Faustus of the Church” (207). Like Faust at the
beginning of Goethe’s work, Fermín in the balcony scene takes stock of his
existence and finds it barren. Unfulfilled by lives of chastity and study,
both Faust and Fermín long for love, power, and an ideal existence but are
mired in the material world. For Fermín, consequently, the aria strikes a
resonant chord:
The canon did not know the music, and could not associate it with the scenes
to which it belonged, but he realized that it spoke of love. Listening with de-
light, as he was, to that suggestive music was a form of self-indulgence—of
dangerous sensual pleasure—but that violin expressed so well the strange

things he was feeling!
He suddenly remembered that he had lived for thirty-five sterile years—
thirty-five years rich only in trepidation and remorse, which became less
painful as time passed by, but more deadening to his soul. He was overcome
by tender self-pity; and while the violin lamented,
“Dammi ancor, dammi ancor contemplar il tuo viso,
al pallido chiaror
che vien da gli astri d’or . . . ”
he wept, looking up at the moon through spiders’ webs made by the tears
which were flooding his eyes. (340–341)
Gounod’s music captures Fermín’s longing for a better life. It directs his
eyes toward the heavens and offers an ideal to which he may aspire.
Insinuating and suggestive, it seems a confirmation of his spiritual strug-
gle: his need for change, his desire to rise up against circumstance. It does
so, moreover, in a disturbing way: Fermín does not recognize the plot or
even the opera to which the melody belongs, and yet the aria mysteriously
infuses him with its message. Its content somehow goes beyond the musi-
cal phrase.
This ideal, however, is immediately deflated: “He was looking at the
moon,” the narrator adds, “exactly as Trifón Cármenes said he looked at it
in El Lábaro [the local newspaper] every Thursday and Sunday, the days
when the literary supplement was published” (341). Like Luísa in the se-
duction scene, Fermín’s illusion is foiled by the repetition of a repetition.
Just as Basílio echoes Jorge’s echoing of the opera, so Fermín’s reflections
on the music reiterate reiterated soliloquies, Cármenes’s clichéd and
absurdly regular monologues. The comparison with Cármenes exposes the
kitschiness of Fermín’s reverie, his literary posturing. As in O primo Basílio,
“Al pallido chiaror” is associated in this scene with layers of textuality.
These layers, however, function differently in the two novels. In Eça,
they serve to bracket Luísa’s textual experiment and to separate her from
its economic consequences. In Clarín, in contrast, the layers serve to deflate
Fermín’s literary posturing. Unlike the scene in O primo Basílio, the end-
ing of Verdi’s opera is not an illusion but rather a reminder of the material
basis of the priest’s Faustian reverie. As Fermín is listening from the bal-
cony, the violin begins to play music from La Traviata, and a new charac-
ter appears on the scene: Santos Barinaga, drunk and speaking to himself,
stops to listen to the music, and congratulates the violinist for cultivating
the arts rather than commerce (342–343). The change in music and the
appearance of Santos are preceded tellingly by the sound of clinking coins.
While Fermín takes stock of his life on the balcony, his mother, Doña
Paula, totals his earnings in the basement. As the aria shifts, Fermín hears
Paula counting his ill-gained profits and observes Santos, whom he has
driven out of business through his monopoly on religious wares. Now sick,
unemployed, and dependent on his daughter, Santos is the victim, the cost
of Fermín’s Faustian ascent. With the change in music, Faust’s longing for
a chaste and pure Margaret is answered by the death of Dumas’ Marguerite
(in the form of Verdi’s Violetta). Like the courtesan, Santos is a debtor and
victim of capitalism. By inverting Eça’s allusions, Clarín not only restores
meaning and force to the Faust myth but also confronts it with its human
victim.
With the shift in music, the tone of the episode changes. Whereas be-
fore Fermín gazed up at the moon, he now looks down as if from an opera
box and observes Santos’s impassioned performance below. What was lyri-
cal sentimentality has become theatrical melodrama, a genre that in its
original form consisted of mute, gestural expression. In the balcony scene,
Santos acts out a series of pantomimes. Hearing the violin, he removes his
hat, makes a show of enlightened attention, and signals his approval (343).
Later, when the playing stops, he spins around as if “looking for the notes
[of the dying music]” (343). As the episode continues, Santos’s pantomime
becomes increasingly histrionic: “He stumbled to the door of La Cruz
Roja, put his ear to the keyhole and, after listening attentively, laughed
what is known in plays as a sardonic laugh” (345). As Peter Brooks has ar-
gued, the use of gestural language in early melodrama was an attempt to
penetrate the veil of reality and to reveal a hidden ethical truth. It sought
to forge unambiguous signs—a “verbal language which strives toward the
status of sign language” (Brooks 28)—and black-and-white distinctions
that resisted the blurring nuances of ordinary words. Santos’s phrases
and gestures have a similar function: he seeks to uncover the corruption
concealed by Fermín’s duplicity. In Santos’s Manichean worldview, the
virtuous must struggle to rend a mystifying veil of appearances and to
be recognized despite the rampant hypocrisy of society. Santos describes
Vetusta as a “land of robbers” and condemns Fermín as an “obscurantist”
and “darkness pedlar” (344). He attempts to penetrate the reality beyond
Fermín’s walls. He even puts his ear to the door in an attempt to uncover
the truth.
It is this movement toward revelation that distinguishes Chapter 15
from the seduction scene in O primo Basílio. The role of Faust in Eça’s
novel, as we have seen, is to cover up, to remove the heroine from the re-
ality she has perilously entered. When Luísa listens to “Al pallido
chiaror” again at the end of the novel, she reflects that the last time she
heard it had been the start of “all her misery!” (284). The aria draws a
moral curtain over class struggle. Like the camellias Sebastião has Luísa
take to the opera, it translates a bodily and economic reality back into
comfortably bourgeois terms. The episode in La Regenta, in contrast,

does not cover up but rather reveals: Santos and the finale of La Traviata
deflate Fermín’s Faustian reverie and uncover its economic conditions of
possibility. In this scene, Fermín looks at himself in an oblique mirror—
he spies on Santos spying on him. Santos’s speech echoes Fermín’s reverie
but reflects back a more material vision: where de Pas lamented that “he
had no home, no home of his own” (340)—an echo of Ana’s earlier ob-
servation that she “had no homeland” (250)—Santos complains, “I
haven’t got a house any more” (344). The mirror reveals the economic
conditions (a house) of the spiritual yearnings of both Fermín (a home)
and Ana (a homeland).
In revising the seduction scene in O primo Basílio, Clarín rejects Eça’s
inversion of the structure of La dame aux camélias and returns to the spirit
of the original. Whereas in Dumas the prostitute’s voice infuses and un-
dermines the bourgeois sentimental translation, in Eça Marguerite’s threat-
ening mystique and the economic danger it introduces are deflated by an
emphasis on bourgeois mimicry, on the distance between the heroine and
the text, on Basílio’s repetition of Jorge’s repetition. Fermín’s balcony scene
gestures toward Eça’s novel in its background music, but the opposition it
sets up is that of Dumas’s: Fermín’s lyrical reverie, like Armand’s senti-
mental translation, is subverted by a Marguerite-Violetta (Santos), who re-
veals an economic reality that the former conceals.
Clarín, however, complicates Dumas’s opposition between the subver-
sive voice of Marguerite and the sentimentality of the bourgeois narrator.
Whereas in La dame aux camélias, the relation between these voices is one
of translation, in Chapter 15 of La Regenta, it is represented as a sort of
prosopopoeia. In his soliloquy, Santos addresses an inanimate object
(Fermín’s house) as if he were having a conversation with its occupants. By
speaking to the house as if it were a living person, Santos implicitly gives
it a voice or face and introduces the possibility of a response. (As Paul de
Man explains, the Greek prosopon poien means to “confer a mask or a face
(prosopon)” [76].) Santos puts his ear to the keyhole and listens for an an-
swer. What is eerie about the scene is that the house seems indeed to reply,
to take on the voice Santos has conferred upon it:
Once again he fell silent and put his ear to the keyhole.
The canon theologian eased the balcony window open and leaned over
the handrail to peer at Don Santos.
“Can he hear anything? It doesn’t seem possible.”
Turning his head back into his dark, silent house he, too, listened with
all his attention. Yes, he could hear something. It was the chink of coins,
but it was a faint sound—one might recognize it if one already knew that
money was being counted, but from outside nothing could be heard, surely.
Impossible. But the idea that the drunkard’s hallucination had coincided
with reality disturbed De Pas even more, filling him with superstitious fear.
(345–346)
For de Pas, Santos’s prosopopoeia creates a troubling ambiguity. Fermín

knows that Santos could not possibly hear the clinking coins from outside,
and yet it seems that he has intuited Paula’s counting, that the house has
mysteriously assumed a voice and answered him. He is left to wonder
whether Santos is merely hallucinating or whether he has somehow ven-
triloquized the house.
As Paul de Man has noted, this confusion about who is addressing
whom is one of the perils of prosopopoeia. In his Essay upon Epitaphs,
Wordsworth warned against the use of the trope on tombstones for pre-
cisely this reason: “The convention of having the ‘Sta viator’ addressed to
the traveler on the road of life by the voice of the departed person” confuses
“the conditions of death and of life with the attributes of speech and of
silence” (de Man 77). The dead seem to speak (the tombstone addresses the
traveler and tells him to stop), while the living (the travelers) are silenced
and, in a sense, confronted with their own mortality: “The latent threat of
prospopoeia,” de Man writes, is “that by making the death speak, the sym-
metrical structure of the trope implies, by the same token, that the living
are struck dumb, frozen in their own death” (78). The peril is that one may
lose sight of the fiction, the act of projecting an imaginary voice onto the
dead, and believe that death itself is speaking, that one is hearing a voice
from beyond the grave. The scenario of the traveler before the tombstone is
not unlike the scene in La Regenta. Before Santos’ appearance, the basement
of the house is described as an inferno and is occupied by Paula, nicknamed
la Muerte (Death), who seems a “priestess” of “plutolatry” (342). In his
soliloquy, Santos is addressing the underworld, and what he “hears” is a
voice from beyond the grave. He appears to have revealed the dead, to have
made Death speak. To return to our metaphor, he has exhumed the
Marguerite, the economic conditions of possibility, of Fermín’s sentimental
translation of his own life. The music in the background, La Traviata, rein-
forces this: it points to the dying body of the victim.
What makes Santos’s words so disturbing is this apparent ability to awaken
death. When he accuses the house of corruption, it seems to speak back, con-
firming his allegations with its clinking coins. From Fermín’s perspective,
Santos’ ravings are revolutionary. Not only does the drunkard denounce the
corruption of the clergy and embrace the Enlightenment, republicanism, and
revolution, but his words seem to be supernaturally powerful: the content of
his speech appears to go beyond mere phrase and to impose itself on reality.
For the canon theologian, Santos is a frightening figure: “Don Fermín was
like a man terrified” (346). In his seeming ability to ventriloquize the house,
to conjure up a spirit, Santos resembles Marguerite, whose content also went
beyond her phrase and whose exhumed body proved so threatening.
Clarín, however, deploys prosopopoeia and coincidence to suggest an
alternate interpretation of the scene. Fermín’s response to the Gounod
aria is complicated by the fact that he himself does not recognize its
source. Although the narrator suggests that Fermín is projecting on the
music as Trifón Cármenes does, the reader is nevertheless aware that there
is a real parallelism between Fermín and Faust. Without words and de-
spite Fermín’s ignorance of the music, the aria seems to have conveyed its
meaning to him. Clarín’s use of coincidence allows us to see at once
Fermín’s potential—his Faustian energy, the spirit that goes beyond the
musical phrase—and his failure to realize it—his projection, his repetition
of a repetition. The treatment of Santos and of the ending of La Traviata
similarly revolves around a coincidence: just as Fermín’s thoughts unwit-
tingly reproduce the spirit of the Gounod aria, so Santos’s drunken imag-
ination arbitrarily coincides with the reality (the clinking coins) behind
Fermín’s door. For the priest, this coincidence is uncanny and threaten-
ing: like Marguerite, Santos seems to break down the barriers between the
internal and the external. The use of prosopopoeia and coincidence, how-
ever, suggests another interpretation. From the reader’s perspective,
Santos’s words are not magical but coincidentally accurate: we do not lose
sight of the prosopopoeia, Santos’s act of projection. The dispossessed
salesman has made a lucky guess, but in his mouth, the rebellious phrases
are merely citations.5 The narrator emphasizes that Santos, who had al-
ways been a “good Catholic” (449), has become anticlerical against his na-
ture and almost against his will: “You’ve made me into a heretic, a mason”
Santos cries out in his drunken ravings, “yes sir, now I’m a mason—to
avenge myself—to—down with the clergy!” (344). His “revolution” is not
a struggle for convictions but rather a series of formulae adopted as a last
resort. His laughter is not Marguerite’s subversive hilarity but rather
“what is known in plays as a sardonic laugh” (345): it is an act, an imita-
tion. Though his phrases happen to be on the mark, they ultimately go
beyond his spirit, which is best represented by the saintliness of his
Christian name.
In its structure, the episode resembles Dumas’s novel: like Armand’s,
Fermín’s translation is deflated by a Marguerite/Violetta who reveals an eco-
nomic reality. Clarín’s use of prosopopoeia and coincidence, however, adds
nuance to each side of the opposition. The episode reveals not only Fermín’s
tyranny and Santos’s misery but also Fermín’s defiant spirit—his resemblance
to the great literary offspring of the French Revolution—and Santos’s hesi-
tation—the repetition implicit in his critique. Both the potential of 1789
(Faust’s idealism) and the farce of 1848 (Marguerite’s failure) loom behind
them. The scene, thus, goes beyond Dumas’s opposition between bourgeois
mystification and the economic reality of the underclass. It explores the spir-
itual strength of the bourgeoisie as well as its tendency to exploit, and the
ideological weakness of the exploited as well as the miserable conditions in
which they live.
A Male Marguerite
Clarín draws upon the courtesan’s story in La Regenta to sketch not only
the character of Fermín but also that of his rival for Ana’s affection, Álvaro
Mesía. Álvaro’s best friend is an aristocrat named Paco Vegallana, a pas-
sionate reader of Dumas fils:
[Paco] was disdainful towards mistresses won in fair combat, and consider-
ate, even affectionate, towards those who cost him money. His reading was
limited to the History of Prostitution, by Dufour, and The Lady of the
Camellias and its derivatives, together with some other fictional panegyrics
on the fallen woman. He believed in the hearts of gold of those ladies whom
Bermúdez called meretrices, and in the absolute corruptness of the upper
classes. He was certain that unless there was another invasion of Barbarians
the world would soon be rotten to the core. He lamented the fact but found
it all terribly amusing. (150)
Clarín’s presentation of Paco’s views plays off French socialist discourse of

the 1840s in which the prostitute’s lot was a symptom and symbol of the
corruption of capitalist society.6 Paco laments the oppressive system by
which good-hearted girls are reduced to prostitution and exploited by the
wealthy. His outlook and behavior, however, are ultimately closer to
Armand’s and the corrupt upper class’s than to the exploited prostitutes’.
Just as Dumas’s hero jilts a middle-class lover—“a little middle-class girl,
very loving, very cloying” (46)—to pursue Marguerite, so Paco prefers
meretrices to “mistresses won in fair combat.” Like Armand, Paco exhumes
a heart of gold (el buen corazón) in these “fallen women.” Finally, both men
translate the prostitute into more comfortably bourgeois signs. In 1848,
the invading hordes who championed the prostitutes, fought corruption,
and sought a more progressive society were the insurgent masses who re-
leased the women imprisoned in Saint Lazare. In Paco’s version, however,
the saviors are invading barbarians. In his imagination, the young marquis
has translated the plot of 1848 into a decadent cliché. He has converted
political rebels into primitives, their advance into an anachronism. His
translation neutralizes the ideological significance of the prostitute and

postpones indefinitely the change she embodies.
Like Emma Bovary and Luísa Mendonça, Paco Vegallana reads
La dame aux camélias quixotically, looking for analogies in the real world
and attempting to reenact its plot. The role he assigns himself is that of
Armand. Just as Dumas’s hero finds redeeming virtues in his courtesan
lover, so Paco locates the heart of gold in Marguerite, whom he identi-
fies with Álvaro Mesía: “Paco did find in his reading someone who re-
sembled Mesía: he was a Marguerite Gautier of the male sex, a man who
could be redeemed by love. It was necessary at all costs to redeem him,
to help him.” (156). Like Armand, Paco attempts to exhume the
Marguerite Gautier, the redeemable core, within the indifferent seducer:
he tries to translate the promiscuous lover’s life into a sentimental plot.
He does so by creating a distinction between the inner and outer Álvaro.
Just as Armand can see the heart of gold beneath Marguerite’s courtesan
trappings, so Paco recognizes the potential romantic difference beneath
the seducer’s cool indifference.
In both La dame aux camélias and La Regenta, Marguerite’s redemption
depends on a distinction between surface and depth. This distinction,
however, is always on the verge of collapse. In Dumas, as we have seen, the
boundaries between the interior and exterior are continually blurred as
Marguerite’s essence, like an Oriental perfume, penetrates borders. Signs of
her profession and language constantly escape Armand and the narrator’s
translation. In La Regenta, the opposition between the inner and outer
Marguerite is similarly vulnerable. Paco is introduced within pages of
Ronzal (alias Trabuco or “The Student”), an uncouth provincial who slav-
ishly imitates Álvaro. Although both Ronzal and Paco have taken Mesía as
a role model, their imitations are carefully distinguished:
[Paco and Alvaro] understood each other and had the same tastes and ideas,
if only because Paco attempted to imitate his idol in these things. Paco did
not, however, imitate Don Alvaro’s dress or manner, because as soon as the
older man had observed in the younger a propensity to do so, he had dis-
creetly given him to understand that this kind of imitation was vulgar and
ridiculous. By making fun of Blunderbuss he had guided Paco, who had an
instinctive sense of elegance, away from such tendencies. And as a result the
Young Marquis dressed in an original and fashionable style. (149)
Whereas Ronzal copies Álvaro’s clothes and seems a grotesque mirror, Paco
imitates his ideas but dresses originally, with true elegance. The distinction
between the disciples is based on the same opposition as Paco’s vision of
Álvaro: the difference between surface and depth.
As Clarín continues to sketch Paco’s character, however, this opposition

becomes problematic: “Just as an elegant and wealthy lady lets her servant
girls have left-off clothes which are almost new, so Mesía more than once
left scarcely used mistresses in Paco’s arms. And, Mesía being Mesía, Paco
was happy to take them. So great was his admiration for his hero”
(150–151). In the contrast between Paco and Ronzal, the originality of the
former lay on the surface, in his style of dress. In the vehicle of this simile,
however, Paco wears borrowed clothes. The simile collapses the distinction
between surface and depth: it equates a superficial (sartorial) dependence
with a deeper (emotional) one. The comparison introduces into the text an
element of indifferentiation that undermines from the outset Paco’s at-
tempt to distinguish the inner from the outer Álvaro.
The simile threatens to confuse not only the boundary between the
interior and the exterior but also the class differences upheld by that
boundary: the distinction between the upper-class dandy of Álvaro’s outer
appearance and the lower-class prostitute that lies beneath. In his relations
with Álvaro, Paco’s stance is similar to that of the femmes du monde in
Dumas’s opening scene. If Mesía is a prostitute, a male Marguerite, then
Paco is, like the society ladies, exploring a lower class when he digs up the
inner Álvaro. The narrator’s simile, however, inverts this scenario. In its ve-
hicle, Paco is not the femme du monde viewing Marguerite’s possessions but
rather a female servant who delights in wearing her mistress’s clothes. Just
as the femmes du monde invert into the masses at the Tuileries, and Luísa’s
fantasies about Marguerite’s luxury are answered by her servant’s appropri-
ation of her wardrobe, so Paco’s projection of Álvaro as Marguerite is
turned on its head in the narrator’s projection of the young marquis as a
maid decked out in finery. In each case, a scenario of class tourism is in-
verted. The simile demonstrates the vulnerability of Paco’s projections of
Dumas’s story onto his world: like Luísa in her reading, he exposes himself
to being inverted, revolved, answered with revolution.
As the passage continues, Paco’s similarity with the society ladies and
Armand becomes even clearer:
[Mesía] deceived [Paco] in the same way as he often deceived certain

women with upbringings and sentiments similar to those of the Young
Marquis. Paco’s imagination, his habits and the special perverseness of his
moral principles made his soul an effeminate one, in the sense that he re-
sembled countless married and unmarried ladies who are sound in mind
and limb, idle, hearty eaters, and brought up to lives of leisure and plenty
in the midst of ready, everyday vice.
He was prone to a vague sentimentalism which, like such women, he re-
garded as exquisite sensibility, very nearly a virtue. But this kind of virtue
for the use of fine ladies is ruled by the laws of a privileged morality which
is much less severe than the disagreeably dour morality of the common peo-
ple. Without thinking much about it, and not thinking at all clearly, Paco
still hoped for some pure, great love, like love in books and plays . . . For all
this to come to the surface, and for Paco to become aware of it, he needed
an imagination more powerful than his own to set his mind working;
Mesía’s insinuating, corrosive eloquence was the most effective stimulant.
(152)
This passage places Paco in the position of the Bovaresque adulteress: he is

likened to loose and leisured ladies who await loves of literary proportions.
By portraying Paco as an Emma Bovary figure, Clarín clearly identifies
him as a stand-in for the heroine, Ana Ozores, who is also a Bovaresque
reader and who will later become an adulteress. Paco’s relationship with Ál-
varo models the other option that Ana may choose in life. At the same
time, Paco recalls Dumas’s hero. Not only does he idealize the prostitute in
the same way that Armand does, but Álvaro also treats him as Marguerite
does her lover: both the male Marguerite and the female deceive naïve ad-
mirers by appealing to their sentimental illusions. The option that Paco
models is that of playing Armand to Álvaro’s Marguerite, of being a
Bovaresque adulteress who projects on the courtesan.
The passage not only clarifies the relevance of Paco’s reading to the
broader plot of the novel but also comments on the political significance
of Dumas’s novel: it decodes Armand’s sentimental translation and its ap-
peal to bourgeois readers. The new morality that Armand proposes—the
salvation of the golden hearted—is appreciated not as the redemption of
the lower ranks but as an aesthetic distancing of the elite from the
masses—an apotheosis of the golden pursed. Paco will “redeem” Álvaro-
Marguerite by asserting his aesthetic rather than moral exceptionality. He
will recognize not humility or goodness (as Armand does), but rather (in
Fermín’s terms) “good taste.”
This good taste lies precisely in the difference between the inner and
outer Álvaro:
So inside the out-and-out sceptic, the man of ice, the disillusioned dandy,
there was another man? Who would have thought it? And how well
the colours of the two men matched (their subtle shadings, Paco meant.)
What a fine contrast between his apparent indifference and elegant
pessimism, and his hidden erotic fervour, with just a hint of the romantic
about it! (156)
Paco’s appreciation of Mesía is entirely aesthetic: he admires the matching

colors, the subtle shadings, the fine contrast. His stance is again a
Bovaresque one that mirrors that of the heroine. Like Paco, both Emma
and Ana take pleasure in the contrast between a flippant demeanor and the
inner worth it conceals: Paris, Emma supposes, is full of men whose “true
worth” lies “unsuspected under their frivolous exteriors” (68). Ana too
looks beyond Álvaro’s surface to find a depth no one else perceives. With
both Paco and Ana, Mesía is happy to play along. He adopts for Ana “the
part of the secret sentimentalist like the ones in Feuillet’s plays and nov-
els—a great deal of esprit concealing a heart of gold, which keeps itself hid-
den for fear of the thorns of reality. That was the height of distinction as
understood by Don Alvaro” (377). Similarly, for Paco, he creates an aes-
thetic effect, a “distinction” or “fine contrast,” that appeals to the marquis’
sentimentality. Emma, Paco, Ana, and Feuillet fans all read in the same
way: they imagine that the surface is a lie, and the hidden depth is the
truth. They seek to exhume a heart of gold. In reality, however, the sur-
face—Álvaro’s frivolity—is the truth, and the depth is an illusion. Catering
to his readers, Álvaro creates a sort of trompe l’œil: his depth is in the eye
of the beholder. As in the simile about the elegant lady and her servant
girls, depth collapses into surface.
At the end of the novel, it will be this skill at trompe l’œil that allows
Álvaro to succeed with the heroine. On the rainy night that she is seduced,
Ana sees “Álvaro’s eyes shining and wet with tears. His cheeks were wet, too.
She did not stop to think that it might be the water which was falling from
the sky” (634). Just as Paco projects aesthetic and social distinction upon his
equal, so Ana projects sentimental difference onto sameness—the “tears” and
the rain are identical in source, but Ana reads a distinction into them.7
In his confusion of distinctions, Álvaro’s effect is similar to
Marguerite’s: both blur boundaries and cater to, but never wholly conform
to, the sentimental translations of their admirers. The two characters dif-
fer, however, in a significant way. Dumas’s hero and narrator exhume
Marguerite from the fosse commune: they distinguish her from the com-
mon prostitute. Paco, in contrast, digs up the Marguerite Gautier, the
heart of gold, inside the “disillusioned dandy.” The dandy and the prosti-
tute resemble one another in several ways. Both live off the surface (their
appearance), and neither is known for depth or emotional engagement. To
locate a heart of gold in either, consequently, is something of a feat. Both
the prostitute and the dandy, moreover, are figures of indifferentiation.
The dandy confuses the male and the female, the foreign and the na-
tional,8 whereas the prostitute introduces indifferentiation into the social
hierarchy: Marguerite is indistinguishable from the femmes du monde. In
this respect, both figures lend themselves to Paco’s and Armand’s projects:
they are a background of indifference and indifferentiation against which
the male or female Marguerite’s “fine contrast” can be defined and from
which her inner heart of gold can be exhumed.
What distinguishes the dandy and the prostitute and what separates
Paco’s projection from Armand’s is the distinction each blurs. The dandy
in his late nineteenth-century incarnation confuses genders and nationali-
ties but not social classes.9 The prostitute, in contrast, is a revolutionary
figure who threatens social hierarchy. By converting the prostitute into a
dandy, Paco neutralizes her threat. In this sense, the passage about Álvaro
resembles the description of Paco’s reading of Dumas. In each, the histor-
ical referents of Dumas’s novel, the insurgent masses and the whores of
1848, are translated in Paco’s imagination into harmless, decadent clichés:
barbarians and dandies. The threat of a real uprising is suppressed.
As in Dumas, however, this translation is vulnerable. Both
Marguerites—Clarín’s dandy and Dumas’s prostitute—serve to deflate the
illusions of their admirers. “If instead of the History of Prostitution Paquito
had read certain fashionable novels,” the narrator observes, “he would have
realized that Don Alvaro was only imitating the heroes of these elegant
books—and imitating them badly, for he was above all a political man”
(156). Just as Marguerite laughs back at Armand’s romantic projections,
the narrator smirks at Paco’s through Álvaro, whose function from the be-
ginning of the novel is to mock: his first appearance is preceded by his guf-
faw, a “sonorous, booming laugh” (141). The difference between the
laughter of the male and female Marguerites is that the courtesan’s hilarity
is that of the other “filles de son genre,” the leveling laughter of the pros-
titute. It is the language that Dumas’s narrator and hero do not master, that
of prostitution and revolution. Paco, however, is not ridiculed by the lower
classes. The indifferentiation Álvaro introduces is never socially threaten-
ing. Paco may be at first like a leisured lady and then like a servant girl, but
this inversion happens entirely at the level of a simile: the “like” always sep-
arates the prostitute’s political threat and Paco’s reality. He may be tricked
or blind, but his position is never endangered.
This is clear in the contrast between Paco’s experience and that of
Dumas’s femmes du monde at the viewing. As we have seen, the narrator
compares Paco’s taste and habits to those of leisured society ladies. Just
as Dumas’s femmes du monde look for the traces of the courtesan’s pro-
fession in her lavish apartment, so Paco attempts to see Marguerite be-
neath Álvaro’s elegant exterior. What distinguishes Paco and the society
ladies is that the latter are exploring an actual difference in social rank,
while he does so only at the level of metaphor: he has projected the plot
of 1848 onto a man of his own class, whom he refigures as Marguerite
in his imagination. In La dame aux camélias, the society ladies expect to
find traces of Marguerite’s difference but are confronted by her eerie
sameness to themselves. Paco, in contrast, refashions his equal as differ-
ent. Whereas in Dumas difference underlies an apparent sameness, in
Clarín sameness underlies a projected difference. La dame aux camélias

opens with the uncanny repetition that Gilles Deleuze has identified
with simulacra in the Logique du sens. Dumas’s courtesan is threatening
because she blurs differences and creates a jarring simulacrum of aristo-
cratic life. Paco’s reading, in contrast, is a projection of difference onto
two things that are fundamentally identical, a controlled differentiation
across a base of sameness. Whereas the femmes du monde slum in a slum
that looks uncomfortably like their palace, Paco engages in an armchair
slumming in which he envisions his palace-mate as slum-dweller. As he
slums in only a metaphorical slum, he never encounters the lower classes
or an actual social threat. Like Armand, he is ridiculed, but the laughing
Marguerite is not the voice of the oppressed.
Álvaro and Paco’s relationship should also be distinguished from
Fermín and Santos’s encounter. Both episodes involve projection (Paco’s
reading, Fermín’s idealizing, and Santos’s prosopopoeia) and confuse the
distinction between the interior and the exterior (the inner and outer Ál-
varo and the inside and outside of de Pas’s house). Fermín and Santos’s en-
counter, however, is ultimately closer to Dumas’s opening episode than is
Álvaro and Paco’s relationship. Like the femmes du monde in Marguerite’s
apartment, Fermín observes a social inferior only to discover an unsettling
reflection of himself, which destabilizes his sense of privilege or difference.
Just as the women’s position is undermined by the indifferentiation
Marguerite introduces (her apparent sameness to themselves), so the dis-
tinction between spectator and speaker, inside and outside, is confused by
Santos’s disturbing prosopopoeia. In each case, the sameness or reversibil-
ity is eerie because it blurs an actual distinction between social classes or
between interior and exterior. In contrast to Paco’s vision of Álvaro, this
distinction between the inner and the outer is not projected but real.
Whereas Álvaro’s depth is an illusion of the surface—it exists only in the
eye of the beholder—the hidden truth that Santos’s gestures “exhume”
actually exists. It is the presence of the door, of a barrier between the
internal and external, that confirms the distinction and that makes its
subsequent collapse so disturbing for Fermín. What is the inversion and
unsettling reflection of class struggle in the balcony scene is with Álvaro
and Paco a game of projection and manipulation among aristocrats in
which social difference is reduced to a metaphor.
Clarín’s departure in Chapter 7 from the model of both Dumas and
Fermín-Santos raises important questions about Álvaro’s function. If Paco’s
male Marguerite is not a figuration of class struggle, what then does he rep-
resent? If not to subvert, what is the function of his laughter? The key to
understanding Álvaro’s role in Clarín’s historical commentary lies precisely
in the distinction that he collapses: the difference between surface and
depth, body and soul. This binary is in fact the structuring opposition of
the entire novel. On the surface, La Regenta is about the conflict between
body and soul. More precisely, however, it is the conflict between a body
that represents a soul and a soul that is an illusion of the body. When Ana
first confesses with Fermín, he explains that “[t]he soul, like the body, has
its own therapeutics and its own hygiene, and the confessor is a hygienist”
(187). In Fermín’s metaphor, the body is the vehicle, a sign that points to
the soul. De Pas’s person similarly stands for his spirit. He is identified with
the cathedral tower, which is described as an index finger pointing to the
divine.10 His power lies in a body that represents a greater spiritual truth, in
a surface that gestures toward depth and soul. Mesía, in contrast, is trompe
l’œil. He seems to incarnate higher ideas, but his depth, any spirituality he
might evince, is ultimately an illusion of the surface, of the body. La Regenta
traces Ana’s vacillation between these two modes. In this sense, it revolves
around an opposition very similar to that of La dame aux camélias. Dumas
contrasts Armand’s representation and “translating back” (his rendering of
the prostitute’s story as a spiritual drama) with the bodily reality of
Marguerite’s profession and the indifferentiation it introduces. Similarly,
Clarín pits Fermín’s representation (the body that points to a soul) against
Álvaro’s physicality and blurring of distinctions (a seeming depth that col-
lapses into the surface).
In the portrayal of the two rivals in La Regenta, however, this opposition
functions differently. In La dame aux camélias, translation or representation
is a backward-looking approach, a dependence on bourgeois ideology that
ultimately foils social change. The true revolution, Marguerite’s defiant
gesture, depends on making the spirit of the new language live in oneself,
on a sort of incarnation. The failure of 1848 and of Marguerite’s project is
due to an insistence on translation. In his treatment of Fermín and Santos,
Clarín echoes this critique of representation and translation. Fermín’s lyri-
cal translation contrasts with the earnestness of Santos’s bodily gestures,
which seek to reveal the economic truths that the former obscures. It is also
evident in the contrast between Fermín and the bishop, Fortunato
Camoirán. Fortunato is a modest and saintly man who identifies with the
humblest of his flock. Given to altruism, he often runs into debt, and his
sermons are so exuberant that on Good Friday it seems as though he is
experiencing the crucifixion he describes: it is “as if he could feel the execu-
tioners’ breath on his own forehead” (259). At first, the Vetustans are drawn
by Fortunato’s faith and fervor. Hearing him, they take seriously “the idea
that they were all brothers” (256). After a while, however, his populism
becomes grating: the ladies find it “not very amusing to have to rub shoul-
ders, in the chapel of Mary Magdalen behind the high altar, with a mass of
servant girls and other sanctimonious poor women” (263). Gradually, the
upper-class Vetustans abandon Fortunato, the popular and the prostitute

(Mary Magdalen) and turn instead to Fermín, who is more measured in
both his economy and his words. His sermons are scholarly and abstract,
and his vision of religion veers toward the utilitarian—“he was the Bastiat
of the pulpit” (262). Whereas the bishop (to return to Derrida’s phrase)
makes the spirit live in himself, Fermín is unable to do so and avoids to
whatever extent possible the story of the Incarnation:
In general, he managed without the Christian epopee in his sermons [No

le gustaba sacar el Cristo], and he seldom preached during Holy Week . . .
The fact was that De Pas’s imagination lacked the creative power to paint
New Testament scenes with originality and vigour. Whenever he had to re-
peat “And the Word was made flesh” he saw in his mind’s eye not the
manger and Baby Jesus but the sentence from the Gospel according to John
painted in red on a piece of wood in the middle of an altar: Et Verbum caro
factum est. (260)
The words that describe how words become flesh fail to become flesh in
Fermín’s mind. His imagination is not possessed (as the bishop’s is) by the
spirit of these words but rather translates back into the older tongue, back
into Latin. In Dumas’s terms, he avoids creation—incarnation—and
limits himself to an abstract representation (one set of words standing for
another). Just as Armand’s translation betrays the spirit of Marguerite’s ges-
tures, so Fermín’s representation is a shortcoming, a failure to be possessed
by (and to convey) the defiant spirit of Christ. In the contrast between
Fermín and Santos and between Fermín and the bishop, Clarín creates
an opposition resembling Dumas’s and makes a similar critique of the
shortcomings of bourgeois revolution.
Unlike Dumas, however, Clarín is processing the plot of 1848 with
considerable hindsight. Dumas’s novel was published shortly after the June
Days, in which the bourgeois republicans brutally put down their prole-
tarian allies. From his perspective, the movement failed because it was
translated back into bourgeois. Clarín, in contrast, is writing not only after
the February and June Days but also after the coup of 1851 and the col-
lapse of the Paris Commune in 1871. He may incorporate a distinction
similar to the one that opens La dame aux camélias (representation versus
true incarnation), but this distinction only serves to offset the opposition
that governs most of his novel: the conflict between representation and
false incarnation. It was this opposition that tore apart the Second
Republic in France and that would later make Restoration Spain such a
farce. After the initial outbreak of the Revolution of 1848 during the
February Days, various classes and parties contended for power. With the
elections of December 10, 1848, however, this struggle was distilled into
an opposition between two forces: the bourgeois representatives of the
National Assembly and the new president, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte.
For Marx, this was ultimately a conflict between the spirit and the body:
The elected National Assembly stands in a metaphysical relation, but the
elected President in a personal relation to the nation. The National
Assembly, indeed, exhibits in its individual representatives the manifold as-
pects of the national spirit, but in the President this national spirit finds its
incarnation. As against the Assembly, he possesses a sort of divine right; he
is President by the grace of the people. (Marx, Brumaire 33)
Whereas the legislators represented the national “spirit” abstractly, Louis-

Napoléon styled himself as its embodiment. His triumph is the
victory of the body, the physical incarnation, over the legislators’ abstract
representation. As his coup d’état in 1851 demonstrated, however, his in-
carnation of the national spirit was only skin-deep. The legislative body
that represented the national spirit was defeated by a false incarnation of
this spirit in the Napoleonic body.
It is this type of embodiment that prevails in La Regenta as well. At first,
Ana Ozores gravitates toward her “soul brother,” Fermín, who leads her to
defy and rise up above Vetustan conventions. His insistence on representa-
tion, however, ultimately does not satisfy her. Ana’s imagination is deeply
empathetic, closer to Fortunato’s than to Fermín’s. She is drawn to precisely
the images that Fermín most avoids: as a child she is moved by the image
of the infant Christ and at the Christmas eve mass as an adult she is touched
by the story of the Incarnation. Like the bishop, who is the author of
several volumes of poetry about the Virgin, Ana has written odes to Mary
in her adolescence. Her fantasies are not translations but flesh-and-blood
images. Fermín, as a result, is at a loss to control her. He attempts to tighten
the reins, to impose a stricter discipline, but this backfires. As he begins to
abuse his power, Ana turns to his rival, who caters more to her imagination.
With Álvaro Mesía, Ana feels, there is “no need to imagine something ab-
sent” (633). Ana chooses incarnation over abstract representation and suc-
cumbs to a seducer who, like Louis-Napoléon, seems to embody a spirit.11
Unlike the bishop, however, Mesía is a false incarnation, a messiah in name
only—his spirit is nothing more than the esprit of his dandyism. Fermín’s
abstract spirituality cannot compete with the bodily presence of an Álvaro,
whose depth, like Louis-Napoléon’s, is but an illusion of the surface.
The course of Fermín’s failure resembles that of the Second Republic. As
the legislature gradually introduced oppressive measures such as heavy sur-
veillance, the nation reacted against it and embraced the ambiguous figure
of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. In Marx’s metaphor, it behaved like a

woman who allowed herself to be violated by the “first adventurer that came
along” (21). Increasingly pressured by Fermín, Ana similarly throws herself
into the arms of the politically ambivalent Álvaro. What is alluring in both
adventurers is their decadence. As Marx observes, “[t]he Uncle remembered
the campaigns of Alexander in Asia, the Nephew the triumphal marches of
Bacchus in the same land” (78). In La Regenta, Álvaro, “the Alexander of se-
ducers” (153), brings out the orgiast in Ana, who right before her seduction
hears the polka from Salacia, a ballet about Bacchantes. Finally, both Álvaro
and Louis-Napoléon are politically shifty. Just as Louis-Napoléon goes from
populist to emperor, Mesía publicly supports the Liberal party while con-
trolling the conservative faction from behind the scenes. Both are false rev-
olutionaries who refashion themselves with the political tides.
At this point, we may return to my earlier question: who is Clarín’s
male Marguerite? It is clear that Álvaro is not (like Dumas’s heroine or
Santos as Violetta) the underclass or oppressed, the prostitute as a figure
of revolution. Rather, Clarín’s male courtesan resembles Louis-Napoléon,
who, as Madame Girardin famously quipped, ushered in “a government
of hommes entretenus,” of kept men. Clarín too draws a connection be-
tween Álvaro’s political dealings and his function as Paco’s male
Marguerite: “Don Alvaro was to the marquis in politics what he was to
the younger Vegallana in love: his Mentor, his nymph Egeria” (158). Just
as Mesía creates for Paco subtle shadings and illusory distinctions, so he
creates a false appearance of difference in Vetustan politics (both parties
are controlled by the same man). Álvaro’s Bonapartist character is clear
not only in his political dealings but also in the space in which he tri-
umphs. Moments before her seduction, Ana dines in a conservatory with
decor that recalls Bonaparte splendor: “Don Alvaro, who knew about
such matters, said that it resembled, on a smaller scale, Princess Mathilde’s
conservatory.” (644). The salon of Princess Mathilde, a first cousin of
Louis-Napoléon who was once courted by him, was the center of Parisian
cultural life during the Second Empire. It is the allure of Bonapartism
that ultimately wins Ana over.
Both La dame aux camélias and La Regenta exhume a Marguerite
Gautier and translate her into bourgeois signs. In Dumas, this translation
is foiled by a prostitute whose meaning constantly escapes translation. The
revolutionary side of Marguerite—the leveling laughter of the working
class—permeates the signs used to contain her. Paco’s translation and sen-
timental illusions are also ridiculed but not by any genuine political con-
tent. What leaks through and subverts him is rather the farce of
Bonapartism, a breakdown of representation itself. As Jeffrey Mehlman
explains in Revolution and Repetition, Bonapartism marked “the emergence
of a State which has been emptied of its class content” (15), of a state that
represented no constituency whatsoever. Louis-Napoléon, who seemed to
embody an entire nation, stood for no one but himself and with his rise,
political representation collapsed altogether. What answers Paco is the false
depth and false representations of Álvaro, the trompe l’œil of a Louis-
Napoleonic seducer. Just as Louis Bonaparte’s false incarnation defeated a
system of political representation, so Álvaro’s mimicry and manipulation
of signs win out over the body that represents spiritual depth and foil
Fermín’s attempt to rise up.
At this point, we have come full circle from the opposition with which
we began in Dumas. In La dame aux camélias, to represent is to translate
back into comfortably bourgeois terms. Indifferentiation, Marguerite’s lev-
eling laughter, in contrast, is subversive. La Regenta gestures toward this
critique (but also complicates it) in the treatment of Fermín and Santos.
The focus of the broader plot of the novel, however, makes a different
commentary. In the portrayal of Álvaro, indifferentiation is not defiance
but a parody of it, a vacuum of meaning exploited by a political oppor-
tunist. Representation, in contrast, becomes a precondition for political
expression: Ana’s and Fermín’s attempt to rise up against Vetustan norms
will depend on the legibility of their signs, on a surface that points to
depth, spirit, and meaning.12
In interpreting Clarín’s treatment of Dumas in relation to the specter of
French history, it is important not to reduce characters to political types:
Fermín, a priest, is clearly not to be equated with the National Assembly.
What is parallel in history and the novel are not the figures themselves but
the plot that governs them and the structural relationships between them:
the struggle between the spiritual and the corporal; an abuse of power and
excessive abstraction that allow for the rise of an empty sign; the oppor-
tunism of an homme entretenu. Clarín has exhumed the plot of 1848, the
history encoded in Dumas’s novel, and translated it to a Spanish context.
La Regenta works in what Fredric Jameson has called the conditional
mode: it examines what would be, were such a plot to repeat itself in Spain
where social and historical circumstances are different. As Jameson ex-
plains discussing Balzac’s La Vieille Fille, “if [the novel] inscribes the irrev-
ocable brute facts of empirical history . . . it does so in order the more
surely to “manage” those facts and to open up a space in which they are no
longer quite so irreparable, no longer quite so definitive” (Political
Unconscious 164).
What Paco’s reading of Dumas filters out of the plot of 1848, what it
makes “less irreparable,” is the threat of the proletariat, the true voice of
Marguerite. What now replaces Marguerite’s voice, however, is the farce of
Louis-Napoléon. This is also a key focus in O primo Basílio as is clear in
the figure of Castro. The appearance of Louis-Napoleonic characters in

both of these novels attests to the literary impact of the historical figure. In
studies of nineteenth-century literature, Louis Bonaparte has long been
eclipsed by his uncle Napoleon, who is one of the great heroes of
Romanticism. Though less sung, the nephew was nevertheless a funda-
mental archetype for the second half of the nineteenth century. The myth
of Louis Bonaparte was the foundation of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series,
which was one of the principal models for the Iberian (and European)
novel of the 1870s and 1880s.13 In the late nineteenth-century novel,
moreover, this archetype came to influence the representation of the
seducer figure, who was increasingly portrayed as a Gallicized homme
entretenu. In Madame Bovary, for example, Léon is described as Emma’s
“mistress” (327), and in his notes Flaubert observes how Frédéric Moreau
of L’éducation sentimentale “acquired the charm of putains just by his life’s
having developed analogously to theirs” (cited in Bernheimer 152). For
Charles Bernheimer, this description is a clear allusion to Louis Bonaparte,
who “embodies prostitution in power” (53).
Both Eça and Clarín take up the figure as they reenact the plot of 1848.
Their treatments, however, vary widely and suggest different interpreta-
tions of the historical subtext. Whereas in O primo Basílio, the Louis-
Napoleonic figure is Castro, an exploiter of prostitutes, in La Regenta, it is
a male prostitute. Tyrannized by her rebellious servant, Luísa turns to
Castro out of desperation. The threat of the proletariat has driven her into
the arms of a Louis-Napoléon. Although Eça almost immediately pulls her
away from him and by extension pulls Portugal away from the precedent
of 1851, by briefly introducing this possibility he clarifies his interpreta-
tion of 1848 and the threat it posed. Frightened by the violence of the
working classes, the French bourgeoisie embraced Louis-Napoléon, sacri-
ficing its political influence to maintain its economic position. What
makes Paco vulnerable to the farce of Louis-Napoléon, to the laughter of
the male Marguerite, in contrast, is not a social threat. No menacing un-
derclass throws him into Álvaro’s arms. In La Regenta, Louis-Napoléon is
not the answer to a danger but a danger in himself. Like a prostitute, he is
an empty sign, a vacuum of meaning, available for projection and distor-
tion. Unlike Luísa, Paco and later Ana are not vulnerable because of their
slumming: Ana’s ability to lose herself “in a crowd of common people” is
viewed positively. Their susceptibility is rather an eagerness to project
upon an empty sign. In La Regenta, the real danger is not an uprising but
the parody of an uprising, the beguiling phrases of a Louis-Napoléon.
During the Revolution of 1868 in Spain, Clarín realized that the working
classes lacked the ideological development and language necessary to be a
serious political player or threat (this is clear in the representation of Santos
Barinaga, who makes his critique only in spite of himself ). What was to be
feared was rather the political adventurer who maneuvered his way into
power by manipulating distorted or inapplicable discourses.
Ana’s Tableau Vivant
In Part I of La Regenta, Clarín draws upon La dame aux camélias to intro-

duce the two characters who contend for Ana’s affection. Each episode
places one of the rivals in a relationship that models an option Ana may
later choose: she may either be Santos-Violetta reading Fermín de Pas or
Paco Vegallana writing over Álvaro-Marguerite. By rehearsing these alter-
natives with male characters, Clarín draws out the political implications of
each possibility: Santos’s revolutionary rhetoric and Paco’s social theories
clarify the ideological meaning of the sentimental plot (Marguerite’s or
Violetta’s life).
Ana’s vacillation between these options—bourgeois aestheticism and
identification with the prostitute—is, to a certain extent, inscribed in Ana’s
genetic code. Her mother, who died in childbirth, was an Italian seamstress,
but in Vetusta is widely believed to have been a dancer and, by implication,
a prostitute. During her childhood, Ana yearns for the mother she has never
known and seeks solace among the shepherds of the countryside, with
whom she identifies. It is this longing for maternal affection and compan-
ionship that leads her to befriend a peasant boy named Germán, who
explains to her what mothers do—“give lots of kisses” (68). Like her
mother’s profession, however, Ana’s relationship with Germán, whose name
suggests hermano (brother) (Labanyi, “City” 57), is misinterpreted in
Vetusta. When the ten-year-old girl spends a night on a boat with him, the
Vetustans conclude that Ana has inherited her mother’s wantonness—“yes,
of course, the mother was a trollop” (99)—and begin to treat her as if she
were a loose woman (70). Traumatized by their assumptions, Ana retreats
into herself. It is at this point that Ana’s father, Don Carlos, returns to Spain
after years of exile and decides to intervene in his daughter’s upbringing.
Under her father’s tutelage, Ana cultivates the aesthetic—she reads about
Greek art—and becomes an aesthetic object herself—“Don Carlos treated
her as if she were Art” (89). As a child, Ana experiences the stances of both
her mother (the supposed prostitute) and her father (the aesthete) and
retreats from the former into the latter when her solidarity is mistaken for
promiscuity.
As an adult, Ana will repeat this pattern during the Nazarene procession
in Chapter 26. At the beginning of this episode, Fermín has lost support
among the Vetustans, who suspect that he is to blame for the death of
Santos Barinaga (after being driven out of business, Santos has drunk him-
self to death). In a moment of compassion, Ana decides to show her soli-
darity for Fermín, whom she regards as her “soul brother,” by walking
barefoot in a procession on Good Friday. As she walks, all of Vetusta looks
on, fascinated by the naked feet glimpsed beneath her penitent’s dress. At
this juncture, Ana may either embrace her initial project of supporting
Fermín and following the footsteps of the Messiah or reject it in favor of
his rival, the earthly Mesía.
At first, it may be tempting to read this scene as the culminating
moment in Fermín’s oppression of the heroine and the beginning of her
rebellion against him. The text, indeed, invites the first part of this inter-
pretation: Vetustan society and de Pas himself regard Ana’s gesture as a sign
of her submission to his authority. Víctor laments that the Magistral “is
parading her like a Roman victor with a slave—behind his chariot of
glory” (593), and Fermín does in fact take pride in being “the master,” the
one who “bared the most select pair of feet in town and dragged them
through the mire” (595). Álvaro suspects that Fermín “has tried to tighten
the screws too much” (592) and that Ana will react against it.
The introduction to the episode, however, suggests a different reading.
Ana decides to walk in the procession after attending a mass and hearing
Rossini’s Stabat Mater at a novena. What inspires her in this scene is the
faith of the pueblo, with whom she feels an intense solidarity: “She was lis-
tening to the eloquent silence of an act of manifest transcendence re-
peated throughout centuries and centuries in thousands and thousands of
towns: collective piety, corporate devotion, the almost miraculous eleva-
tion of an entire people, prosaic and debased by poverty and ignorance”
(572). Ana identifies with this collective effort to rise up through religion
and is particularly touched by a poor boy next to her who begs his mother
for bread. Through this juxtaposition of the religious longings of the com-
munity and the physical needs of the child, spirituality is translated into
literal and economic terms: the death of Christ, which is witnessed by his
mother in the Stabat Mater and is believed to provide the spiritual bread
of the community, does not satisfy the hunger of the impoverished child,
who asks his mother for physical nourishment. Having been deprived as
a child herself, Ana is full of compassion for poor children, whom she
considers brothers. Her sympathy now extends to the plight of Fermín,
whom she begins to think of again as her “soul brother” (573). Through
the inclusion of the famished child, Ana’s identification with the
Christian community is represented not as a mark of docility but as a
revolutionary gesture, an expression of solidarity—fraternité—with Fermín
and a rejection of the injustices of the society that has deprived him.
As the novena continues, it becomes increasingly clear that Ana’s reli-

gious epiphany is a moment of revolt. Listening to Rossini’s music, she ex-
periences a nervous excitement that recalls earlier episodes in which she
similarly identified with the masses. Walking along the lower-class
Boulevard in Part I, for example, Ana is brought to tears when she sees des-
titute boys unable to name the sweets on display in a pastry shop and is
later riveted by a scene of jealous rage in which a working girl is accused of
being “a little tart” (194). This accusation, which is not dissimilar to her
own childhood experience, and this glimpse at poverty provoke a feeling
of revolt, a desire “to turn everything upside down” (198). Her identifica-
tion with the poor provokes a “wave of rebelliousness [that] rolled through
her blood towards her brain. Again she feared an attack” (197). At the
novena, Ana’s idea of walking in the Nazarene procession is the result of a
similar sequence of emotions: a solidarity with the people (particularly, a
poor boy) triggers a nervous attack, which manifests itself as a defiant res-
olution, “a decision which burst into being in her brain with all the com-
pelling force of a mania” (574). Ana’s initial intention in walking as a
Nazarene is not to submit, but to subvert, to support another “soul
brother,” Fermín, who is cruelly treated by society.
Like Marguerite, Ana is poised to make her spirit exceed her phrase.14
Her act, which she describes as a “cuadro vivo” or tableau vivant, will be a
gesture of defiance, a live allegory charged with revolutionary meaning not
unlike that of the fille de joie posing as Liberty. To carry off this gesture, Ana
must make her meaning go beyond the religious commonplaces that are its
signs. This is not the first time that Ana faces this challenge. When she first
committed herself to Fermín’s spiritual project, she had to ignore “the
shortcomings, the vulgarities, the wretchedness of this noisy, exterior devo-
tion . . . She compared herself to the corpse of the Cid, led forth to defeat
the Moors: it wasn’t her body they were taking from church to church”
(441). According to legend, the Cid’s corpse, mounted on his steed, served
as inspiration for a crusade long after his death. Just as his spirit lived
beyond his physical body, Ana, through her religious performance, has the
potential to impart a larger meaning, a vision of the future. At the novena,
Ana conceives of her tableau as a collective statement, an attempt to right a
social wrong and to improve the lot of her “soul brother.” She infuses the
Stabat Mater with a content, an economic and social subtext, that goes
beyond its religious phrases.15 In the procession, it is precisely the poor
Vetustans who appreciate this meaning, the way life surpasses art: “All the
people, in particular the poor people” (593) admire Ana’s gesture, and for
many watching from the street she even eclipses her model: “Christ lying
on His bed, and His mother following Him in black, pierced by seven
swords, did not merit the attention of the pious people of Vetusta” (590).16
As she walks, however, Ana loses sight of this meaning and becomes in-
tensely conscious of the insufficiency of her imitation, of how she falls
short of the art she represents: “‘Mary was there because of her dead son,
but what was Ana doing there?’” (594). Her focus is no longer the future
but her relation with the past. As her embarrassment increases, the narra-
tor emphasizes the anachronism of the procession: her fellow Nazarene
wears patent-leather boots though these “did not exist in the times of
Augustus” (592), and the drum-roll that accompanies them is “determined
to revive a grief which had been dead for many centuries” (593). When
Ana now recalls her initial decision, it is no longer represented as an
epiphany but rather as a random association: the Stabat Mater had
reminded her of a penitent she once observed in Saragossa. The gesture
here arises not from her solidarity with the collectivity but rather from her
desire to imitate a striking posture. Just as Luísa’s reenactment of
Marguerite ’s life and Fermín’s Faustian fantasy are foiled by layers of in-
tertextuality (the lover imitating the husband imitating the tenor in O
primo Basílio; Fermín’s unwitting imitation of Trifón Cármenes’s kitschy
poetry), so Ana’s gesture in this flashback is now a repetition of a repeti-
tion of a repetition: she is inspired not by the Virgin but rather by a
Saragossan woman recalled through Rossini’s evocation of the Stabat Mater
scene. The defiance of Ana’s gesture is diluted through layers of textuality:
“Ana tried to find the fire of enthusiasm, the frenzy of abnegation which
had suggested the project to her a week before, but the enthusiasm and the
frenzy did not return; she was not even supported by faith” (589). As with
Luísa, her Bovaryism, her awareness of her own role-playing, distances her
from the meaning she intends to convey.
As Ana realizes the shortcomings of her gesture, she begins to see her
act as a form of prostitution: “For Ana, her naked feet were the nakedness
of her whole body and soul. ‘She was a madwoman who had fallen into a
singular kind of prostitution!’” (594). By quoting her inner dialogue,
Clarín emphasizes the distance between the Ana who judges and the Ana
who is judged, between the heroine and the “prostitute” walking the
streets. The political significance of Ana’s reaction is clarified by an earlier
episode in the novel, which it mirrors. At the burial of Santos Barinaga, the
working-class Vetustans gather to show support for a man who had defied
the church and social norms. Like the Good Friday scene, this funeral pro-
cession has the potential to be a revolutionary statement. As the mourners
march, however, it becomes clear that they, like Santos himself, lack ideo-
logical conviction. Not only do they begin to pray for their anticlerical
hero, but also, when onlookers accuse them of being “hussies,” the female
protestors respond with unseemly laughter, “thus showing how shallow-
rooted were their convictions” (526). Like Santos’s female supporters, Ana
in the Nazarene procession follows a martyr in order to defy Vetustan

norms and make a statement. When she identifies herself as a prostitute,
however, the shallowness of her convictions is as apparent as that of the
“hussies” following Santos’s casket. In the nineteenth century, as we have
seen, the figure of the prostitute could have a revolutionary force. In the
Nazarene procession, Ana assumes the position of the prostitute walking
the streets and becomes, like her, part of a live allegory. Ultimately, how-
ever, she loses sight of the meaning of her tableau and recognizes only its
vulgarity, what she earlier called the “noisy, external devotion” of religious
life (441).17 She reacts to herself as Armand does to his lover: just as he fails
to recognize the meaning that goes beyond Marguerite’s humble dress and
seeks to cover her body with sumptuous trappings, so Ana, forgetting the
defiance of her gesture, struggles to cover her bare feet, “to prevent them
from appearing beneath her purple tunic” (594). Like Dumas’s narrator
who translates back, she is not creating but representing: “‘My trouble is
that I’m too fond of play-acting—I’m just like my husband.’” (594). She
is merely imitating, reproducing a memorized phrase without mastering its
new content.
Up to this point, Ana has vacillated between the two poles of Dumas’s
novel—representation and creation—and between the two positions of the
conflict between Fermín and Santos. At first, she puts herself into the
position of Santos-Violetta: like the women who follow his corpse, she
makes a show of solidarity and defiance. Just as Santos seems to bring the
dead to life, Ana attempts to resuscitate a centuries-old grief. Unlike the
bishop in his Good Friday sermon, however, she is unable to make the
spirit live in herself and falls back into the position of Fermín and Armand,
that of merely representing.
At the beginning of the novel, Ana’s ability to be “one among many,” to
identify with the poor, distinguishes her from the other Vestustans; it is
what allows her to critique social norms and economic injustice. Like
Marguerite’s eerie simulacrum of the aristocratic woman, her resemblance
to others, her act of being one among many, is a defiant sameness. In the
Nazarene procession, Ana has the potential to distinguish herself through
this type of sameness, through an uncanny similarity to the Virgin that
moves the collectivity. This is her opportunity to make her likeness—her
condition of being, like a prostitute, one among many—an act of defiance.
As Ana becomes embarrassed by this prostitution, however, she begins to
see herself as “one among many” in the ordinary sense of the phrase. From
this point on, it is this use of the phrase that prevails in the novel: “My
health,” Ana tells herself pages before her seduction, “demands that I be
like all the other women” (630). When she returns to the cathedral after
her fall and its tragic consequences, she regrets that she is unable to “weep
like Mary Magdalene” (712), the biblical figure with whom Marguerite is
identified in Dumas’s novel. She is now capable only of meaningless repe-
tition, “mechanical piety, praying and hearing mass like all the other
women” (712).
The political implications of this failure are clarified in Chapter 27,
which explores how Ana has changed after the procession. Once spiritually
troubled, the heroine is now a frivolous woman clearly on the path to adul-
tery. When Ana asks her husband, Víctor, to peel her an apple, he is re-
minded of a scene in the comic opera Beltrán y la marquesa de Pompadour
(by Manuel Cañete and José Casares, 1872):
‘“Peel this apple, peel this apple . . . “where have I heard that? Oh, I know
. . . It’s something from a comic opera—a comic opera by an academician.
It’s all about the Marquise de Pompadour. A gentleman called Beltrand
is looking for her, he comes across a village girl in a windmill—and nat-
urally enough they sit down and have supper together—indeed they eat
apples.”
“Like you and me.”
“Exactly. Well then, the village girl, naturally enough, picks up a
knife.”
“To kill Beltrand . . . ”
“No, to peel the apple.”
“That isn’t very plausible.”
“Both Beltrand and the orchestra are of your opinion. The shock
makes the orchestra bristle up, with tremolo shudders from all its violins
and squeals from all its clarinets, and Beltrand, no less shocked, sings”
(standing, and singing):
“Good heavens! she peels the apple:
‘Tis the Marquise
De Pompadour,
De Pompadour!” (599–600)
As in Paco’s relationship with Álvaro, class difference here is projected

upon social equals; the lovers’ charade enacts not rebellion—the com-
moner who kills the noble—but rather temptation—the apple of Genesis.
It is an arousing game of class tourism. Eroticism—the adultery of
Pompadour—dispels the threat of revolution. Ana’s adultery with Álvaro
will serve a similar function: it too reduces political subversion to the play
of the surface.
The heroine’s new superficiality is anticipated in the same chapter by her
return to aestheticism and her father’s legacy. Her project with Fermín may
be traced to her childhood longing for her mother, for it recalls her scan-
dalous friendship with Germán, through whom she sought to experience
maternal affection vicariously, and involves a solidarity with the lower

ranks, her mother’s class. After the Nazarene procession, in contrast, Ana is
drawn instead to her father’s influence, to the Greek art and literature to
which he exposed her: “God’s heroes, life in the open air, art as a religion”
(611). Whereas walking in the Nazarene procession was an attempt to con-
vey religion through art, to evince a spiritual depth that would transcend
her statuesque appearance, what Ana now embraces is art as a religion—the
phrase itself, the aesthetic surface, has become the content. As in the rela-
tionship between Álvaro and Paco, depth collapses into surface, and the rev-
olutionary overtones are reduced to the false nuances of the male
Marguerite, of the Louis-Napoleonic Mesía.
The connection between Ana’s adultery and Paco’s relationship with Ál-
varo is confirmed in the final passage of the novel. When the heroine re-
turns to the cathedral after the discovery of her adultery and the death of
her husband in a duel with Álvaro, Fermín repulses her with such violence
that she faints in terror. In the last paragraphs of the novel, the effeminate
acolyte Celedonio finds her unconscious on the floor:
A wretched desire stirred in Celedonio: a perversion of his perverted lust. To

enjoy a strange pleasure, or perhaps to discover whether he would enjoy it,
he bent over and brought his vile face close to the face of the judge’s wife
and kissed her mouth.
Ana returned to life, overcome by nausea and tearing at the mists of
delirium.
For she thought that she had felt on her lips the cold and slimy belly of
a toad. (715)
Celedonio’s kiss reenacts Álvaro’s transgression, the adultery that is the cul-
mination of hundreds of pages of vacillation. Celedonio’s choice here is
pointed. In a classic example of Clarín’s ring composition, the closing lines
of the novel point back to its opening scene where Celedonio first appeared,
his affectations “impart[ing] a suggestion of wantonness and cynicism to his
look, like a side-street harlot who proclaims her unhappy trade through her
eyes, so that the police can do nothing to uphold the rights of public moral-
ity” (25). Just as Álvaro is defined as a male Marguerite, Celedonio, who
reenacts Mesía’s sins in the final paragraphs of the novel, is a harlot-like
boy.18 Like Álvaro’s and Louis-Napoléon’s, his “prostitution” is not a sign of
defiance but rather a metaphor for his parody and manipulation of signs. In
the opening pages of La dame aux camélias, Marguerite’s resemblance to the
upper classes is unsettling because she is a prostitute. Celedonio, in contrast,
is like a prostitute because he attempts to resemble the upper classes.
His wantonness is not (like Marguerite’s) an economic threat, a blurring of
social hierarchy, but rather a metaphor for his relation with signs, for the
opportunistic imitation that characterizes Louis Bonaparte. His perversion
of perversion ultimately captures the indifferentiation that Álvaro intro-
duces into Ana’s life. Like Paco, Ana in the final words of the novel is vul-
nerable to the laughter of the male prostitute, to the farce of Louis-
Napoléon, to the slimy kiss of the toad.
2
An Unbridled Bride
Puppetry and Plagiarism
Eça de Queirós’s O primo Basílio became an object of controversy almost

as soon as it appeared. Shortly after its publication in 1878, the Brazilian
novelist Machado de Assis wrote a highly critical review in O Cruzeiro,
which generated such debate that two weeks later he published a defense
of his reaction in the same journal. Much of the initial controversy re-
volved around the eroticism of the novel. Its graphic representations of il-
licit pleasure seemed gratuitous to many readers, among whom Machado
was perhaps the most vociferous. Though the novel ended chastely, he
claimed, it was permeated by a “boudoir aroma”: the reader might read
through the final pages, but they would surely not be the ones that he or
she would reread (137–138). For Machado, this moral deficiency was the
symptom of a deeper aesthetic flaw. The heroine of the novel, he com-
plained, never became a convincing character. Lacking ethical judgment or
guilt, Luísa Mendonça was but a “títere” (puppet) without compunction,
passion, perversity, or any other logic that would make her seem human or
real. In her adultery, “Luísa falls into the mud, without will, without re-
pulsion, without consciousness: Basílio does nothing more than push her,
like the inert material that she is” (131). At one point, Luísa flips a coin to
decide what to do next. For Machado, the randomness of this gesture
characterized the novel as a whole, the action of which developed not from
the complexity of its characters’ psychologies but rather from the arbitrary
whims of stick figures.
Not only was the heroine criticized for her lack of authenticity but so was
the novel itself. Machado, somewhat unconvincingly, considered the work
a (very inferior) re-elaboration of Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet. Others, more on
the mark, heard echoes of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. 1 So intense were the
accusations that a considerable volume of Eça criticism has been dedicated
to defending his work against them. An entire book addresses (and takes as
its title) the question: Foi Eça um plagiador? (Was Eça a plagiarist?).2
From its publication, thus, the main criteria for evaluating Eça’s novel
have been romantic notions of originality and realist expectations of
verisimilitude, accurate representation. O primo Basílio floundered on both
scores: its plot seemed derivative and its characters unreal. As I argued in the
introduction, however, these criteria had little to do with the actual practices
of Spanish and Portuguese novelists in the 1870s and 1880s. The predomi-
nant figures of this period—Eça, Alas, Galdós, and Pardo Bazán, among
others—constantly read one another’s works and were highly attuned to lit-
erary innovations abroad. Almost all of them were critics as well as novelists,
and their fiction, with its complex allusions and literary dialogues, reflects
this dual vocation. As a result, their novels are never the transparent works
we expect of realist authors; though fluid and accessible on the surface, they
reveal themselves on closer examination to be highly wrought, opaque, and
even hermetic texts. Paradoxically, their innovation and meaning lie in their
dependencies, in the complex ways in which they weave together various
models and react against one another.
This aspect of Eça’s work has passed unobserved in much of its criti-
cism, which has often attempted to defend him from charges of plagia-
rism by claiming that he imitates not Flaubert but the reality of nine-
teenth-century Lisbon. Even if Eça has drawn some figures from Madame
Bovary, the argument goes, in their new context they “undergo a sort of sea
change and become quickly acclimated and assimilated into the peculiar
structure of Portuguese society” (Coleman 116). For such critics, the in-
novation of O primo Basílio is to be found in its representation of
Portuguese society, in its portrayal of the peculiarities of the Lisbonese
bourgeoisie. This approach has tended to shift attention from the relation
between the text and its models to its reflection of local reality, which is
read as an allegory of Portuguese life. Eça himself interpreted the novel in
this way. In a letter to his friend Teófilo Braga, he broke O primo Basílio
down into a list of Lisbonese types: “Official formalism (Acácio), the
smallminded religiosity of an abrasive temperament (D. Felicidade), brain-
less literature (Ernesto), acrimonious discontent of a bored bureaucrat
(Julião) and . . . a poor goodhearted man (Sebastião)” (cited in Coleman
120). As he summarized, “A social group in Lisbon is made up of these
dominant elements, with just a few modifications” (120). This allegorical
approach has continued to dominate readings of the novel.3
AN UNBRIDLED BRIDE 67
Although such interpretations may help to define the local context that
distinguishes the novel, they do little to defend it against Machado’s accu-
sations of puppetry. The problem is not that they read the text allegorically
but rather that they do so in a way that bluntly equates characters with ide-
ological principles. Like Lukács’s identification of social types in Studies in
European Realism, such interpretations miss the complexity of the social
networks that connect the characters and inform their interactions. By read-
ing each individual as a mirror of external reality, as a passive reflection, they
overlook the way their interrelationships involve an active reshaping, com-
mentary, or experiment upon the context the work explores. As Fredric
Jameson has observed discussing Lukács, this type of approach “implies an
essentially one-to-one relationship between individual characters and their
social or historical reference, so that the possibility of something like a sys-
tem of characters remains unexplored” (The Political Unconscious 162).
O primo Basílio is indeed an allegorical text: Eça uses the family, the
romance at the center of the story, to comment on broader social prob-
lems. It is appropriate to attempt to decipher his allegory. Problems arise
only when allegory becomes a defense, a way of drawing attention away
from the literary dialogue out of which the work emerged. An example of
this may be seen in an essay by the Portuguese intellectual António Sérgio.
Observing a similarity between Sebastião’s comments in O primo Basílio
and Dussardier’s in L’éducation sentimentale, Sérgio hastens to excuse Eça.
The overlap, he argues, is a case not of “translation” but rather of two
instances of a universal character type. Sérgio resorts to an allegorical logic
to defend Eça from possible charges of plagiarism. In so doing, however,
he misses the point of this borrowing: as we will see toward the end of this
chapter, Eça has drawn from Flaubert’s novel an entire character system
and subtly transformed it. Much of the meaning of his work lies in this
careful transposition. Madame Bovary is the rubric through which Eça’s
allegory of Portuguese society is intelligible.
Emma Versus Luísa
Eça’s most obvious departures are apparent in the briefest summary of his
plot. O primo Basílio is the story of Luísa, a bourgeois housewife in Lisbon,
who at the beginning of the novel has been happily married for several years
to Jorge Mendonça, a government engineer. Because of his job, Jorge has
been sent for several weeks to Alentejo, a remote area in the south of
Portugal. Since this is the first time he is leaving his wife alone, he is nerv-
ous and asks his best friend Sebastião to look after her. Jorge is particularly
insistent that she not consort with her childhood friend, Leopoldina, a
scandalous character who is openly promiscuous and even (it is hinted)

bisexual. After Jorge leaves, however, his wife disregards his warnings and
falls under the influence of her friend, who appeals to her romantic sensi-
bility. Luísa, who is like Emma an avid novel-reader, longs for a more
exciting life. As we have seen, she secretly reads Dumas fils’s La dame aux
camélias and envies its heroine’s lifestyle with its “dinners, delirious nights,
money troubles and days of melancholy” (8). Leopoldina’s ways are similarly
enticing for Luísa. Soon after Jorge leaves, Luísa’s cousin and former love in-
terest, Basílio, returns from Brazil, where he has made his fortune. Once
again, Basílio courts his cousin, who soon yields to his desires. After a few
weeks of adulterous bliss, however, Luísa’s servant, Juliana, a bitter and
oppressed woman, discovers compromising letters, which she uses to extort
large sums from her mistress. Juliana’s greed is insatiable: not only does she
appropriate Luísa’s wardrobe and belongings but she also assigns her the
most menial household chores. In the meantime, Basílio has left for Paris
abandoning Luísa, and Jorge, who has returned, finds it suspicious that she
has a sudden passion for ironing. Like Emma, Luísa turns to a banker
(Castro) for help but is repulsed by his sexual advances. Finally, she confesses
her sins to Sebastião, who, aided by a friend in the police force, intimidates
Juliana into handing over the letters. In her terror, Juliana suffers a heart at-
tack and dies. Through Sebastião’s intervention, the heroine’s honor has now
been restored, and all would seem to have returned to normal, but soon after
Juliana’s burial, Luísa comes down with a mysterious illness and dies.
Eça’s plot diverges from Flaubert’s in two major ways: in his treatment
of the heroine’s fall and in the form of her punishment. Many of his most
glaring debts to his model appear in passages that deal with Luísa’s infi-
delity and its catalysts. At the end of the novel, for example, the narrator
pauses to reflect on the causes of her predicament: “Luísa was dying: her
very pretty arms, which she used to caress before the mirror, were already
paralyzed; her eyes, to which passion had lent flames and voluptuousness
tears, were clouded over as under a light layer of very fine dust” (319). This
moral dissection of the heroine echoes a famous passage in Madame
Bovary, which similarly compresses the entire plot of the novel into a sin-
gle image, a glimpse of the heroine’s body:
Then [the priest] recited the Misereatur and the Indulgentiam, dipped his
right thumb in the oil, and began the unctions. First he anointed her eyes,
once so covetous of all earthly luxuries; then her nostrils, so gluttonous of
caressing breezes and amorous scents; then her mouth, so prompt to lie, so
defiant in pride, so loud in lust; then her hands, that had thrilled to volup-
tuous contacts; and finally the soles of her feet, once so swift when she had
hastened to slake her desires, and now never to walk again. (382)
Not only does Eça draw upon Flaubert’s post-mortem analysis but he also
copies Emma’s post-coital reflections. As Luísa reflects on her own behav-
ior after her first act of infidelity:
her pride dilated in the amorous warmth that emerged from [those senti-
mental words], like a dry body that stretches out in a tepid bath: she felt her
self-esteem grow, and it seemed to her that she was at last entering a superi-
orly interesting existence, in which every hour would have its own different
enchantment, every step would lead to ecstasy and her soul would cover it-
self in a radiant luxury of sensations! . . . And immobile in the middle of the
room, her arms crossed, her gaze fixed, she repeated, “I have a lover!” (134)
The words she repeats are a repetition of Emma’s:
She repeated: ‘I have a lover! a lover!’ delighting at the idea as if a second

puberty had come to her. So at least she was to know those joys of love,
that fever of happiness of which she had despaired! She was entering upon
a marvelous world where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium. She felt
herself surrounded by an endless rapture. A blue space surrounded her and
ordinary existence appeared only intermittently between these heights,
dark and far away beneath her. (117)
Eça’s dialogue with Flaubert is most blatant in passages such as these,

which explore Luísa’s desires and weaknesses.
In both borrowings, however, Luísa’s similarity to Emma serves to offset
subtle distinctions, which suggest a somewhat different interpretation of her
fall. Unlike Flaubert’s heroine, whose energy is boundless, Luísa is a passive
and languid figure.4 Whereas Emma’s eyes actively desire “all earthly goods,”
Luísa’s are acted upon by desire (Eça uses a passive construction). Whereas
Emma’s feet walk swiftly toward the object she covets, Luísa placidly caresses
herself before a mirror or soaks in a “tepid bath” of emotion as she stands
“immobile” in her room. Edgy and high-strung, Emma (“prompt,” “defi-
ant,” and “loud”) revels in “heights” of delirium. The stolid Luísa, in con-
trast, imagines a gradual accumulation of interesting sensations.
This passivity is perhaps clearest in Basílio’s first attempt at seduction,
which is also drawn directly from Flaubert. To facilitate the comparison of
these passages, I have divided them into numbered segments:
[1] She listened to him with lowered head, stirring the wood chips on the
ground with the toe of her shoe.
But when he said, “Our lives are bound up together now, aren’t they?” she
answered, “No–you know they can’t be.”
[2] She rose to leave. He grasped her wrist. [3] She stood still and gave
him a long look, her eyes moist and tender. [4] Then she said hastily:
“Please-let’s not talk about it any more. Where are the horses? Let’s go
back.”
[5] A movement of angry displeasure escaped him.
“Where are the horses?” she asked again. “Where are the horses?”
Then, smiling a strange smile, staring fixedly, his teeth clenched, he advanced
toward her with arms outstretched. [6] She drew back trembling. “Oh, you
frighten me!” she stammered. “What are you doing? Take me back!”
[7] His expression changed. “Since you insist,” he said.
And abruptly he was once more considerate, tender, timid. She took his
arm and they turned back.
[8] “What was the matter?” he asked. “What came over you? I don’t un-
derstand. You must have some mistaken idea. [9] I have you in my heart like
a Madonna on a pedestal—in an exalted place, secure, immaculate. But I
need you if I’m to go on living! I need your eyes, your voice, your thoughts.
I beseech you: be my friend, my sister, my angel!” (187–188)
In O primo Basílio, Eça draws on Flaubert’s treatment of the power dy-

namics of Emma and Rodolphe’s relationship and follows a similar se-
quence of events:
[1] Luísa listened immobile, with her head bowed, gazing into oblivion;
that warm and strong voice, from which she received the breath of love,
dominated her, conquered her; Basílio’s hands penetrated hers with their
feverish warmth; taken by a feeling of lassitude, she felt herself almost falling
asleep.
“Speak, reply!” he said anxiously, shaking her hands, seeking her gaze
avidly.
“What do you want me to say?” she murmured.
Her voice had an abstract, weak tone.
And slowly loosening herself, turning her face, “Let’s talk about some-
thing else!”
[2] He stuttered with his arms extended, “Luísa! Luísa!”
“No, Basílio, no!”
And in her voice there was the trail of a complaint, with the softness of
a caress.
He then did not hesitate and took her in his arms.
[3] Luísa was left inert, her lips white, her eyes closed—and Basílio, put-
ting his hand on her head, inclined his head over her, kissed her eyelids
slowly, her face, then her lips very deeply; her lips opened slightly, her knees
buckled under.
[4] But suddenly her whole body stiffened, with an indignant modesty,
she moved her face away and exclaimed in distress, “Leave me, leave me!”
A nervous force came to her; she loosened herself, pushed him; and pass-
ing her open hands over her head and hair, she murmured, “O my God! It’s
horrible! Leave me! It’s horrible!”
[5] He approached with his teeth clenched; [6] but Luísa pulled back
and said, “Go away! What do you want? Go away! What are you doing here?
Leave me!”
[7] He then calmed himself and made his voice suddenly serene and
humble. [8] He didn’t understand. Why was she cross? What was a kiss? He
didn’t ask for anything more. What had she imagined then? [9] He adored
her, of course, but in a pure way.
“I swear!” he said with force, beating his chest.
He made her sit on the sofa, he sat at her feet. He spoke to her very sen-
sibly. He saw the circumstances and he resigned himself. It would be like a
friendship among siblings, nothing more.
She listened, oblivious.
Certainly, he said, that passion was an immense torture. But he was
strong; he would control himself. He wanted only to see her, to speak to her.
It would be an ideal sentiment. And his eyes devoured her.
He turned her hand, bent over and gave her palm a full kiss. She trem-
bled and then straightened herself, “No! Go away!” (85–86)
Both Eça’s scene and Flaubert’s begin with [1] the heroine listening, head
bowed, to the pleas of her future lover, who [2] makes uninvited advances,
to which [3] she begins to yield but [4] then repulses. In [5], the seducer,
teeth-clenched, makes a brief display of force that [6] frightens the hero-
ine, but in [7] he assumes a submissive stance, [8] questions her lack of
trust, and [9] professes a pure and ideal love. These similarities, however,
serve to offset differences between the two heroines. The most obvious diver-
gence between the scenes is the description of Luísa’s brief surrender in [1]
and [3]. Whereas Emma responds directly to Rodolphe’s questions in [1]
and engages him visually and mentally in [3], Luísa is consistently inert and
passive: she avoids the topic, closes her eyes, and virtually lets herself fall
asleep. Throughout the novel, sleeping is one of Luísa’s principal activities.
Our earliest glimpse of her thoughts (the first time the narrator uses free
indirect speech to enter her head) is a vision of drowsiness: “She would like
to be in a rose-colored marble bath, in tepid, perfumed water, falling
asleep!” (17). Her relationship with her husband is described as “a de-
pendence and a softening, a will to doze off leaning on his shoulder” (21),
and her moral fall is ultimately a falling asleep: listening to Basílio’s
amorous pleading, “she felt herself almost falling asleep” (85). Luísa’s
stance in the novel is constantly one of sleeping, leaning or languor: as the
narrator puts it, her character is “cheio de deixar-se ir” (210; full of letting
her will go).
In portraying Luísa as passive and drowsy, Eça has assigned her the
character not of Madame but of Monsieur Bovary—a figure similarly
distinguished for his lethargic nature and lack of will. One of the most
memorable images of the young Charles is the description of his fondness
for tolling the church bells, letting himself go as he “hang[s] with his full
weight from the heavy rope and feel[s] it sweep him off his feet as it swung
in its arc” (9). In adulthood, Charles continues to hang, allowing himself
to be borne along by the forces that intervene in his life. It is this passivity
that gives him the effeminate quality that has often been noted in discus-
sions of Flaubert’s treatment of gender. In O primo Basílio, Luísa absorbs
not only this lassitude but also various of Charles’s lines. Consider, for ex-
ample, her reaction to Jorge’s marriage proposal: “She said yes, looked silly,
and felt her chest expand softly beneath her merino dress. She was en-
gaged, at last! What happiness, what a relief for her mother!” (21). Her
measured response recalls the description of Charles’s belated success in the
exam to become an officier de santé: “He passed with a fairly good grade.
What a wonderful day for his mother!” (13). In each case, free indirect
speech captures the character’s alienation from his or her own experience:
Luísa and Charles are pleased not for their own sake so much as for their
mothers’. Consistently passive, both hang on the desires and expectations
of others.
At the same time that Luísa absorbs Charles’s passivity and femininity,
she also sheds Emma’s tendency to dress and act in a masculine way—her
taste for smoking, men’s glasses, or occasional cross-dressing. Eça’s refemi-
nization of Flaubert’s heroine is clear in the way the two women look for-
ward to future children. While Emma is pregnant, she hopes for a son:
He would be strong and dark; she would call him Georges; and this idea of
having a male child was like a promise of compensation for all her past frus-
trations. A man is free, at least—free to range the passions and the world, to
surmount obstacles, to taste the rarest pleasures. Whereas a woman is con-
tinually thwarted (105).
Luísa similarly desires a male child and has a name ready, but her expectations
are much more conventional: “He would be called Carlos Eduardo. And she
saw him in his cradle sleeping, or in her lap, gripping with his little hand a
toe-nail, nursing at the rosy tip of her breast . . .” (45). Emma’s envy of male
freedom is echoed in O primo Basílio not by Luísa but by her friend,
Leopoldina: “A man can do everything! Nothing ill becomes him! He can
travel, go on adventures . . . ” (125). In reworking Flaubert’s novel, Eça
shifts Emma’s masculine proclivities to Leopoldina. António Sérgio has
even suggested that “Eça’s Bovary . . . is not Luísa but Leopoldina” (75).
This claim is exaggerated. Although Leopoldina has more of Emma’s en-

ergy, it is Luísa who follows the path of the Bovaresque adulteress mis-
guided by her readings. What distinguishes the two women in O primo
Basílio is not that one is more Emma-like than the other but rather that
Eça has refeminized the adulteress and assigned to Leopoldina Madame
Bovary’s will and masculine traits. As Jorge observes, Luísa is quintessen-
tially feminine: “[S]he doesn’t reflect. It’s necessary for someone to warn her,
to say to her, ‘Stop there, that cannot be!’ . . . She’s a woman, very much a
woman” (41).
By reworking Flaubert’s characterization of the heroine, Eça introduces
an allegory in which the heroine is a figure for Portugal. Jorge’s assessment
of his wife echoes the words with which the young doctor Julião diagoses
the ills of Portugal:
We need men . . . This country, my dear friend, has been governed until
now with expedients. When the revolution against expedients comes
about, the nation will have to find someone who has principles. But who
here has principles? . . . No one. They have debts, secret vices, false teeth,
but principles, not half of one! Consequently, if three adventurers gave
themselves the trouble of establishing half a dozen serious, rational, mod-
ern, positive principles, the country would throw itself at their knees and
beg them: “Gentlemen, do me the illustrious honor of putting a bridle on
my teeth!” (193)
If we consider that Luísa is from her earliest appearance identified with a

horse—“Jorge wanted to buy a horse; but he met Luísa” (90)—it follows
that her weaknesses are a figure for the nation’s. Eça’s friend and fellow
writer, Antero de Quental, once described Portugal as “a nation sick from
the worst kind of illness, languor” (cited in Jarnaes 28). Eça’s heroine suf-
fers from a similar passivity and lack of will. Luísa and Portugal are both
horses who need to be reined in by men of principles and action. Through
this parallelism, Eça transforms the adulteress’ story into a cautionary tale
about the dangers that face the nation at large. Eça’s response to Flaubert
is: Madame Bovary, c’est nous.
From Seducer to Seductress
Ironically, though Luísa seems more passive and inert than her French coun-
terpart, Basílio gets nowhere with her in the scene drawn from the forest
seduction in Madame Bovary. Rodolphe’s power games lead to Emma’s fall,

but the same strategies are useless with Luísa. In reworking Flaubert, Eça
limits the role that the seducer plays in her temptation: ultimately, it is not
he who makes Luísa sin. The identity of Luísa’s true tempter is made clear
through borrowings from Flaubert that are shifted to an unexpected charac-
ter. At the agricultural fair, Emma considers Rodolphe “as if he were a trav-
eler from mythical lands” (168). In O primo Basílio, this is Luísa’s reaction
not to Basílio but to her best friend: “[Leopoldina] almost seemed to her a
heroine; and she glanced at her with fear as if she were considering those who
arrive from some marvelous and difficult journey, from exciting episodes’’
(24). At the fair, Rodolphe dismisses the politician’s mention of duty: “‘Ah,
there they go again!’ said Rodolphe. ‘Duty, duty, always duty—I’m sick of
that word’” (169). In Eça’s novel, this is the reaction of Leopoldina: “Luísa
spoke vaguely of ‘duties,’ ‘religion.’ But ‘duties’ irritated Leopoldina. If there
was one thing that made her crazy, she said, it was hearing people talk about
duties!” (127). These borrowings suggest that Luísa’s seducer is actually a se-
ductress. Indeed, Luísa’s fall comes immediately after the conversation from
which these citations are drawn. Leopoldina leaves after a visit lasting nine
pages, Basílio enters, and a half page and mere “Adoro-te!” later, Luísa is his.
Why then does the rhetorical labor of seduction fall to Leopoldina
rather than Basílio? On the one hand, the substitution of Leopoldina for
Basílio suggests the arbitrariness of Luísa’s choice of lover: Basílio is not
the object of desire but a placeholder, someone who happens to be in the
right place at the right time. He is an occasion for her Bovaresque self-
fashioning rather than a source of attraction in himself. On the other
hand, the juxtaposition of Leopoldina and Basílio also brings out his fem-
inine nature and thereby “denaturalizes” his union with Luísa. On his first
appearance, Basílio is portrayed as overrefined, effeminate, and fond of
wearing “ridiculous women’s socks” (101). Leopoldina’s involvement in
the seduction implies that adultery with Basílio is almost a form of les-
bianism. Fittingly, one of the few novels Basílio keeps in his hotel room is
Adolphe Belot’s sensational Mlle. Giraud, ma femme (1869), a story about
a husband who discovers that his wife has refused to consummate their
marriage because she is having an affair with a female friend. The nature
of Basílio’s appeal is made clear in the one explicit sex scene in the novel:
[Basílio] knelt down, took her little feet in his hands and kissed them, then crit-
icizing her garters, which were “so ugly with their metal broaches,” he kissed
her knees respectfully and very softly made a request. She blushed, smiled and
said, “No, no.” And when she came out of her delirium she covered her face,
all scarlet, with her hands and murmured reproachfully, “O Basílio!”
He twirled his moustache, very satisfied. He had taught her a new sen-
sation: he had her in his hands! (170)
His strategy here contrasts with Rodolphe’s domineering approach. In

Madame Bovary, Emma looks to her seducers for what the effeminate
Charles lacks. She longs for her husband to be more forceful and at one
point even wishes he would beat her (129). Charles, however, is so hope-
lessly passive that no one considers him a serious threat. When Emma
warns Rodolphe to carry pistols, he scoffs at the idea. Unlike Emma, Luísa
is not seeking to fulfill a lack. Her husband, Jorge, is strong, virile, and
even dangerous—significantly he is given the same name as the male hero
that Emma longs for her son to become (Georges). The earliest sketches of
Jorge focus on his masculinity and beard, and his letters to Sebastião reveal
that he can be a veritable “Don Juan” (203); in Alentejo, he has left behind
“a trail of sentimental flames” (203). Unlike Charles, moreover, his profes-
sion requires him to bear arms, which Luísa is careful to hide when he re-
turns, for he is, according to her friends, “the type of man who would stab
you” (21). Luísa’s affair is not a longing for a more dominant figure.
Basílio’s influence over the heroine lies not in his sinister clenched teeth,
a show of power, but rather in his tongue (and Leopoldina’s). Whereas the
quintessential seducers of Madame Bovary click their spurs (e.g., Charles’s
soldier father, the tenor Lagardy), Basílio has “a habit of putting his hands
in his pants pockets and jingling money!” (19): his appeal to Luísa is based
on a show not of masculinity but of wealth. Criticizing the plebeian fea-
tures of her life (her ugly garters), Basílio makes adultery seem “an aristo-
cratic duty” (98). Emma, of course, is also attracted to the signs of
Rodolphe’s wealth, but in O primo Basílio, these signs become the primary
motive. With a seducer who is effeminate and merely a placeholder, the el-
ement of desire is so reduced that his coins jingle all the louder. In his treat-
ment of Luísa’s fall, Eça places the financial motivation, her social climb-
ing, in the foreground. The importance of this factor is made clear in a
dream in which Luísa imagines herself on stage reenacting her story before
a Portuguese audience. Tellingly, the director of the play cues her with a
rolled-up copy of the Jornal do Comercio (Journal of Commerce). What
guides her story and the national conflicts that it enacts is economics.
In Black and White
This economic subtext is reinforced through Eça’s reworking of Flaubert’s

character system in his treatment of the consequences of Luísa’s affair.
Emma Bovary is a solitary figure bereft of interlocutors. Yonville lacks el-
evated souls that can truly understand her. Though without friends, Emma
does have a kindred spirit in the novel who mirrors her in many ways: the
pharmacist, Homais. Like the heroine, Homais is always seeking something
new: just as she switches from devotion to decadence in a matter of pages,

so he moves breathlessly from bourgeois to bohemian manners, from jour-
nalism to philosophy, from chocolate health foods to Pulvermacher electric
belts. Both posture grandiosely and adopt Parisian language and fads. Their
similarities, however, offset important differences, which, as Naomi Schor
has observed, are implicit in their names: Homais suggests homme (man),
whereas Emma evokes femina or femme (woman) (69). This distinction
forms the basis of Flaubert’s character system, which opposes Emma’s sen-
timental discourse and romantic taste (Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Scott) to
Homais’s scientific language and Enlightenment pretensions (Voltaire,
Benjamin Franklin). What most distinguishes the two figures, however, is
the outcome of their experimentation. Whereas Homais’s hypocrisy tri-
umphs at the end of the novel, Emma’s sincere quest utterly fails.
Eça draws on this structural opposition in O primo Basílio by introduc-
ing a male figure, the statesman Acácio, who serves as both a mirror and a
contrast to the Bovaresque adulteress. A friend of Jorge’s, Acácio is also a
clear counterpart of Homais. Both are walking dictionaries of common-
places—one of the tomes in Acácio’s library is a Dicionário da conversação—
and their speech is dry, technical, and full of quotations (“[Acácio] cited a
lot”[33]). Like Homais, Acácio spouts precise but dull data about his home-
town and has written several pieces of useless erudition. Nevertheless, both
men are rewarded in the end for this civic interest: Homais receives the
Legion of Honor and Acácio a knighthood in the Order of Santiago. Eça
emphasizes the parallelism between the figures by drawing on some of
Flaubert’s details: both Homais and Acácio are afraid of fireworks accidents,
offer unsolicited dietary advice, and retreat to private spaces described as
sanctuaries—Homais to the “veritable sanctuary” of his Capharnaum
(292), and Acácio to the sanctum sanctorum of his study (240, 324).
Eça draws from Flaubert not only the character traits of Emma and
Homais but also the relationship that unites them. Just as after Emma’s
death, Homais designs her tomb and writes her (ironically chaste) epitaph,
so Acácio composes Luísa’s respectful obituary. At the end of both novels,
these male characters “bury” the adulteresses in bourgeois clichés. Like
Emma and Homais, moreover, Luísa and Acácio function as mirrors of one
another—most notably, in their association with newspapers. Acácio avidly
reads periodicals and is a staunch defender of the press: “In Portugal,” he
insists, “the press is a force!” (174). Luísa is similarly identified with the
newspaper, which constantly appears in descriptions of her (135, 212, 257,
269). She enters the novel reading the Diário de Notícias, and in her dream,
the director cues her with a copy of the Jornal do Comércio (222). By the
end of the novel, the newspaper has become a symbol of Luísa and her
position. Jorge realizes the extent to which she has been supplanted in the
household only when he sees her servant Juliana “comfortably lying down
in the chaise-longue, tranquilly reading the newspaper” (265).
Though Eça adopts the Emma–Homais binary from Madame Bovary,
he redefines these characters as national figures. We have already seen that
Luísa, through the image of the unbridled horse, is identified with
Portugal. In his writings and language, Acácio similarly represents the
nation. Whereas Homais has written a study of cider (a local concern),
Acácio is the author of a tourist guide to all of Portugal. His pronoun of
choice is a national first person plural (“He always said ‘our Garret, our
Herculano’” [33]). The insistence on the newspaper, however, is perhaps
the most revealing detail. As Benedict Anderson (recalling Hegel) observes,
newspaper reading is a “mass ceremony” that binds the individual to the
imagined community of the nation (39). More than any other character in
the novel, Acácio and Luísa participate in this ceremony. They are parallel
figures of the nation as a whole. In O primo Basílio, Portugal comes to occupy
the place of Yonville. The opposition between the provinces (Tostes,
Yonville, Rouen) and the capital (Paris) in Madame Bovary has been inter-
nationalized and reworked as a conflict between Portugal and France.5 It is
no longer a question of provincials trying on Parisian fashions but rather of
a nation experimenting with historical plots experienced abroad.
The connection between Luísa and Acácio is reinforced by a second pair
of characters who at once mirror and oppose them: Luísa’s servant, Juliana,
and Jorge’s friend, Julião, a medical student struggling at the beginning of
his career. In O primo Basílio, thus, Flaubert’s pair becomes a foursome:
The National
(Secret Transgression)
Acácio Luísa
Male, Female,
Discourse Embodiment
Julião Juliana
Resentment
(Revelation)
The parallelism between Juliana and Julião is indicated through a

number of textual details, the most obvious of which is the similarity in
their names.6 Both Juliana and Julião are bitter, marginalized figures who
express their frustration by espousing revolutionary political agendas.
Juliana is deeply aware of her bourgeois mistresses’ mistreatment of her
and of the way society exploits servants, who sleep badly, eat leftovers,
and suffer reproaches only to be packed off to a hospital when they fall
ill (59). Julião expresses similarly subversive views, hoping that “by the
logic of things, a revolution would sweep away the filth” (245). Both
characters particularly resent their bourgeois counterparts, Acácio and
Luísa, whose positions they wish to usurp. Juliana decries her mistress’s
tyranny, covets her possessions, and ultimately seeks to overthrow her,
while Julião, bitterly jealous of the counselor, attempts to undermine
him at Jorge’s soirées. His method resembles Juliana’s strategy in her
struggle with Luísa: both subvert their counterparts by revealing the lat-
ter’s erotic transgressions. Juliana spies on Luísa, sniffs her clothing, and
rummages through garbage to find compromising letters, while Julião
sneaks into Acácio’s bedroom to discover pornographic literature beside
his pillow.
By reworking Flaubert’s pair as a foursome, Eça introduces into the
Bovary plot two unambiguous enactments of class struggle: Luísa versus
Juliana and Acácio versus Julião. Julião and Acácio do not simply mirror
the women but also reformulate their conflict. What is a question of sen-
timent in the main plot (Juliana’s resentment and Luísa’s anxiety in her
presence) becomes in Julião and Acácio’s conversations a conflict between
ideologies (the former’s radicalism and the latter’s bourgeois constitution-
alism). Like Paco Vegallana and Santos Barinaga in La Regenta, the two
men clarify the social significance of the adultery story by translating the
domestic tensions into clearly articulated political platforms. Not only do
Julião and Acácio’s conversations spell out the allegorical meaning of the
main plot, they also serve as a contrast to it: whereas the two men discuss
social problems in listless soirées, Luísa and Juliana act them out in a life-
and-death struggle of irreconcilable social forces. The ennui of the saraus
in which Julião and Acácio meet differs strikingly from the sweeping
inversions of the women’s interactions.
Eça intensifies this melodrama by drawing a parallelism between
Luísa and Juliana. When reading La dame aux camélias, Luísa longs to
step into its plot, to experience the world of the courtesan, which seems
more refined and luxurious than her own. Juliana too yearns for a bet-
ter life, for the leisure and wealth of her mistress. As in the Comédie hu-
maine, both women express this desire to rise socially as a longing for
paradise. Luísa escapes to a love nest that Basílio has named “o paraíso,”
and Juliana’s blackmailing scheme gives the Mendonça residence “the
vague seduction of a paradise” for the servants of the neighborhood
(229). Finally, both women’s attempts to reach this paradise are de-
scribed as voyages. Luísa’s visit to Basílio’s (ironically ramshackle) “para-
dise” is compared to a doomed maritime expedition: “Just so a yacht
that prepares nobly for a novelesque voyage, runs aground, on setting
sail, in the muddy banks of the shallow river, and the adventurous cap-
tain who dreamed of incense and the musks of aromatic forests, immo-
bile on his deck, covers his nose to the smells of the sewers” (147).
Placed at the end of a subsection in Chapter 6, this description is echoed
by Juliana’s exultation in the conclusion of the same chapter after she has
plotted to blackmail Luísa: “‘One couldn’t be better! The ship is going
through a sea of roses!’ And she added, with a little laugh, ‘And I’m at
the helm!’” (161).
Both Juliana and Luísa attempt to rise socially, but in each case, this as-
cent takes a peculiar form. As we have seen, Luísa seeks to assume a more
refined existence by placing herself in the position of a prostitute (Dumas’s
courtesan, Marguerite Gautier). As she goes to the “paraíso” for the first
time, Eça draws out the irony of this strategy:
She was reminded of a novel by Paul Féval in which the hero, a poet and
duke, covers the interior of a hut in satins and tapestries; he meets his
lover there; those who pass by, seeing that ruined hovel, dedicate a com-
passionate thought to the misery that certainly abides there—meanwhile,
inside, very secretly, petals fall off flowers in Sèvres vases, and nude feet
step on venerable Gobelins! She knew Basílio’s taste—and the “Paradise”
certainly was like the one in the novel by Paul Féval . . . She experienced
a delicious sensation in being taken so rapidly to her lover, and she even
saw with certain disdain those who passed, immersed in the trivial move-
ment of life while she was going to such a novelesque moment of amorous
life! Still, as she got nearer, a timidity came over her, a contraction of shy-
ness, as with a plebeian who has to climb, among solemn halberdiers, the
staircase of a palace. (145)
Just as in her reading Luísa sees the refinement of the courtesan’s life but
misses its necessities, so she converts what is actually a social descent (the
bourgeois wife in a shanty) into a form of social climbing (the plebeian in
the palace) through the notion of aristocratic slumming (nobles in a hut).
To feel aristocratic, Luísa paradoxically lowers herself to the level of a
plebeian. In this passage, Eça has conflated two different scenes in
Madame Bovary: Emma, too, tastes both the aristocratic high-life
(the ball at Vaubyessard and her affair with Rodolphe) and working-class
revelry (slumming in Rouen with Léon), but these are distinct and suc-
cessive stages in the text, which show her gradual degradation over the
course of the novel. In O primo Basílio, in contrast, the attempted social
climbing is from the beginning a descent.
Juliana, we will see, similarly demotes herself in order to rise socially. In
her case, however, this pattern manifests itself as an opposition not be-
tween classes but between colors: black and white. From the beginning of
the novel, the distinguishing feature of the heroine is her milky complex-
ion. The first description of her emphasizes her fair coloring—“her skin
had the tender and milky whiteness of blond women” (13)—and numer-
ous passages focus on “her small foot white like milk” (17) or “her fine
white skin” (142).7 At the end of the novel, what makes Jorge most jealous
is the idea that Basílio has seen “the whiteness of her neck” (308). Juliana,
in contrast, identifies herself with uma negra (a black woman). When her
leisured mistresses go out to enjoy themselves, she mutters resentfully, “Go
ahead, the negra is here in the pit!” (61). After Juliana begins to extort
money from Luísa, this image becomes more frequent: “The mistress dirt-
ies and dirties, she wants to go see whomever pleases her, she wants to ap-
pear for him with frills underneath, and here’s the negra, with a twinge in
her heart, killing herself with the iron in her hand!” (199). Luísa’s need for
clean whites contrasts with Juliana’s assumed blackness. When the other
servants in the house complain that Juliana is receiving special treatment,
the maid replies, “I pay for it with my body,” she said to Joana, “I work
like a negra! ” (268).
The phrase Juliana repeats—working “como uma negra”—is not sim-
ply a figure of speech. It and the other references to blacks are part of a se-
ries of allusions in the novel to the problem of slavery and to the former
Portuguese colonies. This issue comes up in a number of conversations. At
one of Luísa’s gatherings, for example, Basílio sings a romance he has
learned in Brazil about the passion of a negrinha (black girl) for the white
supervisor of her plantation: “I am a negrinha, but my heart/ Feels more
than a white heart . . . Basílio parodied the sentimental tone of a Bahian
girl; and his voice had a comic preciosity, when he delivered the tearful ri-
tornello: And over the seas the negrinha / Casts her eyes/ In the coconut palm/
The araponga used to sing” (83). The song provokes a debate about slavery,
an institution Acácio denounces (83).
The lyrics of the song reflect Basílio’s own story—like the white man,
he too has courted and abandoned a mulata in Brazil (52)—and anticipate
the imagery and movement of the main plot. Luísa at first imagines life
with Basílio as a leisurely existence “in Brazil, among coconut palms, rock-
ing in a hammock, surrounded by blacks, watching the parrots fly!”
(21–22). As her servant begins to extort money, however, Luísa assumes

Juliana’s duties and with them her figurative blackness: she complains to
Sebastião that her life is “an inferno” and that she works “como uma negra”
(275). By the end of the novel, she is in the position of the negrinha of
Basílio’s song: she identifies with the heroine of Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine, an
African queen forsaken by her white lover, Vasco da Gama.
As Luísa’s paraíso turns into an inferno, Juliana’s fortunes momentarily
rise. In the symbolic logic of the novel, the maid’s social aspiration is pre-
sented as a desire to be white. Always longing for refinement, she prefers
white sugar to brown, and when Luísa is absent, she enjoys being mistaken
for her pale mistress: “Juliana had put on a white, calico dress; two indi-
viduals who were at the door of the tabacconist’s were laughing, looking
up from time to time toward the balcony, toward that white figure of a
woman. Then did Juliana enjoy herself! They certainly took her for her
mistress” (69; emphasis mine). What is actually a scene of class tourism be-
comes in this passage an act of “passing.” The basis of the misrecognition
is the whiteness of Juliana’s dress. Her passing, her assumption of Luísa’s
position, however, is but passing—a short-lived reversal. The turning point
in her story is again marked through black-and-white imagery. When
Sebastião intervenes to save Luísa’s honor, he considers sending Juliana to
Brazil: putting the maid back in her social place is equated with packing
her off to a slave-driven economy. Juliana responds to his threats by taking
the moral high ground. Unlike her mistress, she observes, she is a virgin:
“[T]here has never been anyone who has seen the color of my skin” (290).
The color of her skin is the crux of the story, the key to the class struggle
of the main plot.
The black-and-white imagery and allusions to slavery serve to punctu-
ate the two women’s stories, to mark their reversals, and to heighten the
melodrama of the novel. In Juliana’s case, they also clarify the nature of
her social climbing. Just as Luísa seeks to adopt the position of a prosti-
tute to experience a more refined existence and figures herself as a ple-
beian to give her bourgeois affair an aristocratic tone, so Juliana demotes
herself socially in order to rise—she imagines herself as a black slave who
passes for white. Though the women’s trajectories have a similar structure,
they are distinguished in that only Juliana’s is defined as passing. Passing
and social climbing are both attempts to become part of a more hege-
monic group. As Werner Sollors notes, however, passing differs in that
one “speaks only of those persons as ‘passing’ who, it is believed, cannot
really ‘pass,’ because they are assumed to have a firm and immutable iden-
tity” (250). Social climbing is not passing, because class allegiance is not
inscribed in a person’s essence or body. By converting Juliana’s aspirations
to a bourgeois existence into a form of passing, Eça gives class hierarchy
the perceived indelibility of race. Juliana and Luísa may take on one an-
other’s roles, but their true essence never changes. In the end, the black-
and-white imagery and the Manichaean ethics that is superimposed upon
it counteract the revolutionary indifferentiation Luísa introduces through
her reading. Class difference may seem to collapse, but the social hierar-
chy remains intact.
The inclusion of the parallel male figures—Julião and Acácio—serves
to reinforce this point. In their last conversation in the novel, Acácio reads
to Julião the obituary he has written for the heroine. His words echo the
charged metaphors that have described Luísa’s and Juliana’s ambitions
throughout the novel: the voyage by ship, the longing for “paradise.” In his
rewriting, however, these terms, divested of their social implications and
melodramatic urgency, are translated into bourgeois clichés and patriotic
rhetoric. The sea voyage that once represented Luísa’s struggle to rise so-
cially is translated into banal phrases (the journey of life): “There
foundered, like a ship on the surf of the coast, the virtuous lady who with
her lively nature was the delight of whoever had the honor of coming near
her home!” (322). Her lurid paraíso becomes a pátria: heaven is “a nation
of souls of such high caliber” (322). The two men’s final conversation
serves to bury the heroine in meaningless words that blur the truth of her
situation. The indifferentiation Acácio introduces with this language, how-
ever, is not the same as that which Luísa creates through her actions. The
female characters seem to invert class hierarchies, but the novel insists that
these social differences cannot be collapsed. Julião and Acácio’s story makes
an opposite point. The two men begin on opposite sides of the political
spectrum but ultimately converge in an ideologically vacuous center and
repeat the same empty clichés. When Juliáo is finally promoted, he aban-
dons his radicalism and embraces Acácio’s bourgeois values. The women’s
blurring of classes is replaced by the men’s much less threatening blurring
of words.8
Sebastião as Savior
Eça explores a solution to these conflicts again by reworking Flaubert’s

character system as national allegory. As we have seen, Luísa is, like
Portugal, a horse that needs to be reined in through strong governance.
As Julião suggests, the dilemma of the nation is that its men lack the will
to do so. Julião’s ideal, a combination of masculinity and activity, is em-
bodied in the figure of Jorge. The fact that Jorge is absent in the critical
chapters of the novel suggests that this ideal is lacking in Portugal. The
union of Luísa, the allegorical figure of the nation, and Jorge, the paragon
of active masculinity, realizes in the plot Julião’s prescription for Portugal:
the union of bridle and horse. This ideal is represented as a conventional
heterosexual union of active male and passive female.
The absence of Jorge and strong governance exposes Luísa (and by
extension, the nation) to various risks. As soon as her husband leaves,
Luísa pulls out a hidden copy of La dame aux camélias and receives a
visit from her friend Leopoldina, whose company she has been told to
avoid. Openly adulterous and perverse, Leopoldina leads the heroine
into a predicament that she is unable to remedy. When Luísa, black-
mailed by Juliana and abandoned by Basílio, turns to her friend for help,
Leopoldina’s only idea is to appeal to Castro, who, we have seen, is
drawn in the image of Louis-Napoléon. Though at first Luísa follows her
friend’s advice, she is ultimately unable to stomach this solution. The
savior figure in the novel, the character that successfully removes Luísa
from the plot of 1848, will be not Leopoldina but Sebastião.
At the beginning of the novel, Eça briefly describes Jorge’s relationship
with Sebastião, his best friend from childhood:
Playing in the back yard, Sebastião was always the “horse” when imitating the
stagecoach or the “vanquished” in wars. It was Sebastião who carried the loads,
who offered his back for Jorge to climb; at snacks he ate all the bread and left
for Jorge all the fruit. They grew up. And that friendship, always the same,
without sulking, became in the lives of both a special and permanent interest.
When Jorge’s mother died, they even thought about living together; they
would share Sebastião’s house, which was larger and had a back yard; Jorge
wanted to buy a horse; but he met Luísa in the Passeio and two months later
he spent almost all his time on the Rua da Madalena.
The whole playful plan of a “Jorge and Sebastião Society”—as they
laughingly called it—fell through, like a castle of cards. Sebastião was very
disappointed.
And it was later he who supplied the bouquets of roses, without thorns,
wrapped in silk paper with devoted care, that Jorge carried to Luísa. It was
he who dealt with the arrangements for the “nest,” who went to hurry the
upholsterers, to bargain the prices of the clothes, to supervise the work of
the men who were installing the rugs. (90–91)
The fact that the horse is identified with both Sebastião and Luísa in this
passage hints at the homosocial nature of the “Sebastião and Jorge
Society”: Luísa has usurped Sebastião’s place as Jorge’s horse. A perpetual
bachelor with a flair for antiques, flowers, and interior decorating,
Sebastião is an ambiguous figure; Jorge teases him for his “girly nerves”
(292), and in various scenes, it is clear that Sebastião feels awkward in
heteronormative situations. Early in the novel, Eça points out that

Sebastião never enters Jorge’s “nest” comfortably, and when asked at
Acácio’s bachelor pad about his taste in women, he hesitates to answer and
does so with great “timidity” (247). What distinguishes Sebastião at this
gathering is his sweet tooth—“Are you one of my type, then?” another
guest asks him: “You like a good sweet!” (242)—a predilection that seems
opposed to the other men’s obsession with women: “Alves Coutinho for-
got about women and turning toward Sebastião, discussed sweets” (248).
The description of Sebastião as belonging to an unnamed group (my type)
and the introduction of a substitute for women (sweets) suggest the ambi-
guity of his desire or orientation.
If the central problem of the novel is the seeming incompatibility of
masculinity and activity in Portugal (the fact that these terms do not co-
incide and that the only character who combines them, Jorge, is absent),
then the sexual logic of the plot may be illustrated (in Greimasian fash-
ion) as in the following diagram, which expands this opposition into a
rectangle consisting of these attributes and their opposites (femininity
and passivity).9
Jorge
(complex)
Masculinity Activity
Sebastião Leopoldina
(closure) (exposure)
Passivity Femininity
Luísa
(neutral)
What Greimas refers to as the “complex” term, the ideal combination

of opposed elements, is embodied in the figure of Jorge, who unites viril-
ity and energy. On the opposite pole, Luísa, the passive female, represents
what Greimas calls the “neutral” term. She is Portuguese reality, the polit-
ical situation that must be addressed.10 Leopoldina and Sebastião illustrate
two alternate combinations of these terms, the active female and the pas-
sive male, as well as other forms of sexual desire (lesbianism, male homo-
sexuality). At the same time, they introduce into the character system an
opposition between openness and closure, which is reflected in the func-
tion of each in the novel. Leopoldina’s open promiscuity lures Luísa into
a predicament in which she is threatened with public exposure. Through
the portrayal of her role model as an active female, Luísa’s straying from
the national union becomes a straying from the “natural,” from conven-
tional gender roles. Sebastião’s remedy, however, is no more natural than
her transgression. As one critic has pointed out, Sebastião’s name, for
Portuguese readers, recalls the messianism of King Sebastian, the young
ruler who launched a crusade against the infidels in the sixteenth century
(Jarnaes 38). Like the misguided prince, Sebastião is a savior figure. What
Eça emphasizes, however, is not his royal namesake but rather his patron
saint: his home is decorated with an icon of the martyred Saint Sebastian,
a homoerotic image. The salvation Sebastião offers reflects the passivity of
this image and of his nature. Though he is aware of the dangers Luísa
faces, he hesitates to involve himself. His final intervention is belated, a
stopgap measure that does not restore the honor of Luísa-Portugal but
rather covers up its loss. From the outset, Sebastião is most concerned not
with Luísa’s behavior but with the degree of its exposure: “[T]he worst
thing,” he insists, “is the neighborhood,” where gossip travels quickly
(41). When he fears she has compromised herself, he invents a story to
excuse her: “[N]ow at least,” he reflects, “appearances are saved” (155).
Jorge has left Luísa in his protection and asked him to bridle her more
dangerous impulses, but Sebastião, identified as a horse himself, is unable
to rein her in. It is pointed that it is to Sebastião that Julião complains
about the state of the nation. Portugal, he says, is a nation sick from expe-
dientes, emergency remedies, and from a lack of principle: “The Nation is
ripe for an intriguer with will! These people are all ancient, full of diseases,
catarrhs of the bladder, old cases of syphilis! Everything is rotten inside
and out! The old constitutional world is going to fall to pieces . . . We need
men!” (293). Portugal needs not the expedientes of a Sebastião, which
merely put the problem back in the closet, but rather men with will, who
can bridle the nation.
Sebastião and Dussardier
Eça uses literary allusion to draw out the political implications of

Sebastião’s character, which is based on that of Dussardier in Flaubert’s
L’éducation sentimentale. Though Flaubert’s bildungsroman deals with the

Revolution of 1848 and its aftermath, what is perhaps most striking about
it is how little most of its characters intervene in these historical events.
The only ones who are directly involved in the political struggles are sec-
ondary figures: the doctrinal, revolutionary Sénécal and the bleeding-heart
proletarian Dussardier.11 These characters are almost always juxtaposed in
the novel; as Chantal de Grandpré has noted, Flaubert designated them in
early drafts with similar underlinings and marks to ensure their parallelism
(623). The two men are also the only figures that really act in the work.
The final assassination of Dussardier by Sénécal during the coup of 1851
is in de Grandpré’s words the “only truly dramatic event of the novel”
(621). It is not only dramatic but also melodramatic; the work reaches its
climax with a striking tableau of impassioned gestures. The story of
Frédéric—his ennui, his halfhearted pursuit of Madame Arnoux, his desire
to desire—pales in comparison. Flaubert interweaves and contrasts
Frédéric’s story with a subplot of action, engagement, and earnestness. At
the same time, however, this subplot subtly parallels Frédéric’s trajectory
and serves to clarify how his seemingly ahistorical vagaries are in fact de-
termined by the times.
In O primo Basílio, Eça introduces a similar subplot, which, as is clear
in the passages that follow, is in direct dialogue with L’éducation senti-
mentale:
Dussardier made no reply. Everyone pressed him to speak out.

“Well,” he said blushing, “personally I’d like to love the same woman all
my life.”
He said this in such a way that for a moment no one spoke, some sur-
prised by his genuine innocence, others perhaps recognizing their own se-
cret longings.
Sénécal put his mug of beer down on the mantelshelf and dogmatically
declared that since prostitution was tyrannical exploitation and marriage
immoral, the best thing was to steer clear of women. (63)
They wanted then to know the opinions of Sebastião—who turned scarlet.

Finally, after being pressed, he said timidly, “I think one should marry a
good girl and esteem her all through life . . .”
Those simple words produced an abrupt silence. But Saavedra, lying
back, classified such an opinion as “bourgeois”; marriage was a burden;
there was nothing like variety . . .
And Julião expounded dogmatically: “Marriage is an administrative for-
mula, which has to end one day.” Besides, according to him, the female was
a subaltern entity; man should only go near her in certain periods of the year
(as the animals do, who understand these things better), impregnate her,
and get the boredom over with. (247–248)
As these parallel quotations suggest, Sebastião and Julião are counterparts

to Dussardier and Sénécal respectively. Like Flaubert’s pair, they are al-
most invariably coupled in Eça’s novel, and their conversations are strate-
gically placed to frame and comment upon the main plot.
They share not only the position of Flaubert’s duo but also their char-
acter traits and trajectories. Like Sénécal, whose “whole get-up smacked of
pedagogue and preacher” (56) and whom Frédéric instinctively dislikes,
Julião is dogmatic and unappealing: “Luiza didn’t like him; she found in
him a ‘north-eastern’ air, she detested his pedagogical tone” (31). Both
characters are unpleasant and bitter men who depend on their middle-class
friends but resent the latter’s prosperity and position. Like Sénécal, who
does not hide his disgust at Arnoux’s and later Frédéric’s bourgeois refine-
ment, Julião resents his cousin Jorge, “this mediocrity, who lived so com-
fortably, well-married, in bodily contentment” (26). Though secretly
ashamed of their poverty, both Sénécal and Julião pretend to be proud of
it and look forward to a social revolution12. What they find most satisfy-
ing about this possibility, however, is not the idea of a fairer or more equal
society but rather the prospect of violence and vengeance against the rul-
ing classes. Sénécal imagines how the workers will avenge themselves on
their exploiters “either by bloody evictions or by ransacking their grand
mansions” (150)—and declares the need for “new blood, citizens whose
hearts are pure, whose hands are clean!” (334). Similarly, Julião savors the
idea of a social cleansing: “‘But where’s the harm, Counselor, if we shoot
some bankers, some fathers, some obese property-owners and some dod-
dery marquis! It was a cleansing!’ And he made the gesture of sharpening
a knife” (245). In each case, this longing for power and bloodshed ulti-
mately translates into an authoritarian political agenda. We have seen that
Julião believes that Portugal needs a few strong men. Sénécal, similarly, is
associated with oligarchic political figures: he is “an up-and-coming Saint
Just” (27), seeks to “look like Blanqui, who modeled himself on
Robespierre” (329), and approves of the Holy League (153). Working for
Arnoux as a factory manager, he abuses his power and treats the workers
cruelly: “Being a theoretician, he saw men in the mass and was ruthless
toward individuals” (215). By the end of the novel, he declares himself “all
in favour of Authority” (407). His support of Louis-Napoléon’s coup and
his murder of his co-revolutionary, Dussardier, are but a step away.
The similarity between Dussardier and Sebastião is also striking.
Though (unlike Julião and Sénécal) neither has a clearly articulated polit-
ical platform, both are bleeding-heart leftists who genuinely sympathize
with the exploited working class. Their commitment is personal rather
than dogmatic and takes the form of a shared compulsion to protect the
helpless. In his first appearance, Dussardier comes to the aid of a protestor
assaulted by a policeman, and the narrator categorizes him as “the sort of

man who’d fling himself under a carriage to rescue a fallen horse” (153).
Metaphorically, this is what Sebastião does in O primo Basílio: by burning
the compromising letters and restoring Luísa’s honor, he saves Jorge’s new
(fallen) horse, Luísa. Though both Dussardier and Sebastião are savior fig-
ures, each finds himself in a position in which he must work against the
classes and principles he supports. A staunch republican, Dussardier asso-
ciates authority with injustice: “In his simplistic view, Power was responsi-
ble for all evil and he loathed it with a permanent, deep-seated, heartfelt
and carefully cultivated hatred” (253). Dussardier’s tragedy is spelled out
in these lines. His “simplistic view,” derived not from Sénécal’s systèmes but
from personal experience, is in the end quite right and tragically proven by
his own violence as a National Guardsman in the June Days. Dussardier is
unable to deal with the guilt he feels after this. His ultimate defiance of
Sénécal—his cry, “Vive la République!”—has rightly been described as a
form of suicide.
Sebastião’s story is not as dramatic but follows a similar pattern. In the
blustery political discussion at Acácio’s party, Sebastião stands out for the
sincerity of his convictions: though he claims not to understand politics,
he laments the inadequate wages of the working class (246). Whereas
Julião expresses his radicalism dogmatically in terms of rights and revenge,
Sebastião responds to the sufferings around him in an emotional way and
feels deep compassion. Among Luísa’s regular guests, he alone treats
Juliana humanely and takes time to talk to her. His intervention at the end
of the novel, consequently, goes against his nature. Though opposed to
abusive authority, he nevertheless recruits a policeman and puts on a show
of force to intimidate Juliana into handing over the letters. She spells out
the political implications of Sebastião’s maneuvre: “They had it all for
themselves, the police, Boa-Hora, chains, Africa . . . And she—nothing!”
(290)—reflections that echo Dussardier’s suspicion of “Power” in all of its
forms. Just as Flaubert’s proletarian becomes a guardsman, so Sebastião
now embodies the social evil he rejected earlier. He too feels pangs of guilt
when Juliana dies as a result.
By framing Luísa’s story with the conversations of characters based on
Sénécal and Dussardier, Eça clarifies the political implications of the main
plot: its historical subtext—the dangerous situation arising from the hero-
ine’s reading—is the same that unites Flaubert’s pair: the plot of 1848. In
dealing with this subtext, however, Eça departs significantly from his
French model. Flaubert juxtaposes the eventless, banal life of Frédéric
Moreau with a dramatic, historically resonant subplot. Eça, in contrast,
frames the melodrama of Luísa and Juliana, who physically reenact 1848,
with the comparatively listless conversations of Julião and Sebastião. In
L’éducation sentimentale, Dussardier and Sénécal represent liberty and

tyranny, respectively; their lives trace the fates of these two political terms
and rehearse the reversals and contradictions of 1848, the incongruity be-
tween a naïve but engaged proletariat and a class of ideologues more
power hungry than committed. In comparison, Julião and Sebastião are
vacillating figures who talk but never act. The constant theme of their dis-
cussions is how to prevent Luísa’s fall, but Sebastião’s timidity and Julião’s
indifference keep them from guiding her. Unlike the principled
Dussardier, Sebastião is a passive, unmanly figure who, relying on “expe-
dients,” keeps the situation in the closet rather than addressing it res-
olutely. It is striking how different the passage about Sebastião’s taste in
women reads once we take into account his ambiguous orientation:
whereas Dussardier’s hesitation is naïve and innocent, Sebastião is hiding
something. This is what most distinguishes him from Flaubert’s proletar-
ian. Dussardier shoots at the people; Sebastião makes a superficial show
of force. Dussardier saves the lives of the exploited; Sebastião saves the
face of the exploiter. Sebastião’s function is to hide, to tone down, to mit-
igate the melodrama of the main plot. Eça’s conversion of Sénécal into
Julião involves a similar dilution of political urgency. Whereas Sénécal’s
hunger for power and authoritarian nature lead him to participate vio-
lently in Louis Bonaparte’s coup, Julião simply sells out. When he is of-
fered a decent position in the government, he readily declares himself a
friend of Order. The emphasis in Flaubert is the dramatic inversion:
Sénécal as gendarme repeats on Dussardier the violence that the latter had
exercised as National Guardsman. In Eça it is conversion as nonevent, the
substitution of one set of rhetorical clichés for another.
Luísa’s Death
Passive and vacillating, Sebastião can save the heroine’s honor but not her
life. Like Emma, Luísa is destined to die. The cause of her death, however,
is more ambiguous. Eça’s critics have often complained about the vagueness
of the fatal illness that does her in. Whereas Emma dies of arsenic, Luísa,
it would seem, dies of intertextuality. As James R. Stevens puts it, “Emma
dies because her world was destroyed. Luísa dies to complete the parallel
her creator has so assiduously traced between the burguezinha of Lisbon
and the gallant rebel of Normandy” (53–61). Medically inexplicable,
Luísa’s death must be read in light of this literary dialogue. In the final
pages of the novel, Eça goes out of his way to point to his model. As Girodon
has observed, his metaphors in this passage are drawn directly from the
imagery of Flaubert’s death scene (222). Just as Emma’s “pulse quivered

under the doctor’s fingers like a taut thread, like a harp string about to
snap” (376), so Julião takes Luísa’s pulse and feels it “fleeing under his fin-
gers, like the dying vibration of a cord” (318). Like Eça’s borrowings in
Luísa’s seduction, however, the proximity between text and model serves to
offset important differences between the two death scenes.
To perceive how Eça’s version departs from Flaubert’s, it is important
first to understand the function of the death scene in Madame Bovary and
its relation to the narrative that precedes it. Flaubert’s ending points back
to two passages in the novel that clarify its meaning. The first is the well-
known description of Charles’s hat with which the novel opens: “It was a
headgear of composite order, containing elements of an ordinary hat, a
hussar’s busby, a lancer’s cap, a sealskin cap and a night-cap: one of those
wretched things whose mute hideousness suggests unplumbed depths, like
an idiot’s face” (4). Described as a casquette (helmet), Charles’s hat recalls
the makeshift headgear of Don Quixote, a barber’s basin that he mistakes
for Mambrino’s helmet. Like the basin-helmet (baciyelmo), Charles’s hat is
a ridiculous composite, an emblem of its wearer’s folly. At the same time,
the cap anticipates the kitschy books and art that Emma consumes: like
the hat, her album is a mishmash, full of “pale landscapes of fantastic coun-
tries: pines and palms growing together, tigers on the right, a lion on the
left, Tartar minarets on the horizon, Roman ruins in the foreground, a few
kneeling camels” (45). Both the baciyelmo and the casquette, thus, could be
read as a representation of the incongruities of the quixotic imagination, of
the bêtise Cervantes and Flaubert set out to combat. In Adultery in the
Novel, Tony Tanner interprets Charles’s hat in precisely this way, “as the
representative object of the kind of bourgeois culture Flaubert was writing
about. This is the object that is put over the head of le nouveau; it sums up
the enculturation process by which le nouveau is initiated into and pre-
pared for the established society” (240). For Tanner, the hat is an icon of
what Flaubert rejects in bourgeois society.
In both Don Quixote and Madame Bovary, however, the “helmet” serves
as much more than a target of ridicule. Cervantes’s baciyelmo is ultimately
not so much a sign of the hero’s madness as a symbol of tolerance and
perspectivism, of what both knight and squire have come to learn. It is a
token not only of the ridiculed folly but also of the humanist values the work
puts forth. In Madame Bovary, similarly, Charles’s hat is at once the target
and tool of the author’s critique. In Chapter 1, the hat serves not (as Tony
Tanner claims) to initiate Charles into language but rather to obstruct his as-
similation: the hat is not “put over” Charles’s head but rather taken off it, and
it is only its removal (and disappearance) that makes Charles’s initiation pos-
sible. The “helmet” creates havoc, a charivari, in the class, which is only
brought to order through a reprisal that “[l]ike Neptune’s Quos ego, . . . cut
short the threat of a new storm” (6). The reference to the first book of the
Aeneid—the image of Aeolus reining in the winds that have rebelled against
him—suggests that the hat has served not to assimilate but to subvert: a hot
potato that Charles cannot manage to hold, the casquette introduces chaos
into a realm of order. It is beyond the grasp not only of the hand but also of
language. Visually unrepresentable, it is, as many critics (including Tanner)
have noted, an instance of language that exceeds reality—a category confu-
sion and adulteration of genres. In every way, it defies. Only when it is mis-
placed, expelled from the narrative focus, is discipline finally restored and the
tale allowed to commence (now in the third person).13
After this initial scene, the hat would seem to disappear from the novel.
It returns, however, at the level of imagery in a second passage relevant to
the death scene. In Part III, Flaubert incarnates the vehicle of the metaphor
describing the hat in the figure of the blind beggar, who wears a headgear
that recalls Charles’s baciyelmo. Whereas the casquette in the school scene is
compared to an “idiot’s face” in its “unplumbed depths,” the visage of the
beggar (described as “idiotic”) is obscured by a basin-like hat:
His clothes were a mass of rags, and his face was hidden under a battered
old felt hat that was turned down all around like a basin; when he took this
off, it was to reveal two gaping, bloody sockets in place of eyelids. The flesh
continually shredded off in red gobbets, and from it oozed a liquid matter,
hardening into greenish scabs that reached down to his nose. His black nos-
trils sniffled convulsively. Whenever he began to talk, he leaned his head far
back and gave an idiot laugh; and at such times his bluish eyeballs, rolling
round and round, pushed up against the edges of the live wound. (315)
Both hats generate a disruptive hilarity in the text—the charivari in the

classroom and the beggar’s “idiot laugh.” Each, moreover, functions sub-
versively. Just as Charles’s casquette provokes disorder in the school, the
beggar with his basin-hat is the image of a threatening underclass—at the
end of the novel, the bourgeois Homais wages a campaign against him in
the name of Order.
It is in light of the imagery of these two passages that we must recon-
sider Emma’s death scene. In her final moments, the only stimulus that
rouses her from her stupor is the beggar’s song, which immediately pre-
cedes her death:
Suddenly from out on the sidewalk came a noise of heavy wooden shoes and
the scraping of a stick, and a voice rose up, a raucous voice singing:
A clear day’s warmth will often move
A lass to stray in dreams of love.
Emma sat up like a galvanized corpse, her hair streaming, her eyes fixed and
gaping,
To gather up the stalks of wheat
The swinging scythe keeps laying by,
Nanette goes stooping in the heat
Along the furrow where they lie.
“The blind man!” she cried.
Emma began to laugh—a horrible, frantic, desperate laugh—fancying
that she saw the beggar’s hideous face, a figure of terror looming in the dark-
ness of eternity.
The wind blew very hard that day
And snatched her petticoat away!
A spasm flung her down on the mattress. Everyone drew close. She had
ceased to exist. (383–384)
The beggar’s ditty introduces into the death scene the unruly winds pro-
voked by Charles’s hat and permits the heroine to have the last laugh. Just
as the breeze lifts Nanette’s skirts and exposes her romantic illusions to
derision, so the song unveils for Emma the absurdity of her dreams and
allows her to participate at last in the irony of the text. As we have seen,
the hat is a representation both of what Flaubert critiques (the absurd
jumblings of popular literature) and of the method of his subversion: he
deflates bêtise simply by citing it and allowing its incongruities to reveal
themselves. Throughout most of Madame Bovary, Emma has been an un-
questioning consumer of kitsch. On her deathbed, however, she experi-
ences a conversion of sorts as she finally joins in the charivari of the
opening scene. The indifferentiation of the bourgeois clichés and popular
fiction she has unquestioningly accepted are in the end deflated by the
indifferentiation of the basin-hat and the winds it introduces into the
novel.
Eça’s dénouement also represents Luísa’s death as a moment of conver-
sion. Her revelation, however, involves ethics rather than irony, contain-
ment rather than critique. Through her reading and subsequent infidelity,
Luísa has sinned not only morally but also socially: she has exposed herself
to the vengeance of the underclass, represented in the grotesque figure of
Juliana. In the depths of her despair, Luísa feels “soiled like a rag trampled
in the mud by the multitudes” and longs for the “purification” of convent
life (271). Through her moral fall, Luísa has fallen socially, allowing her-
self to be trampled by the masses, contaminated by the blackness of the
proletarian Juliana.
In the death scene, Luísa’s moral and social stains are finally purged.
Throughout the novel, her long blond hair is identified with her sin: it is
associated with Mary Magdalene’s in the dream sequence and with the
devil himself in the death scene. When Julião, who serves as the heroine’s
attending doctor, cuts off her tresses in order to reduce her fever, he is
symbolically erasing her transgressions. On her deathbed, the heroine
experiences a moral purging that recalls the initiation into a convent for
which she earlier yearned.
At the same time, Luísa is also redeemed socially. Whereas her sin has
inverted the social hierarchy and momentarily exposed her to the blackness
of the servant’s world, her death cleanses the stain, restoring her to the
whiteness that is identified with bourgeois society in the novel: she is now
“immobile, white like wax” (312), and her tongue is “white and hard”
(314). The description is a revision of Emma’s final illness in Madame
Bovary, which emphasizes darkness and blackness: the “brown blotches”
that cover her body (376) and the “taste of ink” in her mouth (372). The
supposition in Madame Bovary is that Emma is dying of the texts—the
ink—she has consumed. In O primo Basílio, in contrast, it is Luísa’s death
that purifies her and distances the dangerous social contamination she has
introduced through her reading. She is not taken over by texts (ink) but
rather restored to a blank page, salvaged from the plot of 1848 to which
her reading exposed her. It is significant in this respect that all traces of the
grotesque and the underclass have already been purged from the novel—
Juliana long since dead and buried. Emma, on her death, feels a subversive
solidarity with the beggar and the critique he represents. Still immersed in
indifferentiated texts (their ink metaphorically coursing through her
veins), Emma recognizes the critical force of these composites, the absurd-
ity of charivari. Luísa, in contrast, is removed from the indifferentiation
she has introduced.
In reworking Madame Bovary, Eça departs from Flaubert’s treatment of
indifferentiation by clearly separating the two functions it serves in the
French text. In the latter, it is both the weapon and the target of the cri-
tique. Eça avoids this ambiguity by distinguishing between two types of
indifferentiation (social and discursive) and by clearly defining the politi-
cal function of each. At first, the actions of Luísa and Juliana introduce
confusion into the social hierarchy, which is a troubling echo of the plot of
1848. This social indifferentiation is threatening and subversive but ulti-
mately fails to overturn the existing order. Class differences, Eça suggests,
are not so easily collapsed in the Lisbon of the 1870s. The second form of
indifferentiation—the confusion of discourses—reinforces this point. The
ideological oppositions that seem to reenact this class struggle (the argu-
ments between the liberal Julião and the conservative Acácio) ultimately
converge in empty clichés. Unlike Flaubert’s, however, this discursive in-
differentiation never serves as a critique. Rather, it is a reactionary dis-
course that buries the heroine’s disturbing past in benign clichés. In his
reenactment of 1848, we have seen, Eça rejects the solution of a

Bonaparte-like political savior: Luísa does not succumb to the advances of
Castro. Ironically, however, the Portuguese resolution Eça imagines does
not escape Bonapartism, the empty and indifferentiated language that col-
lapses ideological oppositions and drains political discourse of meaning. It
is this language that we must now consider.
3
A Marriage Sans-culotte?
The classic instance of such indifferentiation in Madame Bovary is the Comices,

the description of the agricultural fair in Yonville. Placed at the exact mid-
point of the novel and occupying what is by far its longest chapter, the episode
constitutes a turning point in the plot—the moment when Rodolphe begins
to woo Emma and when the possibility of adultery first emerges. It is here
that the novel finally moves from the mœurs de province of its subtitle to the
infidelity we associate with its title. At the same time, it is the first point in
the novel in which the private story is interwoven with public history.
Interlacing Rodolphe’s words with the speeches of local politicians, Flaubert
situates his text within its context, adultery within the politics of France at
that moment. To be more precise, however, the episode is less concerned with
politics than with political expression. The orators’ ideas are eclipsed by their
language, a style plagued with clichés, contradictions, and misapplied diction.
The speeches begin with a mixed metaphor—the king steering “the
chariot of the state amidst the perils of a stormy sea” (167)—and reach, by
the end of the episode, a height of absurdity:
Rodolphe was talking to Madame Bovary about dreams, forebodings, mag-

netism. Going back to the cradle of human society, the orator depicted the
savage ages when men lived off acorns in the depths of the forest. Then they
had cast off their animal skins, garbed themselves in cloth, dug the ground
and planted the vine. Was this an advance? Didn’t this discovery entail more
disadvantages than benefits? That was the problem Monsieur Derozerays set
himself. From magnetism Rodolphe gradually moved on to affinities; and as
the chairman cited Cincinnatus and his plow, Diogenes planting his cab-
bages and the Chinese emperors celebrating the New Year by sowing seed,
the young man was explaining to the young woman that these irresistible
attractions had their roots in some earlier existence. (174)
The masterful crosscutting in this passage between Rodolphe’s words

and the speaker’s is a classic example of Flaubert’s delight in wordplay. It is
this aspect of the novel that Tony Tanner has sought to draw out in his dis-
cussion of Madame Bovary in Adultery in the Novel. Examining its mixed
metaphors and decontextualized language, Tanner traces how words are
gradually equated with their opposites and signs divorced from their refer-
ents. Flaubert’s novel slowly moves toward indifferentiation, its playful and
contradictory combinations of phrases eroding the differences that uphold
meaning in language. As Tanner puts it, the novel tends toward “some kind
of ultimate perverse rapprochement among words themselves, not a
marriage but a merging, meanings swallowing each other in hopeless cir-
cularity as Binet’s lathe seems to swallow clear utterance in its insentient
unvarying hum” (257). The adultery plot is for Tanner a metaphor for this
collapse of meaning and representation. Just as Mme. Bovary betrays the
source of her name (M. Bovary), so words in Flaubert’s novel consort with
signifiers other than their wedded signifieds: “[A] crisis in marriage,”
Tanner concludes, is “a crisis in language” (363).1
This analysis, however, becomes vulnerable when Tanner attempts
to relate the private to the public. Observing that the marriage contract is
the foundation of nineteenth-century bourgeois society, Tanner argues that
the dissolution of the former through adultery must represent a threat to
the latter. The crisis in marriage is not only a crisis in language but also a
crisis in bourgeois society. To a certain extent, Tanner’s approach is a step
forward in the study of the adultery novel. It successfully avoids the nar-
row sociological reading of the genre as a reflection of nineteenth-century
women’s desire for autonomy or of the breakdown of the nuclear family.
Tanner recognizes that the adultery plot is a socially symbolic form that
goes beyond the critique of divorce laws or marital practices. Ultimately,
however, his approach does not shake the reflectionism that plagues dis-
cussions of the genre: it bluntly equates a social situation—the dissolution
of the bourgeois political order—with a textual trait that mirrors it—the
dissolution of representation. While this equation is perhaps less obvious
than the usual connection drawn between adultery and the abolition of
divorce, what governs this relation is still a notion of reflection or mirror-
ing. Tanner’s argument commits what John Guillory considers to be one
of the principal errors of contemporary criticism: “A confusion between
representation in the political sense—the relation of a representative to a
constituency—and representation in the rather different sense of the rela-
tion between an image and what the image represents” (vii–viii). The as-
sumption that a breakdown of the latter form of representation involves a
breakdown of the former has led to a distorted view of the genre of the
adultery novel.
A MARRIAGE SANS-CULOTTE ? 97
The analysis that follows will attempt to move away from the idea of
literature as a mirror of social reality and toward a conception of narrative
as a force that works upon the context to which it responds, as a space
where ideological tensions are not reflected so much as probed, resolved,
or kept at bay. The Iberian rewritings of Madame Bovary are actively
reshaping and experimenting upon social reality, imagining resolutions for
disturbing historical patterns. In this chapter, we will see that the unravel-
ing of language that Tanner identifies is not the symptom of a society com-
ing apart at the seams but rather a force that works to keep it together and
uphold the status quo.
With its combination of adultery, politics, and unhinged signs, the
Comices is a useful starting point from which to approach these questions.
The humor in this episode revolves around Rodolphe’s attempt to distin-
guish himself from the political speaker, M. Lieuvain, and his lieux
communs (commonplaces). Early in the episode, Rodolphe contrasts the
orator’s conception of “duty”—“The petty one, the conventional one, the
one invented by man, the one that keeps changing and screaming its head
off ” (170)—with his own moral code, a lofty, more natural vision that sets
him above the masses. He also imagines an ideal, nonverbal communica-
tion—in true love, “no words are necessary” (169)—that is implicitly op-
posed to the prolixity of the orators. As the episode progresses, however, it
becomes increasingly clear that the seducer and the politician are actually
quite similar, and it is this gradual convergence that makes us laugh. Like
Álvaro Mesía, who creates an illusion of difference, of a depth that con-
trasts the surface, Rodolphe is ultimately projecting difference onto two
things that are fundamentally the same.
This underlying sameness becomes apparent in the strategies to which
both the speaker and the seducer resort. Consider, for example, the juxta-
posed arguments in the passage that follows:
“I ought to move a little further back,” said Rodolphe.

“Why?” said Emma.
But at that moment the councilor’s voice rose to an extraordinary pitch.
He was declaiming:
“Gone forever, gentlemen, are the days when civil discord drenched our
streets with blood; when the landlord, the business man, nay, the worker,
sank at night into a peaceful slumber trembling lest they be brutally awak-
ened by the sound of inflammatory tocsins; when the most subversive prin-
ciples were audaciously undermining the foundations . . . ”
“It’s just that I might be caught sight of from below,” said Rodolphe. “If
I were, I’d have to spend the next two weeks apologizing; and what with my
bad reputation . . .”
“Oh! You’re slandering yourself,” said Emma.
“No, no, my reputation’s execrable, I assure you.”

“But, gentlemen,” continued the councilor, “if I dismiss those depress-
ing evocations and turn my eyes to the present situation of our cherished fa-
therland, what do I see before me? Commerce and the arts are thriving
everywhere . . . . confidence returns; at long last, France breathes again!”
(167–168)
Rodolphe and the speaker resort to a similar rhetorical ploy: both evoke
something threatening and disorderly in the past to distance themselves
and the present situation from it. Rodolphe openly admits his previous
philandering in order to disavow it and to distinguish the true love he ide-
alizes. Similarly, M. Lieuvain calls up memories of the recent bloodshed
and revolution to distance them and praise the political stability of the
present. That the two speakers use the same rhetorical strategy is our first
hint of the similarity between them. Rodolphe is adopting a posture of
defiance, pretending to rise up against vulgar convention, but his conver-
gence with the speaker suggests that his words are just as reactionary.
This impression is confirmed as the narrator continues to parallel the
two men’s words:
“And the point has not been lost on you,” the councilor was saying. “Not on
you, farmers and workers in the fields! Not on you, champions of progress and
morality! The point has not been lost on you, I say, that the storms of politi-
cal strife are truly more to be dreaded than the disorders of the elements!”
“Yes, it comes along one day,” Rodolphe repeated. “All of a sudden, just
when we’ve given up hope. Then new horizons open before us: it’s like a voice
crying, ‘Look! It’s here!’ We feel the need to pour out our hearts to a given
person, to surrender, to sacrifice everything. In such a meeting no words are
necessary: each senses the other’s thoughts. Each is the answer to the other’s
dreams.” He kept staring at her. “There it is, the treasure so long sought
for—there before us: it gleams, it sparkles. But still we doubt; we daren’t be-
lieve; we stand there dazzled, as though we’d come from darkness into light.”
As he ended, Rodolphe enhanced his words with pantomime. He passed
his hand over his face, like someone dazed; then he let it fall on Emma’s
hand. She withdrew hers. The councilor read on:
“And who is there who would wonder at such a statement, gentlemen?
Only one so blind, so sunk (I use the word advisedly), so sunk in prejudices
of another age as to persist in the misconceptions concerning the spirit of
our farming population. Where, I ask you, is there to be found greater pa-
triotism than in rural areas, greater devotion to the common weal, greater—
in one word—intelligence?” (168–169)
Right after the speaker evokes the “storms” of revolution, Rodolphe begins
to describe a newly opened horizon. Through the juxtaposition, the lover’s
peaceful skies quell the tempestuous rebellion the speaker calls up.
Rodolphe’s higher morality serves similarly to distance a threat: through it,
he and Emma are set apart from the unruly masses, from a sense of duty
“noisy and vulgar, like the crowd of fools you see out there” (170). Like
Rodolphe’s, the speaker’s strategy in the passage above is to distance his in-
terlocutors from the ignorant mob and the threat of revolution. Just as
Rodolphe distinguishes himself and Emma from the crowd below, so
Lieuvain praises the “intelligence” of the rural community he addresses
and rejects the “blindness” and “prejudices” of an imagined antagonist.
The juxtaposition of the two men’s words and the similarities in their
strategies suggest that the adultery that is initiated with this scene is not a
challenge to bourgeois society so much as a defense of it, a reaction against
the storms of rebellion and the insurgent crowds.
Rodolphe’s and Lieuvain’s words also echo one another in their use of
the discourse of enlightenment. Just as Rodolphe’s imagery goes “from
darkness to light,” the speaker’s moves from blindness to insight. In both
cases, however, we sense that this discourse is misapplied, for the backward
countryside is no more the site of Enlightenment than Rodolphe is the
bearer of true love. The speaker’s surname—Lieuvain—suggests that this
misapplication or decontextualization of discourses—of lieux communs—
is a local phenomenon, a product of the provincial vanity. Throughout
Madame Bovary, this type of language characterizes Flaubert’s representa-
tion of the mœurs de provinces. Whereas other nineteenth-century novels
about country life (e.g., Benito Pérez Galdós’s Doña Perfecta) draw a radi-
cal distinction between the liberal views of the city and the reactionary
anachronism of the locals, the opposition between the capital and
provinces in Flaubert is a matter of degrees of removal from a center of
meaning. Lieuvain’s speech imitates Parisian catchwords but introduces
distortions: it misapplies or decontextualizes political phrases and in the
process waters down their original force. His argument is ultimately reac-
tionary, but it is so through its refraction or misprision of liberal clichés.
Tellingly, Lieuvain is not only provincial but also a substitute. Sent in
lieu of a regional préfet who was to have spoken, he is even more removed
than usual from the center of power and meaning. By making the speaker
a replacement, Flaubert emphasizes the distance of Lieuvain’s phrases from
their origin: the signs this substitute circulates are divorced from the con-
text that gives them meaning. The episode shows how liberal political lan-
guage from the city is unraveled and drained of its force in the provinces
through senseless repetition. At the end of the passage, as the narrator al-
ternates between the seducer’s and the speaker’s words at a speed that
makes them almost indistinguishable, it becomes clear that Rodolphe is as
much a part of this provincial distortion and emptying of meaning as are
the Lieuvains of the world. The passage equates the seduction that leads to
adultery with words that are divorced from their source, emptied of polit-
ical meaning, and absurdly misapplied, with a rhetoric that is used ironi-
cally to repel the very storms it once served to conjure up.
The speaker at the Comices does not specify the upheaval that has caused
the “stormy sea” he evokes. From the standpoint of the audience in Yonville,
the most recent revolt in memory is the July Revolution of 1830. For
Flaubert’s readers in 1856, however, the orator’s mixed metaphor would re-
call more immediately the insurrection of 1848. It is with 1848 that this
distorted language has been most associated. In his reprise of the events of
1848–1851 in The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx famously drew attention to
the decontextualization of signs and discourses that characterized both the
uprising—1848 masqueraded alternately as 1789 and 1793–1795 (15)—
and its ultimate product—Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was a political ad-
venturer who freely manipulated and misapplied the Napoleonic tropes
that were his (dubious) birthright. As Jeffrey Mehlman observes in
Revolution and Repetition, Marx viewed 1848 and its aftermath as a crisis in
representation, “a breakage in the metaphorics of expression itself ” (33).
Though in revolutionary ideology the State was conceived as representing
the entire nation, in practice it gradually came to represent a single class, the
bourgeoisie, which exploited its power. With the emergence of
Bonapartism, however, the State ceased to stand for any class at all: Louis-
Napoléon spoke for no one but himself. As the State was “emptied of its
class content” (15) in Bonapartism, representation broke down altogether.
Marx would later move away from this vision of Bonapartism and associate
Louis-Napoléon’s agenda with the interests of the smallholding peasantry,
but, as Mehlman shows through close readings of the literature of and
about the period, it was the analysis of the Brumaire—its devastating por-
trayal of language and intertextuality gone awry—that most captured the
contemporary response to Bonapartism. At the time, it seemed to many
that Louis-Napoléon had introduced a sort of linguistic parasitism: signs
were freed from their signifieds and blithely grafted onto their opposites in
a farcical negation of the differences that made language meaningful.
The breakdown of expression in Mehlman’s Marx resembles that of
Flaubert’s Comices, for both involve a decontextualization and confusion of
political meaning. As with the agricultural fair in Madame Bovary, more-
over, Mehlman associates this type of language with provincial spaces that
distort and frustrate the revolutionary agendas of the capital. One of
Mehlman’s key examples is the treatment of the Vendée in Victor Hugo’s
1793: in this novel, the locals’ “dogged refusal . . . to entertain that
minimal degree of (centralizing) organization that would allow for the
identification of one’s interest effectively shatters any effort to comprehend
the region within the category of project” (54). Appropriately, Marx called
the Bonaparte regime a “latter-day Vendée.” As in the forest of the Vendée
in 1793, the provincial decontextualization of language in 1848–1851
frustrated attempts to articulate meaningful political projects. What dis-
tinguishes the decontextualization of Mehlman’s Bonaparte from that of
Tanner’s Flaubert is its political function. For Tanner, the sign is liberating
itself from the constrictions of meaning. In Mehlman, in contast, the
breakdown of representation, the separation of words from their sense, is
not a rebellion but a force that frustrates revolution by foiling the articu-
lation of a meaningful political project.
Like Tanner, however, Mehlman is too ready to equate linguistic and
political representation. Where Tanner believes that the dissolution of lan-
guage reflects the dissolution of society, Mehlman associates the sign that
is divorced from its meaning with the state that is divorced from class in-
terests. Like Tanner’s, Mehlman’s logic depends on a homology, a concept
of reflection. His homology, moreover, risks depoliticizing these nonrepre-
sentative signs. As Terry Eagleton has objected,
It is not that political signifiers have become free-standing, as the formalism

of a Mehlman (or his post-Marxist English equivalents) would suggest; such
a claim merely falls prey to the ideology of Bonapartism itself. Bonaparte is
indeed a signifier of class interests, but a complex, contradictory one that
politically constitutes the very interests it signifies. (168)
Eagleton’s observation is a useful corrective. Mehlman is reacting to the lit-

erary vision of Louis Bonaparte, which associated him with a contradictory
and almost self-generating discourse that seemed to have no grounding in
the social reality of the moment. As Eagleton points out, however, the his-
torical phenomenon of Bonapartism was somewhat different. Its dissolu-
tion of language did not entail a loss of political agency. Rather,
Bonaparte’s strategy involved negotiating between incompatible interest
groups and conflicting discourses. This is not to suggest that the contra-
dictory signs—the breakdown of representation in Bonapartism—reflect
the contradictory interests of its constituencies. Such an argument would
not escape the equation of linguistic and political representation against
which Guillory warns. Rather, as Eagleton points out, these signs not only
stand for a social group but also serve to constitute its interests. The fact
that it ceases to represent the world does not mean that it has ceased to im-
pact it. Bonapartism marks not the rise of a sign freed from political ends
so much as the emergence of freed signs put to ideological ends.
In Madame Bovary, Flaubert hints at the political ends to which the de-
contextualized signs of the Comices are put: they are a reaction against the
“stormy sea” of social upheaval. Lieuvain’s empty words serve to distance

the specter of revolution. This opposition between rebellion and reaction
is dramatized in the action of the novel. Rodolphe defines his love as trans-
gressive, as an impulse that transcends the narrow social codes the speaker
represents. From his perspective, desire is a revolutionary force opposed to
the empty political rhetoric of the reactionary speaker. Léon too will de-
fine his desire against an indifferent and meaningless discourse: in the
cathedral episode in Part III, he must draw Emma away from a mettlesome
verger, who drags them on a tour of the church and spews random and in-
significant facts. In each case, however, this opposition between transgres-
sive desire and empty discourse collapses. Just as Rodolphe and Lieuvain
ultimately coincide in their strategies and tropes, so also do Léon and the
verger. At the end of the cathedral episode, Léon pulls Emma into a taxi,
where he is finally able to seduce her. We witness this scene from outside
as the hired coach, blinds lowered, circles the city and the narrator points
out monuments the lovers fail to see. The seduction is ultimately as circu-
lar and indifferent a tour as the verger’s in the cathedral. By collapsing the
opposition between erotic language and the vacuous discourses of author-
ity, Flaubert deflates the subversive pretensions of the former: just as the
discourses of Enlightenment have been appropriated by the reactionary
speaker, so Rodolphe’s romantic clichés have lost their revolutionary force.
The point of the episode, however, is not merely to suggest the common
emptiness of these discourses. It also shows how this indifferentiation and
vacuity can be deployed politically, how it can be made to cater simulta-
neously to conflicting interests and groups. The same words and strategies
that pander to the masses appeal to Emma as signs of her distinction from
them. Just as Bonapartism bows politically to one group at the same time
that it favors another economically, so these words do double duty, consti-
tuting the desires of different audiences in different ways.
As we saw in the previous chapter, O primo Basílio also explores discur-
sive indifferentiation and the political uses to which it may be put. Like
Flaubert, Eça assigns this type of language a reactionary function: the con-
vergence and confusion of political extremes (Julião’s radicalism and
Acácio’s conservativism) serve to distance the threat that Luísa’s reading
introduces. Indifferentiation at the level of rhetoric replaces and contains
the more troubling indifferentiation of class hierarchy in the struggle be-
tween Juliana and Luísa. Eça’s treatment of this language, however, differs
somewhat from Flaubert’s. The Comices illustrates how two forms of
speech—the seducer’s erotic clichés and the orator’s empty political rheto-
ric—cancel one another out as the indifferentiation of Lieuvain’s words
brings out that of Rodolphe’s. Eça, in contrast, opposes a series of actions
impelled by the heroine’s erotic curiosity with the empty political language
of Juliâo and Acácio. It is not that the emptiness of the men’s words reflects
that of the heroine’s but rather that the former suppresses the threatening
political meaning that the latter might unleash. In Flaubert, the revolu-
tionary overtones of erotic language are compromised from the outset: be-
fore Emma even commits adultery, it is clear that the affair can express no
more subversion than the speaker’s empty words. O primo Basílio, however,
introduces a real political threat, which is recontained at the end through
indifferentiated language, through a sort of Bonapartism without
Bonaparte.
La Regenta, which will be the focus of this chapter, deals with these is-
sues in a different way. Whereas Madame Bovary sets up an opposition be-
tween eros and the decontextualized signs of ideological discourse, Clarín’s
seducer, Álvaro, is not struggling against a distorting political language but
rather seducing through it. The opposition here is not between eros and
empty rhetoric but rather between an eroticized decontextualization of
signs (such as Álvaro’s language), on the one hand, and, on the other, an
attempt to articulate a meaningful political agenda through coherent rep-
resentation. As we saw in Chapter 1, Ana and Fermín’s attempt to rise up
against Vetustan conventionality depends on a logic of representation that
is ultimately foiled by Álvaro’s indifferentiation. In reworking Madame
Bovary, Clarín complicates its treatment of the relation between erotic and
political discourses. On the one hand, he introduces the possibility of an
erotic gesture that could represent a political critique. Ana’s “singular pros-
titution” in Chapter 26 is motivated by her anger at economic inequality
in Vetusta. On the other hand, however, he explores how political language
is confused and drained of meaning through an eroticism that decontex-
tualizes discourses and deploys them for very different ends. The analysis
that follows will explore the tension between these two possibilities in La
Regenta. First, it will examine how in Vetustan high society political mean-
ing is dispelled or defused through sexual innuendo. Then, turning to the
heroine, it will explore how the erotic can also become an expression of the
political.
The Marchioness’ Pun
As in Flaubert’s description of the Comices, much of the humor in La

Regenta arises from the misuse and misapplication of phrases. Consider, for
example, the discussion of Ana’s adolescent literary aspirations. The
Marquis de Vegallana fears that Ana’s poetic pretensions will jeopardize her
marital prospects: “And who wants to marry a bluestocking? . . . I should
not like to have a wife more talented than myself ” (113). Not flattered by
this remark, the marchioness takes out her displeasure on one of her guests:
“I don’t want my wife to wear the trousers,” added the effeminate little
baron. And the marchioness, taking vengeance on him for her husband’s re-
mark, said:
“In that case, dear boy, yours must be a sansculotte household.” (113)
The marchioness’ humor functions much like Flaubert’s at the Comices.

Like Lieuvain, she applies Parisian political language to a provincial con-
text and in so doing distorts its meaning. In eighteenth-century France,
aristocrats sported culottes while peasants wore pantalons (hence, one group
of revolutionaries was known as the sans-culottes). The marchioness’ pun,
however, blurs this distinction. Decontextualizing the terms, she equates
the two types of pants. At first glance, this confusion might be interpreted
as subversive: it blurs the distinction between the upper and lower classes
and thereby destabilizes the social hierarchy. This is not, however, the im-
pression we come away with on reading the joke. We are struck rather by
the association she establishes between pantlessness in the nonpolitical
sense (impotence, effeminacy) and pantlessness as a revolutionary sign.
The sans-culotte does not wear the pants in the marchioness’ world: he is
powerless. Her pun drains the term not only of its political meaning but
also of the social threat it evokes.2
It is important to note that the joke does this by introducing an erotic
code: the identification of pants with heterosexual masculinity. This de-
politicization through eroticism is repeated throughout the novel. Sexual
innuendos are often introduced in such a way as to trivialize political terms.
Visita, Obdulia, and Olvido belong to a “Free Fraternity” that is free only
in its morals and fraternal only in its members’ shameless fraternizing. The
equality proclaimed at the end of the novel—“All we women are the same”
(707)—refers not to political or economic justice but rather to the univer-
sality of erotic transgression (after her fall, Ana is just as sinful as all the
other Vetustan women). Even poetic language is neutralized in this way.
Horace’s “pauperum tabernas, regumque turris,” which describes Death as
a menacing force that levels class difference, is misapplied to eros, which is
universal in its rollicking (148). The misapplication neutralizes the force of
the verse. Not only does the erotic distort the meaning and dispel the threat
of concepts such as liberté, egalité, and fraternité, but also political terms are
often reduced to euphemisms for sexuality. The Marquis de Vegallana’s
habit of sleeping with peasants in his territories becomes a quest for “votes
for the distant future” (406). At the end of the novel, when Fermín dis-
cusses Ana’s transgressions with her husband, Víctor tells her that they are
speaking of “political matters” (693). After Ana’s adultery, politics is reduced

to a euphemism, a sign that stands in for a sexual reality.
The marchioness’ pun is thus typical in the way it neutralizes the politi-
cal terms it adopts and confuses their meanings. Nevertheless, it provides an
important clue for understanding the broader plot of the novel: the idea of
a pantless pair that is at once a couple sans-culotte. In much of the criticism
of the novel, Ana’s adultery with Álvaro has been understood as a subversive
gesture, an attempt to break free from the hierarchy and marriage that
oppress her. The revolutionary couple toward whom the marchioness un-
wittingly points, however, is not Ana and Álvaro but rather Ana and Fermín,
a skirted couple that attempts to rise up against the Vetustan status quo. Like
the pun, La Regenta is the story of how a man’s and a woman’s literal pant-
lessness (Ana is pantless because of her sex, and Fermín because of his
vocation) foil their pantlessness in the political and spiritual sense—their
aspirations to truth and freedom, their attempt to rise above the contradic-
tions and hypocrisy of their surroundings. As we saw in Chapter 1, Ana’s
revolutionary project is frustrated by the eroticism she reads into herself—
she sees herself as merely a prostitute and loses sight of the liberties for which
the fille de joie historically stands. In both the pun and the dénouement of
the novel, political meaning is reduced to a meaningless erotic drive.
Free Associating
The marchioness’ pun illustrates the way the erotic drive decontextualizes and
distorts political phrases and thus foils the projects that depend upon them.
This pattern typifies Vetustan society and will ultimately govern the dénoue-
ment of the novel. The portrayal of the heroine, however, offers a brief
glimpse of an alternative. As Ana prepares for general confession at the be-
ginning of the novel, she begins by consulting a pious manual. After a while,
however, her mind strays and no longer registers the word on the page:
She did not turn the page. She stopped reading. Her look was fixed upon
the words: If you have eaten meat.
Mechanically, she repeated those five words, devoid of all meaning for
her; she repeated them in her mind as if they were in an unknown language.
As her thoughts emerged from she knew not what black pit, she took notice
of what she was reading. (64)
For Ana in this scene, words have ceased to represent the concepts for
which they stand. As meaning breaks down, Ana becomes prey to thoughts
that seem to issue from a black pit or well (pozo negro). The well or black
hole is an image that haunts the heroine throughout the novel. Ana im-
mediately feels herself in danger: “She shuddered, and was surprised to
find her teeth clenched so tightly that they ached” (64). Recognizing the
first signs of a nervous attack, she takes her pulse and tests her vision. This
physiological response marks the scene as a moment of crisis. Later in the
novel, Ana’s nervous attacks are explicitly identified as instances of revolt
or upheaval: “A wave of rebelliousness rolled through her blood towards
her brain. Again she feared an attack” (197); “that longing in her very
bowels, which she attributed to her nerves, [came] to torment her, to bel-
low a war-cry inside her head, and to turn everything upside-down” (198).
The breakdown of meaning during Ana’s reading not only threatens her
with upheaval but also represents something foreign: the incomprehensi-
ble words appear to Ana as if written in an unknown language. Ana’s
distracted reading seems to introduce forces that are menacing, foreign,
and revolutionary.
A few pages later, Ana’s mind again wanders while contemplating the
same page:
If you have eaten meat, her sleepy eyes saw again, but she read on. One, two,
three leaves—she went on, unaware of what she was reading [leía sin saber
qué ]. At length she stopped at a line which said:
“The places where you have been . . .”
She could understand that. While turning over the pages she had been
thinking not knowing why, about Don Alvaro Mesía, the president of the
Gentlemen’s Club of Vetusta and the leader of the Dynastic Liberal Party in
the town. But on reading “The places where you have been” her thoughts
suddenly returned to far-off times. As a girl—one old enough to confess—
she used, whenever the book said “Pass your mind over all the places which
you have frequented,” to remember, unintentionally, the ferry-boat at
Trébol, that great sin which she had committed unawares, the night she had
spent in the boat with that boy, Germán, her friend . . . (67)
This passage distinguishes between two moments in the heroine’s thoughts:

her distraction—her unawareness of what she is reading—and her reaction
to a phrase in the book. In the first, Ana’s mind settles arbitrarily on the
image of Álvaro Mesía. He is a default thought, which occupies a vacuum
of meaning and ideas. When Ana reads the phrase “the places where you
have been,” however, her mind moves away from the random placeholder
and reacts to the words on the page. Her reaction is still distracted and me-
chanical—an almost involuntary repetition of an earlier response—but, un-
like her reflection on Álvaro, these thoughts are mediated by the text (the
“But” reinforces the opposition between these two moments). The phrase
in the book triggers a memory of Ana’s childhood friendship with

Germán, an innocent relationship that was misinterpreted by Vetustans as
a sexual scandal. As Ana remembers the past and the way she was branded,
she becomes increasingly bitter and angry at the society that unfairly
judged her:
From that day on the man [her governess’s man friend] would look at her
with eyes ablaze, smile and, as soon as the governess left the room, ask her
for kisses . . . Boys in the street looked at her in the same way as did the man
who kissed Doña Camila; they took her by the arm and tried to make her
go with them . . . [Ana] turned on the light and pushed the heavy counter-
pane aside; her form, of a modern Venus, provocative and voluptuous, was
both revealed and exaggerated by the coloured blanket of fine-spun wool,
drawn close about her . . . Those remembrances of childhood receded, but
the anger which they had awoken, its cause now so distant, did not disap-
pear with them. (70)
The physical representation of the adult Ana and her memory of the reac-
tion she inspired as a girl coincide in this passage: Ana, in her anger, iden-
tifies with the child who was treated as a prostitute and, as she does so,
adopts the appearance of a “modern Venus.” As in the passages examined
in Chapter 1, prostitution is identified here with social critique, with a
revolutionary impulse, a condemnation of abuse and injustice. During this
“quarter of an hour of rebellion” (71), Ana defiantly reproduces with her
bodily stance the prostitution of which she was unfairly accused. Her eroti-
cism has the potential to make a political statement.
Ana, however, is unable to sustain this bitter train of thought for long.
Soon she longs “to placate them,” to clear away the “thistles in her soul.” At
this point, she lapses back into the free association with which the episode
began: “And—she did not know how it happened [sin saber cómo], nor did
she intend it to happen—the Royal Theatre in Madrid came before her
eyes, and she saw none other than Don Alvaro Mesía, the president of the
Gentlemen’s Club, wrapped in a high-collared scarlet cape, singing under
Rosina’s balcony: ‘Ecco ridente in cielo . . .’” (71). Ana forces herself to
focus on the image of Álvaro as Lindoro in The Barber of Seville “in order
to assuage that asperity of soul which so tormented her,” and then envisions
Álvaro “in a close-fitting white top-coat, greeting her as King Amadeus used
to greet people.” Gradually, her irritation subsides: “She had stopped being
wicked, now she felt as she wished to feel” (71). Once again, Mesía is a
default thought to which Ana’s mind inexplicably turns. The “sin saber
cómo” (without knowing how) of her mental leap points back to the “sin
saber qué” (without knowing what) of her initial reading: Ana is experi-
encing the same breakdown of meaning that led her to fixate on the image
of Álvaro at the beginning of the scene. As in the earlier passage, moreover,

it is clear that this default idea is opposed to her previous reflections about
Germán and her mistreatment as a child: Ana resorts to the image of Ál-
varo as Lindoro to quell the anxiety produced by that train of thought, to
put down the “rebellion” in her soul.3
The reactionary function of Álvaro is clarified by the comparison with
King Amadeus. In 1868, Spain experienced an insurrection (the Glorious
or September Revolution) that overthrew the Bourbon monarchy. The
various factions that joined together in the rebellion, however, failed to co-
alesce in the new republican government. In 1870, its leaders decided to
invite a foreign royal of liberal tendency, Amadeus of Savoy, to rule over
Spain and guide it toward greater cohesion and stability. He lasted only
three years. Like King Amadeus, Álvaro in this scene is brought in to re-
store order, to quell upheaval by serving as a reassuring figurehead. Both
the Italian Amadeus and the thoroughly gallicized Álvaro are evasions,
arbitrary foreign signs that calm and draw attention away from the turbu-
lence that goes before them. Whereas Ana’s “rebellion” assigns a political
meaning and a critical function to an erotic figure (the prostitute), Álvaro
is likened to a political figure, but his significance is reduced to the eroti-
cism he projects.
The connection between Álvaro and Amadeus in this passage antici-
pates the emergence of another Amadeo who is also closely associated with
Mesía in the novel: Amadeo Bedoya. Amadeo first appears among the
fauna of Vetusta’s casino and reappears at the end of the work with Álvaro
and Víctor’s duel, in which he serves as the former’s second. Mesía not only
depends on Amadeo at this critical juncture but also mirrors him in many
ways. Just as Álvaro seduces through decontextualized discourse and forms
of trompe l’œil, Amadeo is a master of falsification and simulacra: it is he
who recognizes the false antiquities—the truquage (160)—of the Vegallana
Palace. Amadeo himself is responsible for much of the falsification that
abounds in Vetusta: having acquired the key to the casino’s bookshelf, he
regularly pilfers its tomes, which he replaces with other volumes to cover
up their absence (129). He not only steals the books but also their content:
“As soon as he saw upon his own paper the paragraphs which he copied in
the neat, graceful copperplate hand that God had given him, he considered
them to be all his own work” (130). In the duel at the end of the novel, it
will be he who lends Álvaro the French novel from which they plagiarize
the conditions of the fight.
The portrayal of Bedoya draws out the connection between Álvaro and
political figures who are just symbolic placeholders. On the one hand, his
given name points back to King Amadeus, with whom Ana associates
Álvaro. On the other hand, however, the portrayal of Amadeo Bedoya
anticipates a connection between Álvaro and another liberal-leaning royal

brought in to give direction to a foundering new republic: Louis-Napoléon
Bonaparte. The subject of Amadeus’s (plagiarized) writing is “the life of a
certain brigadier who, not having been in command of the action on a cer-
tain field, would, if he had been, have conquered the glory of Napoleon”
(130). Just as Amadeo, through his forgery, produces a false Napoleon, so
Louis Bonaparte, by parroting his uncle’s discourse, fashions himself as
Napoleon III. Amadeo’s connection with both Amadeus and a Napoleonic
pretender draws out the political implications of Álvaro’s most glaring
character traits. Like King Amadeus, Louis-Napoléon, and the books
Amadeo leaves on the casino bookshelf, Álvaro is a placeholder who dis-
tracts attention from an absence: just as Amadeus and Louis-Napoléon gain
power to supply a lacking political cohesion and Bedoya’s books substitute
for the missing tomes, so Álvaro’s image draws Ana’s attention from the lack
of meaning in her world. Like Amadeo’s book and Louis-Napoléon, more-
over, Álvaro Mesía’s effect depends on imitation—he constantly copies
phrases and ideas from the French novels he reads. Álvaro, Louis-Napoléon,
and the books Amadeo deposits in the casino are all simulacra, replicas that
substitute for an original (the idealized heroes of French fiction, Napoleon
I, and the books Amadeo has stolen). Because they are falsifications and de-
fault figures, they represent neither change nor an authentic social project.
Like Louis-Napoléon, Álvaro ultimately serves not to foster but to put
down an uprising. As is clear in the passage above, his function is to quiet
the upheaval in Ana’s soul. In yielding to Álvaro, Ana will abandon the
struggles that have torn her throughout most of the novel: “I want peace,
peace,” she tells herself,“no more battles inside me” (641).
The reference to Rossini further clarifies this function. Il barbiere di
Siviglia (1816) is based on a 1775 play by Beaumarchais, whose work was
often associated with the French Revolution. The plot of the play and the
opera, the story of an old man’s designs on a young woman in his charge,
was a common one in the late eighteenth century. As Ronald Paulson has
argued, this plot of generational struggle took on an allegorical function at
the time of the French Revolution: it came to stand for the young republi-
cans’ battle against the ancien régime. By the time Rossini reworked it after
the Restoration, however, the political climate had changed, and his treat-
ment of the story reflected “the safe, cynical intellectual landscape of
European conservatism, into which many thinkers and artists of the early
nineteenth century had been frightened by the excesses of the French
Revolution” (Robinson 22). As in the duo from Beltrán y la marquesa de
Pompadour, the emphasis lies not on class-crossing as defiance (the student,
Lindoro, who defies the nobility by seducing Rosina) but rather on class-
crossing as a playful game: the Conte d’Almaviva plays at being a student
just as the Marquise de Pompadour masquerades as a peasant. As Robinson

observes, the aria Lindoro sings is a mock serenade: “[W]e never for a
minute take the Count’s assertions at face value . . . In the largo, phrases of
improbable grandiosity (leaps of a sixth and a seventh) give way to sudden
coloratura bagatelles, ridiculing the text’s pomposities” (22). Like much of
the decontextualization in Vestusta, Ana’s application of a performance seen
in Madrid to provincial life places Álvaro in a role that is not subversive but
rather a parody of subversion, revolution as role-playing.
A False Uprising
The image of Mesía courting from below a woman on a balcony looks

forward to several scenes in the novel that further clarify Álvaro’s role and
the function of decontextualized signs in La Regenta. As we saw in Chapter
1, the balcony has an important function in defining positions in the
novel: one may either project from the balcony (as Fermín does with
Santos) or be projected upon from above (as Ana is during the Nazarene
procession). Through her relationship with Álvaro at the end of the novel,
Ana ultimately chooses to be on top, to project from the balcony, upon
which she is seduced. Ana’s fall is anticipated by another balcony scene at
the beginning of Part II, which also recalls the free associations at the be-
ginning of Part I.4 While riding through Vetusta one afternoon, Álvaro en-
counters Ana on her balcony and strikes up a conversation. Noticing that
she is depressed and vulnerable, Álvaro quickly realizes that were he not on
horseback this might be a “quarter of an hour” (362), his term for a mo-
ment propitious for seduction. Álvaro’s jargon points back to Ana’s reflec-
tions reading the pious manual—to the “quarter of an hour of rebellion”
that she suppressed by dwelling on his image. At the same time, the scene
looks forward to the successful seduction at the end of the novel: both bal-
cony scenes occur during the misleadingly warm days of November known
in Vetusta as St. Martin’s summer.
Like the “examination of conscience,” the episode at the beginning of
Part II begins with a moment of distraction in which Ana cannot make
sense of the text before her:
Ana looked at the irregular lines as if they were written in Chinese. She did
not know why, but she could not read, she did not understand any of it.
Even though inertia kept her passing her eyes over it, her attention strayed
elsewhere, and she read the first five lines three times without discovering
what they meant. (352)
To alleviate her frustration, Ana steps out to the balcony, but the world still
seems meaningless: the rituals and conventions of Vetustan life strike her
as “mechanical as a madman’s rhythmical repetition of phrases and ges-
tures” (354). The empty words produce in her soul an “aridity” that sur-
rounds her “as fog envelops a ship at sea, shutting out every ray of light
from heaven” (360).
As in the earlier scene, Ana involuntarily thinks back to her childhood:
Through no effort of her own [sin que ella los provocase], remembrances
of her childhood came into her mind, fragments of the conversations of
her father, the philosopher—the maxims of a sceptic, the paradoxes of a
pessimist, which in the distant times when she had heard them had con-
tained no clear meaning for her, but which now seemed worthy of her
attention. (360)
The heroine attempts to give meaning to the disconnected phrases of her

father, who was for many years a revolutionary conspirator. And as in
Chapter 3, she recalls a friend who has seemed to offer an escape from the
misery she is suffering: Germán, whose name suggests hermano (brother),
is now Fermín de Pas, Ana’s “hermano del alma” (soul brother). Just as ear-
lier Ana remembered her attempt to run away with Germán in search of
her father, she now recalls her hope that Fermín “would help her to escape
from this tedium and take her, without leaving the cathedral, to higher
regions, full of light” (360). Ana desires to rise up above her world but is
frustrated by the fact that she continually “[falls] back to earth” (360).
As at the end of her examination of conscience, what finally soothes her
is the coincidental appearance of Álvaro below her balcony. On seeing her,
Álvaro makes his horse “paw the ground, prance and pirouette [with a
masterly use of his hands and spurs], as if it were showing impatience of
its own accord and not because of its rider’s hidden maneuvers” (361). Ál-
varo’s entrance is an inversion of Ana’s reflections up until now. Whereas
at first Ana attempts to master a series of fragments from the past and to
impose meaning on randomness, Álvaro seeks to give his mastery—his
control over the horse’s movements—an arbitrary appearance. The horse’s
“impatience” mirrors Ana’s frustration with her world. Both are expressed
through random signs—the detached phrases Ana remembers and chaotic
movements of the steed—but the latter are carefully crafted by the rider.
Álvaro deploys the arbitrary to produce a revolution-like effect, a per-
formance rather than the real thing. Ana’s desire to rise up before Álvaro’s
appearance is answered by the steed’s false uprising.
Causing “a relaxation of all her being” (362), Álvaro’s image serves as a
tranquilizer. Ana initially sought to rise up despite a tendency to fall.
Mesía, in contrast, produces the effect of a fall that feels like an uprising:
Ana “let herself slip, enjoying the fall, as if this pleasure were a revenge for
old social injustices” (362). The critical words here are “as if.” Álvaro’s
erotic strategy is to create a revolution-like experience that deflects Ana’s
social anger and directs its energy toward himself. Later, Ana’s adultery
with Álvaro will be described similarly as “falling into heaven” (633). With
Álvaro, the rising up is always subordinated to the fall and the political to
the erotic drive. Ana’s revolt is reduced to a controlled release of energy
much like the horse’s.
As with the marchioness’ pun and the examination of conscience,
Álvaro’s simulacrum of an uprising dispels the political and replaces it with
the erotic. He takes advantage of a vacuum of meaning to assert his con-
trol. At first, Ana is threatened by a fog that blocks “every ray of light from
heaven” (360). This suggests the breakdown of meaning that frustrates Ana
before Álvaro’s arrival. In the midst of this confusion, Álvaro seems “a ray
of sunlight in the midst of a black fog”; she sees him as “a castaway alone
on a rock in the middle of the ocean sees the ship which comes to save her”
(363). Though he seems to bring clarity, however, Álvaro ultimately causes
Ana to feel as though she is “falling into a well” (362), an image associated
with the breakdown of meaning Ana experiences as she reads the pious
manual.5 Ana, in other words, has moved from one set of detached, empty
signs to another, from the obscurity of the “fog” to that of the well. The
only difference between the two is that the latter seems at first a refuge or
salvation from the former. Like Rodolphe’s movement from darkness into
light or M. Lieuvain’s from blindness to insight, the movement from the
black fog to Álvaro’s ray of sunlight is not a true enlightenment but rather
a way of distancing something more threatening. Just as Flaubert’s provin-
cial speaker conjures away the memory of revolution, so Álvaro suppresses
Ana’s disquieting uprising with a reassuring performance.
Throughout the novel, Álvaro introduces language and ideas that, like
the horse’s movements, seem subversive. What marks them as false, how-
ever, is the passive position in which they place the heroine. Fermín en-
courages Ana to exercise her will, to challenge the Vetustan status quo. At
the beginning of the episode, she struggles to see her way out of the fog by
puzzling over and trying to find meaning in the arbitrary signs she con-
fronts. With Álvaro and the well or black pit, in contrast, the arbitrary is
not a focus of concentration but rather a source of distraction. Mesmerized
by the curvets of the horse, the false uprising, Ana ceases to question her-
self and what she hears: “On experiencing a sudden revolution deep inside
herself in the presence of the noble horseman who had come with the
curvets of his mount to shatter the sad silence of a day of stagnation, she
did not hesitate to believe what inner voices told her about independence,
love, joy and pure, beautiful voluptuousness, worthy of sublime souls”

(369). Ana’s train of thought is represented here as Emma’s often is by
Flaubert: as a list of clichés enumerated so quickly that the meaning of
each is lost in the sheer accumulation. Ana’s “revolution” consists merely of
rhetoric or, as the narrator puts it, “sophistry”:
These thoughts flew around Ana’s mind like a whirlwind which she was pow-
erless to stop, as if someone else’s shouts were echoing in there; they filled her
with a terror which was delightful. If something inside Ana suspected decep-
tion and noticed the sophistry in that chattering mob of rebellious ideas
reclaiming supposed rights, she tried to suppress it. Her will, deceiving itself,
took the cowardly and selfish decision to “let itself go” [dejarse ir]. (369)
What Álvaro encourages is not a willful revolution, a struggle to articulate

one’s own voice, but a passive state in which one’s thoughts sound as
though they are “voices of others.”
The conjunction of images in this passage—the whirlwind, the chat-
tering masses, the idea of a love “worthy of sublime souls”—recalls the
scene with which this discussion began: the seduction at the Comices. Just
as M. Lieuvain evokes the “stormy sea” of political uprising only to reaf-
firm the current stability, and just as Rodolphe points to the yelling crowd
only to emphasize his and Emma’s distance from it, so Ana in this passage
feels the “chattering mob” of her ideas as if they were “someone else’s
shouts” and consequently takes delight in the terror of the “whirlwind.”
Though it occurs within her head, this “sudden revolution” is experienced
at a remove, with a suspicion of insincerity that neutralizes its threat and
intensifies its pleasure. Ana is not actively reclaiming rights so much as let-
ting herself go, allowing phrases to circle about in her head. The phrase
Clarín italicizes—dejarse ir—recalls the description of Luísa’s character in
O primo Basílio as “full of letting her will go [deixar-se ir]” (210; Eça also
italicizes the verb). Like Luísa in her affair with Basílio, Ana sinks into po-
litical passivity with Álvaro.
Tears of Solidarity
When Ana recounts the episode to Fermín in confession in Chapter 17,

she recognizes that her experience was not truly a revolution:
“At other times,” she said, “the dryness turns into tears, a desire for self-
sacrifice, a determination to seek self-denial—as you know. But yesterday
my elation took me off in a different direction. I can’t—I can’t explain it

very well. If I tell you in the only way I know . . . taken literally [al pie de la
letra] it’s a sin, a rebellion, it’s horrible—but not how I felt it.” (392)
Her “sudden rebellion” is a rebellion in name only—al pie de la letra. It is

not one in spirit: her experience lacks the stridency of true revolt. Ana con-
trasts this false rebellion with another type of experience: an indignation at
social injustice that is expressed through tears and resolution.6 To give
Fermín an example, she recalls her sympathy for a child too poor to buy a
balloon: “One day, after giving a poor child a peseta to buy a balloon like
those which the other children were sharing out, she had had to hide her
face so as not to be seen weeping” (392).
Her bitterness at economic injustice and her solidarity with the poor boy
point to an earlier episode in the novel in which Ana is similarly moved by
the sufferings of deprived children. In the Boulevard scene in Part I, Ana
passes a group of young “urchins” staring at the display of a cake shop and
trying to guess at the names of pastries they have never tasted:
She always felt a tightening in her throat and tears in her eyes when she saw
poor children admiring cakes or toys in shop windows. They were not for
them, and this seemed the most terrible of all the cruelties wrought by injus-
tice. But what was more, Ana—without knowing why—regarded these raga-
muffins, arguing about the names of morsels which they would never eat, as
companions in misfortune, as younger brothers [hermanitos]. She wanted to
go home. Being moved like this by all she saw was something which alarmed
her. “She feared an attack, she was feeling very nervous.” (194)
As with the boy without a balloon, Ana feels indignation here at the wrongs
of society and is moved to tears in her solidarity with the deprived children.
The fact that Ana identifies them as hermanitos (little brothers) recalls her
childhood friend, the peasant boy Germán-hermano, and her adult “her-
mano del alma,” Fermín. As in the examination of conscience in which Ana
reacts against society’s misjudgment of her and Germán, the mistreatment
of children in the Boulevard scene sparks not only Ana’s anger but also a
nervous attack. In her nervousness, Ana has assumed the tension and edgi-
ness of the lower classes, the “nervous excitement [of all the plebs]” (192).
Her physical identification with the poor develops into a revolutionary
energy: “She and the poor children licking the glass panes of cake-shops
were the paupers of Vetusta. A wave of rebelliousness rolled through her
blood towards her brain. Again she feared an attack” (197). Ana has
adopted the stance of the desheredados, the disinherited of society, and feels
agitated to revolt. Her experience looks forward to her identification with
the boy who cries for bread during the Stabat Mater: in that scene, her tears
will again lead her to rise up against society and to embrace the cause of the
“brother” it mistreats (Fermín).
The description of the poor boys on the Boulevard recalls the examina-
tion of conscience not only in Ana’s sense of brotherhood and her nervous
attack but also because these emotions are triggered by a similar relation
with words. The children’s predicament before the cake shop is not merely
an economic one. They are also challenged linguistically, unable to link
words they have heard with their referents. It is their effort to restore mean-
ing to language, to overcome a breakdown of representation, that makes the
episode so poignant for Ana. Just as the heroine in the examination of con-
science and balcony scene strives to understand the significance of the text
and signs that surround her, the children with whom she feels brotherhood
and who inspire another “rebellion” in her soul struggle to match the word
with what it represents. The episode anticipates Ana’s attempt to make sense
of St. Theresa during her convalescence.7 Just as the children long to name
the sweets in the cake shop, “Ana, flouting the doctor’s orders, tried to read
that beloved book, taking it up as a child takes up sweetmeat” (441) but is
unable at first to make the letters on the page come together as words: “The
letters jumped, exploded, hid, turned over, changed colour, her head
whirled” (441). In each case, the struggle to make sense of puzzling signs is
identified with a child’s longing for sweets. Ana’s relationship with these
brothers and with Fermín, who encourages her reading, is clearly a revolu-
tionary one. In the novel, she must choose between the uprising inspired by
her tears of solidarity and the false rising up of Álvaro’s horse.
A False Napoleon
Just as Ana’s “quarter of an hour of rebellion” is quelled by the image of

Álvaro-Lindoro, and her frustration at the world is deflected by the
curvets of Álvaro’s horse, so the children at the pastry shop on the
Boulevard are answered in the text by another group of “urchins” whose
word game leads to a simulacrum not unlike Mesía’s on his horse. Toward
the end of Part II, Fermín de Pas walks along the Espolón in search of Ana
Ozores and encounters a group of poor children playing a game called
“zurriágame la melunga” (“bash ‘em on the brain-box!”). In contrast to
the earlier scene, which is set on the Boulevard, a lower-class avenue, these
children play on the Espolón, a promenade popular among the clergy and
aristocracy. This shift in setting hints at the outcome of the episode,
which reveals the forces that will squash the revolutionary solidarity Ana
feels on the Boulevard.
The game the children play is clearly about power. A little girl, desig-
nated the “mother,” sits under an iron column wielding a whip fashioned
from a headscarf. The phallic symbols of the column and the whip estab-
lish her as the authority figure in the game: as the narrator notes, her
weapon “stood for coercive power” (320). The boys in the group take turns
holding the other end of the whip and try to guess the word she has in
mind. The child who guesses correctly wins power over the rest, whom he
beats with the whip. As in the episode in Chapter 9, what the game reveals
is the children’s struggle to match words with their meaning:
“Something beginning with [Na]!” the mother cried.

“[Big nose (narigudo)]” replied a blond-haired boy, the strongest in the
group, who always took first place, by right of conquest.
The headscarf went to the next boy.
“Something beginning with [Na].”
“[Noses (narices)].”
“No. Now you. Something beginning with [Na].”
“[Napoleon].”
“Hey, bighead, what’s [Napoleon]?” yelled the Samson of the group, ap-
proaching his dear friend and thrusting an elbow in his nose.
“A [napoleon] is a sort of peseta, by Christ!”
“What do you mean a peseta?”
“Just what I say!”
“I’ll smash your . . . if you weren’t such a little rat. I’d smash your teeth
in—for putting it on.”
“So what? That’s not it,” said the girl, making peace. (320)
The controversy in this passage testifies to the children’s desire for and
struggle with language. The Samson of the group wants to know what the
unfamiliar word represents. The answer he is given, however, is insuffi-
cient: the children know “napoleon” as a coin and nothing more. The
choice of word is telling. We expect that the child will identify “Napoleon”
with the historical figure but instead he defines it as a monetary unit.
Ignorant of the origin of the word (the referent to which the coin points),
the boy recognizes only the signifier that circulates. The coin is yet another
instance of decontextualization in the novel: in Vetusta the French revolu-
tionary is reduced to pocket change, historical meaning to exchange value.
The passage from the historical Napoleon to napoleon-as-money antic-
ipates the movement of the rest of the passage and of the novel as a whole:
“Where can you find it?”

“Ladies and gentlemen eat it.”
“That isn’t fair, skinny! How should I know what ladies and gentlemen eat?”
“Well, you might have seen it sometimes.”
“What colour is it?”

“Yellow, yellow.”
“[Oranges (naranjas)], by Christ!” howled the young urchin as he tugged
on the headscarf, getting ready to set about his companions with it.
“You’re pulling my arm off, you pig. Anyway, that isn’t the word!”
The other youngsters had already made good their escape and were run-
ning along the road and the Mall.
“Come back! Come back! That isn’t the word!” shouted the mother.
“It is! It is! Crikey! I’ll smash your . . . [oranges] are yellow, aren’t they?
And they taste good, don’t they?”
“But you eat [oranges], too.”
“Of course I do—when I can pinch them from Señora Jeroma’s stall.”
“Well, that’s not the word. Your turn next. Something beginning with
[Na].”
A thin, pale, nearly naked boy touched the end of the headscarf; his eyes
gleamed, his voice trembled, and with a timid look in the direction of the
[oranges] boy he whispered:
“Custard! [natillas]”
“Bash ‘em on the brain-box” cried the mother with enthusiasm. “Bash ‘em
on the brain-box!”
And they all ran away as the victor followed them on wavering legs with-
out any great desire to flog his friends, pleased with his triumph but not
anxious for revenge.
Blondie would not run. He was protesting.
“For Christ’s sake! What’s custard?” he screamed as he held his hand up in
front of his face while the Mouse made [simulacra of ] attacks on him.
(320–321)8
The development of the scene is clearly allegorical. The girl who plays at
being a mother, with a whip is a reflection of Fermín’s domineering mother,
whose tyranny he has sought to shake throughout the chapter. At the same
time, however, the girl also points to the new woman in his life, who is also
an enigma he must decipher: Ana Ozores. Just as Fermín must contend with
Álvaro for control of the heroine (and through her the city), so the boys
struggle for the girl’s whip and the power it confers. The conflict between El
Ratón and El Rojo parallels the rivalry between Álvaro and Fermín. Like the
muscular Fermín, whose strength intimidates even Mesía, El Rojo is the
strongest of the boys and has earned a prominent position in the group
through “right of conquest” (320). Despite his strength, however, the
woman at the center of the game has the ability to strip him of his power.
Fittingly, he is described as the Samson of the group—an allusion that rein-
forces his connection to Fermín. Just as the mighty Samson is rendered pow-
erless by his desire for Delilah, it is in his longing for Ana that Fermín truly
begins to feel the shackles (the vows) that restrain his vigorous body.
In contrast to El Rojo, El Ratón is distinguished not by force but by

words. Like Álvaro Mesía, he succeeds because he knows the ways and the
language of the upper classes, and his victory is predicated on a breakdown
of representation: it is only the other children’s inability to match sweet-
meats with their names that allows El Ratón to prevail. His triumph is that
of napoleon-as-money, of a sign that is, for the rest of the group, divorced
from its meaning. Like Álvaro’s success at the end of the novel, it is the tri-
umph not of a forceful revolutionary such as the historical Napoleon but
of a crafty simulacrum, of a Louis-Napoleonic figure who circulates de-
contextualized signs to maneuver his way into power: in his moment of
glory, El Ratón produces simulacros (simulacra).
Watching the children at play, thus, Fermín is witnessing an allegory of
his relationship with Ana, the failure of which is anticipated at the end of
the episode. When Fermín approaches the children to ask if they have seen
her carriage, their response is a flurry of words:
“Have you seen two coaches going up the hill?”

“Yes.”
“No.”
“Two.”
“Three.”
“Down the hill.”
“You’re lying, big head. I’ll flatten . . . ! Up the hill, Your Reverence.”
“It was a wagonette.”
“It was a coach, show-off!”
“I’ll smash . . . !”
“I’ll flatten . . . !” (321–322)
At the end of the episode, representation, reliable language, has disap-

peared. Unable to make heads or tails of the children’s response, Fermín is
foiled in his quest by the indifferentiation of their language. Whereas the
“urchins” on the Boulevard long to match word to referent, and Ana under
Fermín’s influence seeks to make sense of (to differentiate the letters of )
St. Theresa’s life, the children on the Espolón succumb to signs that circu-
late divorced from their origin.
The episode anticipates the game that precedes the heroine’s adultery at
the end of the novel. As Álvaro and Ana exchange confidences at the
Vegallana’s Vivero estate, the other guests play
a children’s game known in Vetusta as “Hunt the Truncheon,” which consists

in the hiding of a handkerchief converted into a whip and the search for it
aided by those well-known directions, warm and cold. The one who finds it
runs after the others whipping them until they reach the safety of the den.
This innocent game gave rise to a multiplicity of delightful incidents among

the players, who were the very opposite of innocent. Often two hands, one a
woman’s and the other a man’s, would feel for the truncheon in the same
hole, as people ran away they would bump into one another, and historical
truth requires that it be owned, however unlikely it might appear, that these
youngsters running like lunatics in a throng around the narrow gallery, fleeing
from the whip, often fell upon the floor in a heap of confusion as their backs
were flogged by the knotted handkerchief. (632–633)
The detail of the handkerchief that serves as a whip clearly links the passage
back to the children playing on the Espolón. Both games end in confusion
and indifferentiation—the children’s jumbled responses to Fermín’s question
become the tangled mass of bodies on the floor of the Vivero estate. The
placement of this scene right before the adultery confirms what the ending
of Part I foreshadowed: it is Álvaro who wins the game. In this episode, it is
clear that Mesía has finally usurped Fermín’s position: Ana speaks with
Álvaro “as with another soul brother” (632). The two games are interesting,
however, not only for their similarities but also for their differences. As we
have seen, the Espolón episode is a political allegory—a representation of the
two rivals who struggle for the heroine. In the game at the Vivero, this po-
litical commentary is replaced by erotic play; the difference between two
forces has been collapsed into an indifferentiated pile of lusting bodies. The
transition from one scene to the other reflects the indifferentiation and
breakdown of representation that is introduced with the adultery at the end
of the novel. Eroticism once again dispels political meaning.
The relation between the games is a typical example of the way Clarín
uses textual parallelisms to spell out his commentary. Another example of
this that at once mirrors the games and comments upon them is the par-
allelism between Fermín’s mother, Paula, and Ramona, one of Álvaro’s
many conquests. Like the children’s game on the Espolón, Paula’s story
appears in Chapter 14, which explores Fermín’s character and the influ-
ences that have formed it. As a young woman, Paula works as a house-
keeper for a local priest. Though generally a devout man, her boss feels one
night inexplicably drawn to his maid and makes an (unsuccessful) attempt
on her honor. Ever manipulative, Paula makes the price of her silence his
complete submission to her will. Shortly afterwards, an ex-sailor, Francisco
de Pas, begins to court her. Paula initially resists, but Francisco insists
swearing that his intentions are honorable. At first, he courts her “follow-
ing the local usage”: he comes to talk to her each night “from the
balustraded platform running around the granary” (333). After a while,
however, he changes his approach: “One night Francisco had broken their
agreement, audaciously entering the granary itself, Paula had struggled,
struggled until overcome—she swore it before a crucifix—overcome by the

gunner’s strength” (333). It is the struggle in the granary that finally con-
vinces Francisco to make good on his word: he has discovered that she is a
true virgin and not, as many suspected, the priest’s mistress. Paula tells the
priest that she is pregnant and instructs Francisco to refuse to marry her:
“‘Let the priest make you an offer. And don’t say yes to his first promise,
wait for the price to rise. Don’t say yes the second time, either. The third
time, give in’” (334). After they marry, Francisco continues to make con-
quests: he was “a man who had his fancies, according to his wife. He liked
to recount his exploits, and even his amorous adventures—these in se-
cret—as he enjoyed a drink with a customer after setting up a few skins of
the deep red wine of Toro” (334).
Like Francisco, Álvaro Mesía is given to making drunken reflections on
his amorous exploits. At a banquet in honor of Vetusta’s only atheist,
Pompeyo Guimarán, Álvaro recalls his struggle to seduce a country girl
named Ramona who, like Paula, sleeps in a granary and puts up a formi-
dable resistance to his advances: she “defended herself with her fists, her
feet, her teeth, arousing a savage, intense, invincible lust which he had
never felt before” (464). In contrast to Francisco, however, Álvaro is con-
vinced not of the girl’s honor but of her lust: “[S]uch scenes of silent gym-
nastic love were not new to her” (464). Hers is a “voluptuous barbarity,” a
“savage pleasure.” At the end of the struggle, Ramona threatens Álvaro
with a dry measure, and he flies through a window. Like Francisco’s nego-
tiation with the priest, however, the struggle is repeated three times, and
on the third attempt Álvaro is victorious: “[I]f it weren’t for the rule that
in good literature comedy must not end in tragedy, that restless mound
would have been the burying place of Álvaro and Ramona, suffocated by
one of our humblest cereals” (465).
Ramona’s story echoes many elements of Paula’s story but gives them a
more comic and trivial inflection. Just as the game at the Vivero turns the
political allegory of “Bash ‘em on the Brain-box” into mere erotic play, so
Álvaro’s conquest of Ramona rewrites Paula’s ruthless social climbing as an
amusing amorous joust. The former seems drawn from a naturalist novel;
the latter is defined as comedy (at the end, “[a]pplause and laughter
drowned the narrator’s voice” 465). Paula’s strategy inverts the social hier-
archy (she comes to control her master) and introduces a figure—the priest
who breaks his vows—that belongs to the iconography of revolution. As
we will see in Chapter 5, Clarín has shaped Fermín’s character after the
hero of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, a novel written shortly after the
French Revolution. Lewis’ hero, Father Ambrosio, is a priest who breaks
his vows and shatters the most basic social bonds. At the end of the novel,
his personal uprising is mirrored by the uncontrollable mob that invades a
neighboring convent and persecutes its nuns. The priest who attempts to
burst free from the restraints of society was an image of the revolution. The
presence of the lascivious priest in Paula’s story marks it as a tale about the
breakdown of social hierarchies and conventions, as an unsettling vignette.
Álvaro’s seduction of Ramona lacks this edge. It recalls not the bursting en-
ergy of Lewis’s monk but rather the humorous one-night stands of the can-
ciones de serranas in the Arcipreste de Hita’s Libro de buen amor. Political
meaning is once again subordinated to erotic play: Álvaro compares him-
self to Caesar in Munda, but his battlefield is a bed (or in this case, a
haystack). Like the game at the Vivero, the episode ends with an erotic par-
ody of punishment. Surrender here is pure delight. The genuine conflict
between El Ratón and El Rojo and between Paula and Francisco is dis-
solved in the later episodes into feigned oppositions, frivolous simulacra of
political struggle.
A Magic-Lantern Show
The relevance of these games to the main plot and its dénouement is clar-
ified at the end of Chapter 14, which emphasizes the linguistic threat that
looms over Fermín’s project. After walking away from the children on the
Espolón, Fermín sees two carriages—one open, the other closed—return-
ing from the country. Giddy from a day of frolicking, the passengers sing
as they drive down the Espolón toward the Vegallana Palace. To Fermín’s
dismay, Ana and Álvaro sit together in the closed carriage. Concerned, de
Pas walks to the Vegallana mansion and attempts to spy on its occupants
from without:
The balcony windows projected great rectangles of light on to the black wall
of the house opposite, and across these patches of garish, impudent bril-
liance shadowy forms passed, as in a magic-lantern show. Sometimes there
was the figure of a woman, sometimes an enormous hand, or a moustache
like a watering hose. That was what De Pas saw opposite the boudoir;
opposite the salon windows the shadows on the wall were smaller, but nu-
merous and indistinct, thronging together and making his head swim. (324)
The image of black figures against a background of white rectangles is a

clear evocation of the written page.9 Like the convalescent Ana struggling
to distinguish the letters of St. Theresa’s life, Fermín is trying to isolate,
read, and interpret these separate signs—the detached body parts—and to
assemble them into a coherent whole, into a corpus or text. The back-
ground against which he attempts to make out these signs is the bedroom
of the Vegallana’s late daughter, Emma. This detail suggests indifference,

the indelicacy of a society that allows a girl’s deathbed to become the site
of an amorous rendezvous. At the same time, however, it also points to dif-
ference, to the way Clarín distinguishes his project from Flaubert’s. Just as
Fermín is trying to separate Ana from the blurry figures in Emma’s room,
so Clarín attempts to differentiate his heroine from the clichés and empty
language of the Emma who precedes her: Madame Bovary. Fermín’s read-
ing is a metatextual moment in the novel. Both he and Clarín struggle to
salvage La Regenta from the indifferentiation that threatens her.
In its structure, this metatextual episode recalls a similarly symbolic
scene in Victor Hugo’s 1793, in which the aristocrat Lantenac attempts to
read a bell he sees but cannot hear: he must understand the tolling, the
bell’s signs, from the alternation of black and white. For Jeffrey Mehlman,
the episode is an instance in which the text precedes the voice: “[I]t is the
bizarre and almost dream-like movement of a hieroglyphic, a form of
script no longer subservient to the ideality of voice” (64). Both Fermín and
Lantenac read a mute, oneiric text that is cut off from the sounds (the
voice, the origin) that give it meaning. Both confront “a silent and repeti-
tive play of difference” (63), what Mehlman calls the “writing machine.”
In the examples Mehlman studies, the writing machine is a force that pro-
duces an indifferentiation of signs, a confusing mishmash of words di-
vorced from their meanings, context or sources that confounds any at-
tempt to articulate a coherent political project. As Fermín observes the
window, his project—his desire to rise up with Ana against the conven-
tionality and injustices of Vetustan life—is foiled by precisely this type of
indifferentiation and arbitrariness: the confusing shadows opposite the
salon interfere with his attempt to distinguish the figures. Like the chil-
dren’s response about the carriages on the Espolón, these dizzying shadows
anticipate the indifferentiation that will ultimately foil his project with
Ana. Whereas Fermín before the window and Ana before her book seek to
distinguish and make sense of the alternation of black and white, Fermín’s
opponent, Álvaro, is “like a man playing himself at chess and taking as
much interest in the white pieces as in the black” (157). With him, the dif-
ference collapses into sameness, into the blurry, decontextualized signs he
circulates.
The indifferentiation into which Ana will sink is clear at the end of the
episode:
“Of course it can’t be her,” thought the priest in the porch.

In spite of these reflections, which could not have been more rational,
De Pas felt uneasy. The darkness in the balcony was like a vacuum—it was
stifling him. The shadowy woman’s head disappeared for a moment. There
was solemn silence and then the clear ringing smack of a bilateral kiss and a
shriek like Rosina’s shriek in the first act of The Barber of Seville.
The canon theologian breathed again. “It isn’t her, it’s Obdulia.” There
was nobody on the balcony now and Don Fermín left the porch and hur-
ried away, hugging the wall. “It wasn’t her, it certainly wasn’t her,” he was
thinking. “It was that other woman.” (325)
What began as a text about Ana has become a shadowy image of Obdulia
Fandiño. This confusion between the two women is an important motif in
the novel: often Obdulia appears in the novel when we expect Ana. When
the swing is caught in a tree at the Vegallana Palace, it is not Ana but
Obdulia whom Álvaro and Fermín compete to rescue. This is also the case
in Clarín’s rewriting of the cathedral scene in Madame Bovary: Obdulia,
rather than Ana, is assigned Emma’s place in the episode. Obdulia, thus,
represents the threat of becoming like Emma, of falling into the indiffer-
entiation and clichés that Flaubert’s heroine cannot escape. The question
of Clarín’s novel is whether Ana will become like Obdulia, whether she is
ultimately “one among many.” In this scene, it is Obdulia who laughs like
Rosina, but as we know from Ana’s reflections at the beginning of the
novel, she too is vulnerable to Lindoro, to the simulacra Álvaro creates. By
the corresponding section of Part II (Chapter 33), it will be she and not
Odulia whom Fermín rejects.
4
On Tour
The tower, a romantic poem in stone, a delicate hymn, with its gentle lines
of silent eternal beauty, was a sixteenth-century work (although begun
earlier) in the Gothic style—but a Gothic tempered, it could be said, by an
instinctive sense of prudence and harmony which curbed the vulgar excesses
of such architecture. One could gaze at that stone finger, which showed the
way to heaven, for hours on end without tiring. It was not one of those
towers with spires so delicate that they seem to be on the point of snapping,
spindly rather than slender, and full of affectation like overdressed young
ladies who lace their corsets tightly. This tower was a solid one, but no less
charged with spiritual grandeur for all that; it rose like a mighty castle to its
upper gallery, adorned with elegant balustrades, from which it launched
itself upwards in the shape of a graceful, tapering pyramid, inimitable in its
measurements and proportions. Like a mass of muscle and sinew, stone,
wreathing around stone, climbed skywards, balancing acrobatically in mid-
air; and as if by some marvelous feat of juggling, a great gilded bronze sphere
stood upon the tip of the limestone pyramid, seemingly held there by mag-
netism, and on top of this sphere was a smaller one and on this a cross of
iron surmounted by a lightning conductor. (21)
La Regenta begins with a tower and a tour. The tower is the spire of the
cathedral in Vetusta, a “poem in stone” to which Clarín dedicates poetic
prose in the second paragraph of his novel. Sturdy and awe-inspiring, it is
very different from the fragile, affected steeples that abound elsewhere,
spires gussied up like young misses in skintight bodices. Vetusta‘s tower is
rather an imposing structure, one worthy of its frequent occupant, Fermín
de Pas, with whom it is explicitly identified later in the novel: “He was a
little like his beloved cathedral tower, also powerful, well-proportioned,
well-built and elegant and mystical; but made of stone” (233).
Though the outside of the cathedral is sober and solemn, exaggeration

and artificiality cannot be kept from within. Shortly after Fermín’s survey
of the city, the tightly-laced young ladies of Clarín’s metaphor take on flesh
with the appearance of Obdulia Fandiño, whose scarlet doublet is
stretched over a corset that gives her the shape of a woman “excessively en-
dowed by nature with the attributes of her sex” (44). Obdulia accompanies
a provincial hidalgo and his wife on a tour of the cathedral led by
Saturnino Bermúdez, an expert in Vetustan antiquities known for his
pedantic explanations and baroque rhetoric. Saturnino’s verbosity and
Obdulia’s scandalously gaudy dress introduce within the cathedral the ex-
cess and artificiality that its spire avoids.
They also introduce the first echo in La Regenta of Clarín’s principal
model: Madame Bovary.1 As Saturnino leads the provincials on a soporific
tour, the infamously promiscuous Obdulia amuses herself by flirting with
him on the sly; in the darker chapels of the church, she squeezes his hand and,
when her friends are not looking, engages in a discreet game of footsie. In its
combination of pedantic tour and profane seduction, Clarín’s episode is a
clear reworking of Part III, Chapter 1, of Madame Bovary, Emma and Léon’s
assignation in the Rouen Cathedral. As in Chapter 1 of La Regenta, Flaubert’s
lovers are taken on a tour by a dull and mettlesome verger who spews endless
and empty facts about the church. The impatient Léon fears he will never
stop speaking. In both novels, the episodes describe the boredom produced
by useless erudition and an eroticism that is out of place in a sacred space.
But where Clarín’s tour is preceded by a tower, Flaubert’s ends with one.
As Léon finally interrupts the verger’s tour and flees the cathedral with
Emma, their guide reminds them that they have yet to see its spire:
“Monsieur! The steeple! the steeple!”

“No, thanks!” said Léon.
. . . Léon fled, for it seemed to him that his love, after being reduced to
stonelike immobility in the church for nearly two hours, was now going to
vanish like smoke up that truncated pipe, that elongated cage, that fretwork
chimney or what you will, that perches so precariously and grotesquely atop
the cathedral like the wild invention of a crazy metal-worker. (287)
In its extravagance, the Rouen tower resembles the affected, corseted

women of Clarín’s metaphor. Truncated and grotesque, it contrasts with its
sinewy, muscular, and imposing counterpart in Clarín’s novel. Not only is
it emasculated—a “truncated pipe”—but it is also emasculating: to realize
his desire Léon must flee its influence.
By beginning his novel with a very different sort of tower and contrasting
it with affected spires similar to Rouen’s and personified by the Emma-like
ON TOUR 127
Obdulia, Clarín is framing his novel as a response to Madame Bovary and

defining its world through and against it. This chapter explores Clarín’s di-
alogue with Flaubert by examining closely three passages in La Regenta that
are drawn from Madame Bovary: the cathedral seduction, the description
of the adulteress’ childhood, and the theater scene. Taken together, these
reelaborations reveal a consistent pattern in Clarín’s response to his model:
in each case, Flaubert’s structuring opposition is reshaped in a similar way.
At the end of this chapter, this pattern will allow us to decipher the poli-
tical commentary that Clarín introduces through his dialogue with
Madame Bovary. 2
The Cathedral Tour
Clarín begins his reworking of the cathedral tour by turning Flaubert’s

final metaphor on its head. As Fermín looks out at Vetusta from the tower,
his gaze fixes briefly on the factory chimneys of the industrial section of
town: “No,” he reflects, “that factory smoke was not the smoke of incense.
It rose towards the sky, but it did not reach heaven. The whistling of the
machines was a mocking whistle, a satirical whistle, the whistle of a whip.
Those tall, slender chimneys were monuments of idolatry, and they even
seemed to parody church steeples” (33). Where Léon sees the spires of the
Rouen Cathedral as a chimney or truncated tower, Fermín compares the
smokestacks of the factories to the steeples of the churches. Clarín has
inverted Flaubert’s metaphor. In the French text, the cathedral is a par-
ody of itself: with its absurd tower, it seems to divest itself of authority. In
Clarín’s novel, the churches are also subject to parody, but what parodies
them is something external, the factories. Whereas in Madame Bovary the
parody suggests the weakness and anachronism of the institution the
cathedral represents, in La Regenta the parody testifies to a strong antago-
nism between two different social spheres. Clarín’s text points to the dif-
ference and opposition between the two: smoke is not incense. Flaubert’s,
in contrast, confuses steeple and chimney.
This indifferentiation is the focus of the Rouen Cathedral tour.
Flaubert’s episode draws its humor from the ridiculous pedantry of the
verger, seemingly inexhaustible in his supply of meaningless facts and
phrases. In Madame Bovary, this critique of indifferent and useless language
is reinforced through a pun. As Tony Tanner has pointed out, tour in French
is not only a guided visit but also a lathe, the tool with which M. Binet
creates useless cylinders and napkin rings throughout the work. The lathe is
a visual counterpart to the language of the tour, a symbol for the dissolution
of meaning in the novel. When Emma’s illusions come crashing down and
her life seems to have no sense, the lathe seems to draw her into the abyss of
its whirring: “And the lathe kept whirring, like an angry voice calling her”
(241). In Tanner’s words, “The process [of producing objects with the lathe]
is duplicated, repeated, endlessly, and it is this repetition that participates in
the annihilation of individuality, difference, and the meaning to which
Monsieur Binet is unconsciously dedicated” (256). This is true of the
verger’s tour as well. Pausing over a depiction on a tomb, he asks if one could
conceive of a more “perfect representation of nothingness” (my translation).
For Emma and Léon, the verger’s words seem to realize this ideal; they mean
nothing. Both the tour and the tour in Madame Bovary resemble what Jeffrey
Mehlman calls the writing machine. Both endlessly produce empty, hetero-
geneous signs that escape totalizing projects or comprehensive meaning.
Saturnino’s language might also be characterized in this way. Not only
does he gush useless facts, but his words are drawn quite literally from
writing: he cites entire paragraphs and even chapters of his own prose, a
multivolume history of Vetusta. Because of this habit, his style is over-
wrought and unintelligible. As with the products of Binet’s tour, moreover,
Saturnino’s discourse is circular: one of his favorite tropes is epanadiplosis,
the use of the same word at the beginning and end of a sentence. Like the
writing machines in Madame Bovary, his language is useless (no one reads
his articles) and resists totalization. Despite sincere effort and good inten-
tions, the visiting hidalgo is unable to put the pieces together: his attempts
to understand the bigger picture only make him nauseous. In portraying
Saturnino, Clarín exaggerates Flaubert’s parody of the dry tour guide.3
At the same time, however, the portrait of Saturnino departs in several
ways from that of the verger. First, the narrator emphasizes that Bermúdez
is often inaccurate. Whereas the verger spews a long stream of dull but cor-
rect information, Saturnino constantly confuses facts and fudges dates:
“And if the truth is to be told it must be said that he did not know which
king to turn to—that is to say, that he mixed and confused them, the cause
of such confusion being Obdulia’s skirt” (46). Flaubert’s tour guide is ob-
jective and impersonal. Clarín’s, in contrast, is more subjective in his ap-
proach. Not only are his facts skewed by his personal experiences (the
proximity of Obdulia’s skirt), but he also prefers objects that allow him to
improvise and project his own interpretations. Tellingly, his other favorite
trope is personification: in his explanations “walls would speak like books
. . . and there was a porte-cochère that brought tears to the eyes with the
pathos of its monologues” (35). He dedicates most of the tour to objects
that are darkened, illegible, or unclear, objects upon which he may project
his writerly discourse.
ON TOUR 129
While this preference for the obscure is in part an erotic strategy (it is
easier to squeeze Obdulia in the darker recesses of the cathedral), it seems
to be Saturnino’s aesthetic preference as well. To the dismay of the hidalgo
and his wife, Bermúdez spends 15 minutes on a work by Cenceño, “a black
painting in which an olive-coloured skull and the heel of a fleshless foot
could just be distinguished” (42). The hidalgo laments the smokiness of
the image, but it is precisely its blurriness that appeals to his guide: “‘No,
my good sir; smoky indeed!’ replied the scholar, smiling from ear to ear.
‘That which you attribute to smoke is patina; precisely what gives old pic-
tures their charm.’”(43). A little while later, when the hidalgo’s wife pauses
to admire a competent copy of Murillo’s famous painting of St. John of
God, Bermúdez dismisses it as “a pretty little thing; but terribly well
known.” (46). Saturnino privileges obscurity, both that of the patina and
that of the painter, a little-known local artist of the seventeenth century. A
more genuine, intuitive, and commonsensical viewer, the hidalgo’s wife
values the sincerity of the expression depicted in the Murillo copy.
Whereas Saturnino speaks to and for the minor Cenceño, the Murillo
speaks to the visiting lady. Ironically, the more provincial viewer appreci-
ates the national masterpiece, while the cosmopolitan Saturnino prefers
the obscure, peripheral work.
By presenting Saturnino in this way, Clarín has restructured the oppo-
sition upon which Flaubert’s episode rests. In Madame Bovary, the writing
machine (the tour) stands in the way of Emma and Léon’s desire. In La
Regenta, in contrast, the writing machine facilitates the erotic: the darker
the image and the longer it needs to be elucidated, the more furtive pet-
ting it allows. Bermúdez’s writerly speech shelters his and Obdulia’s desires.
What opposes Eros here is not the writing machine but rather the hidalgo’s
wife, who, catching onto Saturnino and Obdulia’s game, is scandalized
by their profanation of the church. When Saturnino criticizes a baroque
chapel toward the end of the episode, the lady from the provinces in
dignantly champions it: “You can say what you like, but I think this chapel
is ever so nice; and I also think that it is very nasty of you to profane this
temple” (62). The conflict in Clarín’s novel is not between eros and the
writing machine but rather between an eroticized writing machine and the
Church itself.
This opposition between the church and the writing machine is central
to what is perhaps the most famous story of a cathedral in nineteenth-
century literature: Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris (1832). In the open-
ing pages of La Regenta, Clarín alludes to Hugo’s representation of the
Parisian monument in his evocation of Vetusta’s cathedral tower. Clarín’s
“romantic poem in stone, a delicate hymn” is drawn from Hugo’s “vaste
symphonie en pierre” (vast symphony in stone) (Valis 27). Not only does
Clarín borrow this metaphor but he also adopts the structuring opposition
of Hugo’s work. Notre Dame de Paris is the story of the struggle between
the church and an emerging print culture. Early in the novel, Jean Frollo
predicts that the book will kill the building (“le livre tuera l’édifice”), and
the rest of the work explores, in Jeffrey Mehlman’s words, “the precarious-
ness and inevitable dissolution of architecture, the most primal of arts, in
an age of print” (73), “the vulnerability of the masterpiece or cultural mon-
ument to a radical form of dispersion” (74). Hugo’s plot revolves around
the opposition between the church and the writing machine, between a
cultural icon meaningful to the collectivity and a process of dissemination
that threatens it.
As we saw in the jokes and misappropriations discussed in the previous
chapter, the writing machine militates against meaning and difference by
confusing and distorting political language and collective systems of mean-
ing. In the marchioness’ pun, culottes are equated with pantalons, and
through the confusion both are drained of their ideological meaning. As
Mehlman’s example of Hugo’s Vendée suggests, it is on the margins that this
type of distortion—the indifferentiation of the writing machine—most
persists. Removed from the center and from the source of their meaning,
discourses unravel, and the projects they represent are frustrated or warped.
Like Hugo’s Vendée, Clarín’s Vetusta is a marginal zone prone to this sort of
indifferentiation and decontextualization. Saturnino gushes indifferent and
confused facts and prefers obscure local artwork whose meaning is lost in the
darkness of time and patina. The church is one of the only objects in
La Regenta that resists the entropy of the writing machine. Unlike Flaubert’s,
its tower does not collapse into a chimney: it is a space of difference.
This opposition between the collective values represented in the church
and an eroticized writing machine that disseminates them is complicated by
the fact that the Murillo painting is a copy. Throughout the novel, Clarín
rails against imitations and imitators. Vetusta is wretched because it has lit-
tle else. In this passage, however, the copy is both positive and privileged. It
is the commonsensical hidalgo’s wife who admires it, and the narrator agrees
that it deserves to be admired. Saturnino and the hidalgo’s wife represent not
only different media (he pours forth the contents of his book while she de-
fends the architecture of the cathedral) but also different ways of receiving
art and defining its importance. The value of Saturnino’s Cenceño lies less in
its image or origin than in his explanation of it. In this form of reception,
the viewer-reader is a writer who constructs a narrative around the object
viewed, projecting a meaning onto a virtually empty canvas as if writing on
a blank page. The Murillo copy, in contrast, is valued for its ability to con-
vey the spirit of its origin. What is important here is not the projection of
narrative but rather the transmission of meaning from the original to the
ON TOUR 131
copy and from the canvas to the viewer. The hidalgo’s wife is a reader. Unlike
Saturnino, she is involved in a process of communication, a dialogue with
the image: she receives a message and responds to it.
A final departure from Flaubert and perhaps the most telling one is that
it is not the heroine who takes the tour and is seduced. Emma’s position in
the episode is occupied not by Ana but by a substitute figure: Obdulia.4
Throughout the novel, Obdulia and Ana are often confused. We have al-
ready seen how at the end of Chapter 14 Fermín mistakes Obdulia for Ana
while observing the shadows of the Vegallanas’ window. Hearing a
woman’s voice in the same palace a few chapters earlier, Álvaro experiences
a similar confusion. Wishfully thinking it is Ana’s voice, he is disappointed
to find himself with Obdulia. Perhaps the most salient example of this sub-
stitution, however, is the episode in Chapter 13 in which Obdulia’s swing
is caught in a tree, and Álvaro and Fermín attempt to save her. Her posi-
tion anticipates Ana’s in the main plot of Part II: she stands between the
two rivals for the heroine’s love. Though they seem to be opposites in tem-
perament and morals, the two women are textually linked. The question
of the novel (as we have seen in Chapter 1) is whether Ana is (in Obdulia’s
phrase) “one among many,” whether she will be like the promiscuous
widow in her conduct. By putting Obdulia in Emma’s place in this open-
ing scene, Clarín is sketching Ana’s options in the same way as he does later
with Paco and Santos.
Throughout the rest of the novel, Ana will hover between the church
(represented by Fermín) and an eroticized writing machine (embodied by
Álvaro).5 She will also vacillate between two ways of relating to texts. In
her relationship with Fermín, Ana engages in a dialogue with a series of
literary classics and attempts to model herself after their protagonists: she
reenacts St. Augustine’s epiphanic reading; she strives to be like St. Theresa
of Ávila. In Chapters 25 and 26, as we have seen, she aspires to reproduce
the grief of the Stabat Mater by walking as a Nazarene. Just as the Murillo
copy conveys the spirit of the original to the hidalgo’s wife, so the Rossini
music that inspires Ana’s decision to walk in the procession communicates
its message to Ana, who wishes to retransmit it publicly. As she walks in
Chapter 26, however, she is less conscious of what she is transmitting than
of what is being projected upon her, and she too begins to project upon
herself. This projection typifies Ana’s other option. She may opt for
Obdulia’s form of eroticism, a hidden game that confuses signs and creates
an illusion of meaning around something that is ultimately meaningless.
Like Emma, Ana may fall into the tour, into the abyss or well of indiffer-
entiation that is produced by Álvaro’s trompe l’œil.
In Chapter 9, Álvaro pays Ana an unplanned compliment, and the nar-
rator quips that he has done so natura naturans. Though the philosophical
expression is jokingly misapplied here, it fits Álvaro well. Natura naturans

is a scholastic term that refers to a nature that is created by itself; it is op-
posed to natura naturata, nature created by God. Taken out of its religious
context, the opposition resembles that of Clarín’s cathedral tour. The writ-
ing machine, be it Álvaro’s or Saturnino’s, is language generated out of
nothing, narrative that creates itself and that consequently points to no
origin or referent. It is the opposite of the copy that points to a source and
conveys its essence.
The function of the cathedral tour in La Regenta is to present these two
options, to define the opposition that will govern the rest of the plot. At
the same time, however, it also serves to anticipate its dénouement. Toward
the end of the episode, Saturnino decries the gaudy decorations of a
baroque chapel of the cathedral and defends neoclassical canons. As he re-
jects the excess of ornamentation, however, his own language becomes as
elaborate and flowery as the object he condemns. Even the slow-witted hi-
dalgo is conscious of the irony: “[I]f the plateresque style is cloying and
ponderous wherever could anything more plateresque be found than this
man Don Saturnino?” (61). In the final moment of the episode, the writ-
ing machine and the church mirror one another. Like Bermúdez’s nause-
ating rhetoric (and in part because of it), the architecture of the chapel
makes the viewer queasy: “[H]e was fearful that [those canopies and
niches] were all going to fall on top of him: they were swaying, without a
doubt!” (61). Ultimately, the writing machine has taken over even the
church. Where the novel begins by condemning affectation—the gaudi-
ness of tightly-corseted ladies—and distinguishes the cathedral from it—
the tower is sturdy and solemn, prudent and powerful—by the end of the
episode, the church has taken on the mannerism earlier denounced, and
the condemnation of mannerism has itself become a mannerism.
Saturnino’s attempt to distinguish styles is a farce. In the end, indifferenti-
ation and indifference triumph as the antagonists (the church and its
critic) collapse into sameness.
The passage reaches its climax with a spew of adjectives that confuses
aesthetic movements and mirrors the redundancy and excess of the chapel:
“Quite apart from all that, as you will understand, my dear friend, I am sim-
ply following the canons of classical beauty in energetically condemning
baroque taste. This is plateresque . . . ”
“Churrigueresque!” exclaimed the electoral delegate, with the intention
of thereby making amends for his wife’s preposterous protest.
“Churrigueresque!” he repeated. “I find it quite sickening!”—and it was
plain that he did.
“Churrigueresque!” he managed to whisper once more.
“Rococo!” concluded Obdulia. (62)
ON TOUR 133
It is the scarlet doublet that has the last word, and that word is telling. The
rococó is an aesthetic of sensuality and seduction. The indifferentiation—
the empty play of the writing machine—with which the episode concludes
is aligned with desire. Significantly, Saturnino’s rhetorical victory in this
passage is represented as an amorous triumph: “He was in love, and be-
lieved himself loved.” (63). The opening finishes with the victory of an
eroticized indifferentiation.
Bermúdez’s success anticipates the ending of the novel. Like the hi-
dalgo’s wife, Ana Ozores often feels queasy and bewildered before the frag-
mentary signs and memories swimming around in her head (in the last
chapter, we saw her confused self-examination in Chapters 3 and 16).
Throughout the novel, she attempts to assemble these disjointed signs and
phrases into a whole, to subordinate them to a project under her confes-
sor’s guidance. Fermín gives her the opportunity to be different by being
the same, to become a copy, to replicate the charity of Murillo’s St. John of
God, the spiritual depth of St. Theresa, or the virtue of the Virgin Mary.
Ultimately, however, she cannot realize these ideals. Just as Saturnino in
the end blends into the baroque chapel despite his efforts to distinguish
himself from it, so Ana, through her adultery, attempts to be different
from the common Vetustans and, in so doing, unwittingly becomes “one
among many.”
In Chapter 28, it is clear that it is precisely Ana’s desire to be different
(a forced originality like Saturnino’s preference for Cenceño) that ulti-
mately makes her vulnerable to Álvaro’s indifferentiation. Moments before
her seduction, the narrator observes that
[i]t has always pleased Ana to hear the common people called stupid; for her
it was a sign of spiritual distinction to scorn the common people, the
Vetustans. Perhaps it was a defect which she had inherited from her father.
In order to be distinguished in her own mind from the believing masses she
needed to have recourse to the now widespread theory of the idiotic com-
mon herd, human bestiality, and so on. (634)
As Gonzalo Sobejano points out in his edition of the novel, this theory
is an allusion to Flaubert’s notion of bêtise. Like Rodolphe in Madame
Bovary, Álvaro continues to plead his case, protesting against “laws, customs,
commonplaces and routines,” and Ana quietly listens. Then, suddenly, a
flash of lightning illuminates his face: “Ana saw Alvaro’s eyes shining and
wet with tears. His cheeks were wet, too. She did not stop to think that
it might be the water which was falling from the sky” (634). Álvaro, the
master of trompe l’œil and “subtle shadings,” creates an illusory differ-
ence (tears versus rain) between what is ultimately the same (the water is
all rain in the end). Like Emma, Ana is drawn in by a false appearance of
difference, by a rejection of conventionality and bêtise that is ultimately a
convention in itself. The tears that in other episodes signal Ana’s truest feel-
ings of rebellion and solidarity are travestied in this scene. As she allows
herself to be seduced later in the episode, it is clear that she is falling into
the arbitrariness and indifferentiation of the writing machine, into the
meaningless clichés of Flaubert’s tour, into the very bêtise that she wished
to avoid. By drawing on and reworking the seduction scene of Madame
Bovary in his treatment of Saturnino and Obdulia, Clarín sketches Ana’s
options and subtly foreshadows her ultimate fall into Bovaryism.
Both Flaubert’s and Clarín’s cathedral seductions end in indifferentia-
tion. At the beginning of the episode, the Vetustan cathedral tower con-
trasts with that of Rouen. Whereas the former is distinguished from other
buildings (the factories) and opposed to the gaudy dress and language of
Obdulia and Saturnino, the latter is a parody of itself, a perfect symbol of
the useless and frustrating writing machine that dominates within. By the
end of Chapter 2 of La Regenta, however, the distinction between the
cathedral and the writing machine has broken down: the baroque chapel
cannot be differentiated from the long-winded tirade with which
Saturnino excoriates it. In both Madame Bovary and La Regenta, the con-
cluding image is one of indifferentiation.
The Adulteress as Reader
As we move beyond Chapter 2, it becomes clear that Ana could never be

the heroine of Flaubert’s cathedral tour. Ana’s scattered thoughts in her ex-
amination of conscience (Chapter 3) give us a first glimpse of her nature,
of a spiritual side and seriousness that contrast with Obdulia’s frivolity, but
it is only with the narrator’s account of her childhood and adolescence
(Chapters 4 and 5) that we begin to form a complete picture of her. Like
the cathedral tour, this section of the novel is in dialogue with a passage
from Madame Bovary: the flashback to Emma’s youth. In both novels, the
focus of the narration turns in an early chapter from the current unhappi-
ness of the heroine to the childhood dreams and readings that have led her
to a dissatisfying marriage. Read quickly, these passages might seem am-
bling or disjointed, for the girls move from book to book and fad to fad in
a seemingly capricious and arbitrary way. These childhood narratives, how-
ever, are actually highly structured sequences, and in each it is the order of
the heroine’s youthful phases that gives us an insight into her nature and
development.
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Emma’s development may be divided into five phases. Chapter 6 of

Madame Bovary begins abruptly with a one-sentence paragraph describing
the heroine’s early love of a single book: “She had read Paul and Virginia,
and had dreamed of the bamboo cabin, of the Negro Domingo and the
dog Fidèle; and especially she dreamed that she, too, had a sweet little
brother for a devoted friend, and that he climbed trees as tall as church
steeples to pluck her their crimson fruit, and came running barefoot over
the sand to bring her a bird’s nest” (41). This first phase, enigmatically
brief and limited to one book, ends abruptly as Emma’s father takes her to
the convent where she is to be educated. This move marks the beginning
of a second stage in her development. As a boarder, Emma is attracted to
religious life, to the “mystical languor” produced by the incense and can-
dles of the altar (41). She is fascinated by the images of her prayer book
and the language of the priest: “The metaphors constantly used in ser-
mons—‘betrothed,’ ‘spouse,’ ‘heavenly lover,’ ‘mystical marriage’—excited
her in a thrilling new way” (42). The author to whom she is most drawn
is Chateaubriand, who moves her with “the ringing lamentations of that
romantic melancholy, echoed and reechoed by all the voices of earth and
heaven!” (42).
After defining her initial impressions, however, the narrative veers in a
new direction, introducing the third phase: as a farmer’s daughter, Emma
is too familiar with the realities of country life to be impressed by “the lyric
appeal of nature—which usually reaches us only by way of literary inter-
pretations.” After a while, the lyricism and poetic landscapes of
Chateaubriand fail to engage her. She looks to nature not for pastoral tran-
quility but for action and narrative: “She loved the sea for its storms alone”
(42). Emma now begins to move more toward plot-driven stories that pro-
vide an “immediate gratification” (42). An impoverished aristocrat of the
ancien régime who visits the convent and brings news from the city sup-
plies her with novels that are “invariably about love affairs,” full of
“gloomy forests, broken hearts, vows, sobs, tears and kisses, skiffs in the
moonlight, nightingales in thickets” (43). By breaking Emma’s readings
down into their components and isolating them from the plot that links
them, Flaubert emphasizes the arbitrariness of popular novels, which
amount to little more than a mechanical combinatoire, a mindless assem-
blage of motifs and tropes. Emma’s literature is but another product of
the writing machine, an accumulation of heterogeneous signs that resists
totalization, aesthetic coherence, and deeper meaning. Despite its random-
ness, however, it is an unfailing source of pleasure. Emma’s fondness for
this type of plot will drive her as an adult.
The fourth phase in Emma’s development begins with the death of her
mother. Finally, Emma has an opportunity to apply her readings to her
own life. Gushing “sorrowful reflections,” she insists on being buried by

her mother’s side. Her mourning, however, is in large part an act, her grief
overshadowed by the pleasure she takes in having “so very quickly attained
this ideal of ethereal languor, inaccessible to mediocre spirits” (45). Emma’s
satisfaction with her mourning recalls the self-consciousness of the second
tear in Milan Kundera’s definition of kitsch: “The first tear says: How nice
to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be
moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass”
(251). The only difference is that Flaubert’s heroine is pleased to feel what
most of mankind cannot. Eventually, however, Emma grows tired of even
these rarefied emotions and, in a final stage, becomes restless and rebellious
in the convent: “She reacted like a horse too tightly reined: she balked, and
the bit fell from her teeth” (46). She returns to her father’s home and mar-
ries out of boredom.
With the exception of her first phase, which is strangely isolated in the
text, and her ultimate boredom, Emma’s trajectory is more or less a con-
tinuum. The erotic metaphors of the sermon in the second phase antici-
pate the love affairs and racy plots of the novels she reads in the third, and
it is the flowery language and melodrama of these works that Emma ap-
plies to her mourning in the fourth. Ana’s development, in contrast, is less
fluid and involves more fluctuation. It too may be divided into five phases,
but the components of Flaubert’s passage (the heroine’s reaction to her
mother’s death, her longing for brotherhood, and her attraction to
Chateaubriand) are rearranged.
The first important departure in La Regenta is that the description of
Ana’s childhood begins before she learns to read. As a toddler, Ana makes
up stories in her head to forget the loneliness and neglect she faces in real
life:
The heroine of the novels which she made up at that time was a mother.
At the age of six she composed a poem in her tawny-curled head. The
poem was compounded from the tears shed by this ill-treated, motherless
girl in her moments of deepest misery, and fragments of stories which she
heard from the shepherds of Loreto and the domestics. She escaped from
the house whenever she could; she ran alone through meadows and went
into the huts of the shepherds, who knew her, and patted her, and whose
big dogs gently pawed her; she often ate with the shepherds. From her
excursions in the countryside she returned with material for her poem, like
a bee with the essence of flowers. Just as Poussin picked grasses in the
meadows in order to make a study of nature before transferring it to
canvas, so when Anita came back to civilization after her escapades, her
eyes and her imagination were full of treasures, the finest things she ever
enjoyed. (83–84).
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By including Ana’s preliterate stage, Clarín explores the idea of an un-

mediated response to nature. Unlike Emma, who always perceives the
world through the screen of literature (Flaubert’s narrator denies that one
can appreciate landscapes without it), Ana collects first from nature and
then from books. Whereas Emma’s imagination is a product of texts, Ana’s
predates them. In its combination of fragments from lore and nature, Ana’s
game may resemble the arbitrary juxtapositions of Emma’s novels, but it
differs in that she is drawing directly from the world. Her method is that
of the naturalist artist: she bases her “poem” on the reality around her
rather than on literary models. In this sense, the six-year-old Ana is a mir-
ror of the author in the text.
What propels Ana’s creative drive is not literature but need. Unlike
Emma’s, Ana’s mother dies in childbirth, before her intellectual develop-
ment begins. The poem in Ana’s head is an attempt to fill this gap in her
life, to compensate for her mother’s absence. Emma too uses her imagina-
tion to deal with the loss of a parent. The difference is that the death of
Emma’s mother is an opportunity for her to apply literature, a blank page
on which to rewrite and rehearse literary clichés. Ana, in contrast, longs to
read—”To be able to read! This ambition was her first passion” (84)—to
fill the gap in her life. In La Regenta, this longing for stories and images is
not frivolous escapism but a natural and positive drive, a craving for mean-
ing and emotional depth. It is also a longing for freedom. Locked up by
her heartless governess, Ana “would imagine miraculous escapes from these
confinements . . . and conjure up impossible flights” (83).
Ana’s innocent and constructive use of imagination in this first stage
anticipates the spiritual project she will undertake as an adult. Her tears,
her solidarity with the peasants, and her longing for freedom relate this
phase to other passages in the novel in which Ana weeps over poor chil-
dren deprived of bread, candy, or words and laments the injustice of soci-
ety. This stage also establishes Ana’s fascination with the maternal image of
the Virgin Mary, whom she imagines to be like the peasant mothers she
sees washing infants’ clothes in the river. In its combination of indignant
tears and the ideal compassion embodied in the Virgin Mary, the passage
marks the beginning of Ana’s revolutionary drive. It introduces in embry-
onic form the impulse of solidarity that will lead her to reenact the Stabat
Mater in the Nazarene procession of Chapter 26.6
The second stage of Ana’s development, her earliest reading, is in part a
continuation of the first. Hungry for narrative to fill the gap in her life,
Ana learns eagerly, though her tutor is dogmatic and her texts dreary. To
make them meaningful, she attaches them in her mind to images from na-
ture, converting “tedious lists of rivers and mountains” into “crystal-clear
running waters and the sierra” and filling the Israelites’ tents with “armies
of valiant sailors from Loreto” (84). Whereas books supply Emma’s fantasy
with images, language, and narrative, it is Ana’s imagination that gives life
to her books.
Significantly, Ana’s earliest reading coincides with her first friendship
with the peasant-boy Germán, whom she imagines as the hero of the books
she reads (84). Inspired by these texts, Ana longs to travel with Germán to
the “land of the Moors and either kill infidels or convert them” (84).
Modern reading, silent reading, is generally a solitary occupation—Emma
always reads alone—but for Ana, literature is a communal act, something
she shares with her first “brother,” Germán. Later in life, the heroine’s read-
ing of St. Theresa, who also longed to fight the infidels as a child, will be
the basis for her solidarity with her spiritual brother, Fermín. In the de-
scription of Ana’s Germán-hermano, Clarín gives special weight to the first
stage of Emma Bovary’s development (her reading of Paul et Virginie): the
brother whom Emma imagines climbing trees as high as steeples becomes
Germán, who in turn anticipates another brother, Fermín, who climbs both
trees (Chapter 13) and steeples (Chapter 1). By having this stage flow out
of a period before Ana even learns to read, Clarín presents this longing for
companionship as a natural urge (rather than literary posing), the utopian
impulse of an emotionally deprived child. Both her reading and her earlier
imaginings are motivated by the same needs and contribute to the idealis-
tic poem in her head: having been deprived of a mother, Ana looks for sol-
ace first in nature and then in books and in her friendship with Germán,
with whom she plays at being a “mamma” (68). The two periods are
grouped together in Ana’s recollection of her childhood.
What follows, however, is an abrupt shift. One night, Ana and Germán
attempt to sail in the boatman’s boat to the land of the Moors, where she
hopes to find her father. When the boat gets caught on stones in the water,
the children, unable to move it, must spend the night together onboard.
Ana is only ten years old, but her governess, Doña Camila, assumes the
worst of her conduct. In naturalist fashion, she attributes Ana’s “sin” to her
blood. Ana is now revealed to be the true daughter of her mother, who,
though an honest dressmaker, was believed in Vetusta to have been a
dancer and, by implication, a woman of ill repute. Whereas in the first
stage of her childhood Ana was a “bee” who actively collected the essence
of flowers for the naturalist poem in her head, she now becomes, in the
governess’ metaphor, “a flower which was already rotting after a grub-bite”
(85). The positive naturalism of Ana’s poem in her head, an active collect-
ing from nature, contrasts with a negative, deterministic, and passive nat-
uralism that eliminates the possibility of change or development. Ana is
now governed not by her will and actions but by her genes. She is a flower
that can only go bad.
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In Madame Bovary, Flaubert describes how Emma’s readings gradually

awaken her desire—even the metaphors of the sermons titillate her. Ana, in
contrast, becomes aware of sexuality through the lurid imagination of her
governess and the local gossips, who cast her in the role of the lover before she
has even physically developed into womanhood. It is not her reading, in other
words, that leads her astray. Even later, as she becomes interested in Greek art
and literature, the narrator insists that this “inopportune study of the classi-
cal nude did not play havoc with the girl” (89). Her loss of innocence has
nothing to do with the texts or images she has taken in.
After the scandal of the boat ride, Ana’s father, now returned from exile,
decides to intervene in his daughter’s upbringing. Don Carlos moves her
to Madrid, where she begins a third phase in her development. This stage
corresponds in many ways to Emma’s third period: both girls are drawn to
somewhat racier reading material and derive considerable pleasure from it.
At the same time, they are exposed to the influence of the city—Ana
explores Madrid with her father, and Emma is fascinated by the news from
Paris that she receives from the old spinster in the convent.
Whereas Emma embraces the erotic and the urban, however, Ana retreats
from these new experiences. Traumatized by her governess’ assumptions
about her relationship with Germán, Ana seems to develop backward, to
repress the woman burgeoning within: “At ten she looked thirteen, and now
at fifteen she still seemed thirteen” (90). Her father treats her “as if she were
Art, and therefore sexless”, and she reacts to erotic images in a way that is
“purely aesthetic” (89). Although this stage resembles Emma’s third,
Ana responds to it in a desexualized way. It is important to note that the
description of this period focuses on images and art rather than on her read-
ing practices. In contrast to the second stage, in which Ana reads and feels
solidarity with the peasants and friendship for Germán, she now has no
friends and spends her time coolly contemplating classical art. What com-
pany she has is, like her father’s idea of Art, completely deeroticized. Emma,
during her third phase, contemplates “pale landscapes of fantastic countries:
pines and palms growing together” (45). Ana, in contrast, lives among her
father’s friends, “solitary northern pines” who “did not sigh for the palm-
trees of the south” (90).
Ana’s third stage differs from Emma’s not only in the way she shies away
from sexuality but also in her distaste for the urban environment in which
she lives. Whereas Emma longs for news from the city and later in life is ob-
sessed with literature about Paris, Ana uses books to forget the drab reality
around her: Olympus is an escape from the kitschy (cursi) poverty of her
neighbors in Madrid (90). With her move to the city, literature and art
change their function. In her first and second stages, which took place in the
country, Ana collected stories and songs from the shepherds and peasant
women and shared them as bedtime stories with her friend and “brother”
Germán: literature, slumming, and brotherhood all went together. In
Madrid, in contrast, books and images become an escape from reality and a
way for Ana to distinguish herself from her impoverished neighbors.
Literature now has the same function it had for Emma after her mother’s
death when it lifted her above the “mediocre spirits” (45).
At this point, however, Ana’s trajectory veers off from Emma’s. Tired of
the city and strained financially, Don Carlos decides to move back to the
country, where Ana begins a fourth stage in her development. Unpacking
her father’s books in Loreto, the heroine discovers a copy of St. Augustine’s
Confessions and, walking to the garden, begins to read its pages “which
shone out in white and black” (91). Ana’s reading of the Confessions marks
a shift in her thinking. Augustine rejects the mythology that had so fasci-
nated her in Madrid and offers a new ideal. Reading breathlessly, Ana im-
mediately feels the truth of Augustine’s words and begins to wonder if
“that life of indifference, black in the past and in the future, futile and
beset with vexation and stupidity, was going to come to an end.” Hearing
a “voice” within herself, she is frightened by the text. When she reads of
Augustine’s own garden conversion, she feels as though she has seen an
“apparition.” Her terror, however, soon subsides into gentleness and tears:
the “motherless child” weeps over the book “as over a mother’s breast. In
that moment her soul grew towards womanhood” (92).
With her reading of St. Augustine, Ana in a sense inverts Emma’s trajec-
tory. Flaubert’s heroine moves from religion, which she appreciates for its
amorous metaphors and ethereal beauty (she is influenced by
Chateaubriand), to love songs and romantic novels. Ana, in contrast, remains
prudish, undeveloped, and sexless while surrounded by erotic art and litera-
ture and only develops into womanhood as she reads theological works—first,
St. Augustine and later Chateaubriand.7 What defines the feminine here is
not desire but maternal compassion. Although Emma’s second and third
stages are divided by her preference for city over country, the movement from
one to the other is more or less continuous: Emma is moving toward the
erotic. In La Regenta, in contrast, this becomes a sharp opposition, and the se-
quence in Madame Bovary is inverted: in her third stage, Ana is guided by her
father, who lives in a city surrounded by “northern pines,” while in her fourth
stage back in the country, she develops a maternal instinct through the influ-
ence of St. Augustine, whom she imagines among the “palm-trees” of Africa.
The palms and pines indiscriminately thrown together in Emma’s album in
Madame Bovary are redifferentiated in La Regenta.
The fourth stage is a return to the emotions of the first and second. Once
again, Ana sheds compassionate tears, idealizes the mother—
St. Monica and particularly the Virgin Mary—and adds to the poem in her
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head. It is also a return to the reading of the second phase. Whereas the third
stage is dominated by art, the description of the fourth emphasizes how “Ana
read on, her soul caught in the grip of the letters. As she finished one page,
in spirit she was half-way through the next” (91). This reading, however, dif-
fers from that of the second phase in an important way. Learning to read as
a child, Ana had to bring her imagination to the dry textbooks to make them
interesting. Reading then was a process of give and take. Ana deciphered and
received what was in the book and in turn supplied the landscapes (the sier-
ras) and people (Germán) around her as backdrop and characters. She was
at once receiving and projecting. In the fourth stage, in contrast, the book
speaks to her directly with a “voice” and needs no enhancement.
It is important to distinguish between these two experiences. In her sec-
ond phase, Ana experiences reading as a struggle for meaning. Not only is
she laboring to decipher the unfamiliar signs on the page, but she is also
exerting herself to assign them a meaning. In this process, she relies on her
friendship and conversations with Germán, which at once enhance her
readings and are enhanced by them. The text is made to bear on the world
around her and vice versa. Like the prosopopoeia in the encounter between
Santos and Fermín (see Chapter 1), reading works in two directions: one
projects onto the text (as Santos does with his drunken imagination) and
then penetrates its inside, its meaning (as Santos realizes what is going on
behind Fermín’s door); one projects a voice and also seems to hear one.
The fourth stage of Ana’s childhood, in contrast, involves neither struggle
nor projection. It is an epiphanic and idealized moment in which the book
is not ventriloquized but rather speaks with a voice that is really its own.
In this stage, Ana no longer needs Germán to give meaning and life to her
reading. She is in direct dialogue with St. Augustine. In this scene of ide-
alized reading, the mediation of the text seems to have been eliminated as
two souls speak to one another across the centuries. The absence that is the
trait of all writing is momentarily overcome as Ana basks in the presence
of the voice. So perfectly has she received the spirit of the words that she
eerily reincarnates St. Augustine himself. Even before she reads about his
garden conversion, she has reenacted it herself in the garden of her father’s
estate.8 Whereas in her second phase Ana consciously imitated books with
Germán, in her fourth she echoes them in a purely coincidental way.
Unwittingly, she has become a copy of a classic text. Like the Murillo
reproduction in the cathedral tour, she has captured the spirit of her model
and allowed it to live in herself.
In the uncanny likeness it produces, Ana’s fourth stage anticipates her
later reading of St. Theresa as she recovers from an illness. Picking up the
saint’s life “as a child takes up a sweetmeat,” Ana is at first unable to read
it, but when she is well enough to decipher the page, “nothing, except tears
of tenderness, disturbed the communion of two souls across three cen-

turies” (441–442). The comparison of the book with a child’s sweetmeat
gestures back to the Boulevard scene in which Ana is brought to tears when
she sees poor boys before a cake shop guessing at the names of confections
they will never eat. Her reading provides the emotional sustenance for
which she craved in the first and second stages of her youth. It fulfills the
need that has led her to identify with the poor as spiritual brothers and re-
news her spiritual fervor, which had been wavering.9
Ana’s reading of St. Theresa in Part II and her childhood reaction to St.
Augustine resemble one another not only in the direct communion of souls
across the centuries but also in Clarín’s emphasis on the physicality of the
letters and the written page. On first reading St. Theresa, the letters
“jumped, exploded, hid, turned over, changed colour, her head whirled.” As
she recovers, however, they become “firm, still, compact; the white paper
was not a bottomless abyss now, but a smooth, consistent surface” (442).
Similarly, when Ana reads St. Augustine, “the pages of the book, which
shone out in white and black,” (91) contrast with the “indifference, black
in the past and in the future,” (92) that she experienced before reading. This
physical description of reading the black and white of the book points for-
ward to Fermín de Pas’s struggle to read the black and white of the
Vegallanas’ window (Chapter 14). As we saw in the previous chapter, his
attempt to differentiate black and white, to distinguish Ana, is threatened
and ultimately foiled by the indifferentiation of the shadows that surround
the window, by the arbitrariness of the writing machine, which confuses
opposites and militates against meaning. Ana, similarly, depends on her
ability to read the text, to separate black and white, to escape the indiffer-
entiation of black in the past and black in the future. If she fails to read well,
she too will fall into the meaninglessness of the writing machine.
This possibility is anticipated in the final stage of Ana’s development,
which begins as she becomes dissatisfied with her religious readings.
Although Ana is devoted to the Virgin, to whom she constantly prays,
“that was not enough, she wanted more: she wanted to compose prayers
herself ” (94). The transition from the fourth to the fifth stage is a move-
ment from reading to writing. Ana sets out to write a poem to the Virgin
on an isolated hill in Loreto, which she climbs “as if the path were taking
her to Heaven” (95). From her perch, Ana can see the ocean, which is the
backdrop of a mystical vision: “From here its waves did not resemble the
violent convulsions of a caged beast, but rather the rhythms of a sublime
song . . . Ana descried a minute speck; she knew it was a chapel. The Virgin
was there” (95). Inspired by this sight, Ana begins to write.
At the end of the sequence, it seems, Ana has returned to the method of
her first stage: she goes forth into nature to compose her poem. A number
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of clues in the text, however, distinguish this writing from the “poem in her
head.” When Ana ran into the countryside as a little girl, she consorted with
shepherds and peasant women. On Loreto Hill, in contrast, she is com-
pletely alone—she has escaped to the wild not to find companionship but
to be “assured of her solitude” (95). Far above men and their daily travails,
Ana sees not the struggle of the caged beast but only the sublime song. Her
experience on the hill is not the rising up through descent that she will later
attempt under the guidance of Fermín but rather an attempt to ascend di-
rectly to Heaven through aesthetic epiphany.
Ana’s relationship with nature has also changed. As a child, she drew
directly from the world around her. Still unable to read, her perceptions
were unmediated by texts or literary expectations. As an adolescent on
Loreto Hill, in contrast, Ana is constantly finding “secret correspondences”;
she sees a “mysterious analogy between St John’s verses and the fragrance
released by the wild thyme” (94). Even if she wishes to avoid making the
landscape literary, her perception is always mediated by texts—the analo-
gies occur to her “quite without her consent” (94). Whereas the toddler
collected from nature, the young woman projects upon it.
This confusion of literature and reality recalls Ana’s second stage: when
she first learned to read and deciphered “tedious lists of rivers and moun-
tains,” she saw in her mind the “crystal-clear running waters and the sierra”
of Loreto (84). As she sits on the same sierra as a young woman, however,
these childhood games are inverted. Before, she supplemented dry readings
with the richness of nature and the peasants’ world. As an adolescent, she
does the opposite, projecting mystical poetry on the “dry river bed” by
which she sits. She now behaves as Emma does in her third and fourth
stages, when she draws images from literature and projects them on her
life.10 Even in this stage, however, Ana differs from Emma in her relation
with nature. Emma approaches the landscape looking for storms and
ruins, drama and narrative. Having grown up on a farm, she is not given
to reveries before static vistas. She is more interested in plot and in the
urban spaces where plots tend to happen. Ana, in contrast, returns to na-
ture from the city and appreciates it in a lyrical rather than narrative way:
she blocks out the drama—the violent convulsions of the caged beast—
and admires only the “sublime song.”
The childhood descriptions in the two novels differ not only in the hero-
ines’ generic inclinations (lyric versus narrative) but also in the way nature
(or reality) and literature are related in each. In Flaubert, it is Emma’s
knowledge of the real countryside that deflates the lyrical landscapes of a
Chateaubriand. This is a rare moment in the text in which Emma takes on
the function of the realist author and debunks a literary convention.
La Regenta, in contrast, defines the relation between reality and literature
more ambivalently. Ana’s unmediated perception of nature before learning

to read does not deflate but rather enriches the literature she is later given.
For Ana the naturalist (a mirror within the text of Clarín the naturalist), na-
ture can infuse books in a positive way. In reworking Flaubert’s passage,
Clarín makes room for this possibility. The treatment of the landscape in
the scene on Loreto Hill, however, reverts to the model in Madame Bovary.
Here, nature deflates the mystical landscape Ana imagines and the poetry
she writes. In the final moments of the chapter, Ana calls upon the Virgin
and is overwhelmed by what she believes to be an apparition:
With words of fire she called upon her Mother in Heaven. She was enrap-
tured by her own voice, she shuddered, and she could speak no more. Her
legs gave way, she rested her forehead on the earth. A mystical terror over-
came her for a moment. She did not dare raise her eyes, fearing that she
might be surrounded by the supernatural. A light which was stronger than
the light of the sun pierced her eyelids. She heard a noise near by, she cried
out, and in the terror she lifted her head. There could be no doubt, a bram-
ble on the hillock in front of her was moving. With her eyes open wide be-
fore the miracle, Ana saw a dark-hued bird fly from the thicket and brush
over her brow. (96)
The description of nature, the movement of the bird in the thicket, sub-
verts Ana’s lofty fantasy. Her vision, it reveals, is a product not of her eyes
but of her pen, which has blinded her to reality. In contrast to Emma, who
is led astray by reading, Ana is most vulnerable to illusions when writing.11
Ana’s writing takes on the function of Emma’s reading not only in the
way it skews her sense of reality but also in the eroticism that surrounds it.
In the final stage of her development, Ana is inspired by a new text, St. John
of the Cross’s poetic rendering of the Song of Songs: “It was one of the books
which Anita was not permitted to read. ‘They can’t fool me,’ Don Carlos
would say, winking. ‘This “beloved” might be the Church, but—I’m not so
sure, I’m not so sure.’” (94). Carlos’s reservations recall Emma’s reaction to
the sermons she hears at the convent—her fascination with terms such as
“spouse” and “beloved.” The young Emma is drawn to precisely the equiv-
ocal metaphors that Carlos fears, ambiguous images that anticipate the
awakening of her desire through romantic readings in her third phase. In
La Regenta, the erotic mysticism of St. John of the Cross inspires Ana at first
not to love but to write, to create her own prayers. This writing, however,
soon takes on the eroticism that Emma and Don Carlos intuit: “One line
gave birth to many more, as one kiss calls forth a hundred kisses” (96). Just
as reading awakens Emma’s desire, Ana’s writing is a sensual experience, a
form of solitary eroticism. In contrast to her reading, which inspires her
with compassion for others and solidarity with the common people, Ana in
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her Loreto epiphany is “enraptured by her own voice” in a sort of mystical

masturbation.
The final lines of the passage reveal that her verses and her vision of
nature are neither an apparition of God nor the result of divine inspiration.
To return to the terms of Clarín’s joke about Álvaro, they are not natura
naturata but natura naturans: the verses create themselves; they sponta-
neously generate. Ana’s pencil is propelled along by an uncontainable
gushing—“When her pencil began to write the first line, the whole of the
first stanza was already complete in her soul”—and each line seems to pro-
duce the next—“One line gave birth to many more” (96). The heroine
seems to have little control over the process, which resembles the eroticized
writing machine of the cathedral tour with its frenetic conclusion (just as
the tour ends with the spectacle of the baroque chapel, Ana’s writing takes
the form of a “minute speck” upon which Ana projects a chapel with the
Virgin). In her gushing, voices no longer bear any relation to the realities
to which they correspond: “The sea, now out of sight, again sounded like
an underground murmur; the pine-trees sounded like the sea; and the bird
like a nightingale” (95).
As in the cathedral tour, the ending of the episode anticipates the
dénouement of the novel, the heroine’s fall into the writing machine and vul-
nerability to Álvaro Mesía. If Ana, unlike Emma, resists the racy literature of
the third stage, she cannot avoid the raciness of writing in the fifth. Fittingly,
it is Ana’s writing that precipitates her seduction in Part II. Throughout most
of the novel, Fermín acts as Ana’s spiritual “hygienist” (187), and his pre-
scriptions always involve reading. In contrast, Benítez, Ana’s new doctor in
Chapter 27, encourages her to write and condemns her books. This writing
takes the form of a diary meant for no eyes but Ana’s. Like her solitary
composition on Loreto Hill, her journal is a solipsistic exercise. Although it
masquerades as self-analysis, it differs strikingly from her examination of
conscience at the beginning of the novel. Whereas Ana’s nocturnal reflections
in the earlier episode were a preparation for dialogue, for spiritual brother-
hood with Fermín, in her diary-writing she has no interlocutors but herself:
“Nobody’s going to read them, except me” (603). As with her experience on
Loreto Hill in which she is “enraptured by her own voice” (96), Ana con-
templates her diary “with an artist’s love for her own work” (603).
Clarín clarifies the difference between these two forms of introspection
by revising the opposition between poetry and prose in Madame Bovary.
Emma, as we have seen, moves from lyric to narrative, verse to prose. The
thrills she at first derives from poetic prayers and the lyrical style of
Chateaubriand she later finds in more accessible narratives. Her next step
is to look for them in life itself. Her trajectory goes from lyrical abstraction
to more direct gratification, first in prose and then in reality. She moves
from text to world. In La Regenta, this opposition between poetry and

prose is complicated. Its heroine starts out converting prose into poetry
only to end up converting poetry into prose. As Ana reads the prose con-
fessions of St. Augustine (and later of St. Theresa), she adds “another
canto” (92) to the poem in her head. This reading anticipates her own
confessions and her relationship with de Pas: Fermín will challenge her
to embrace the commonplace piety of Vetusta, “apparently prosaic and
even [cursi]” religiosity (394) and to elevate it into something lofty and
lyrical: “[Y]ou will use your powerful imagination to envisage the scenes
of pure poetry of the birth of Jesus” (396). Whereas Emma moves from
the textual to the real (from literary thrills to pleasures in the world),
Fermín places Ana in a commonplace reality only to turn it into an in-
spiring text, “pure poetry.” Ultimately, however, Ana is unable to read
prose as poetry. In her diary, she starts to “write poetry in prose” (603).
Like Emma, she will now look for more immediate gratifications in the
world around her.
In this journal, Ana writes of her life at El Vivero, the Vegallanas’ pleas-
ure palace in the country, where she has gone to recover from the trauma
she experienced during the Nazarene procession. Ana’s convalescence at
the Vivero contrasts with the scene in which she first read St. Theresa.
Whereas before she struggled with the confusing letters of the book, now
she is incapable of reading St. Theresa and at times cannot decipher even
her own handwriting. In this second convalescence, she develops a habit of
fixating on the surface of the text, on forms detached from their meaning.
As she writes a letter to Fermín, for example, she amuses herself by imitat-
ing his penmanship. Her relationship with her confessor is no longer a di-
alogue but an illusion of one: in her letters, she merely holds a mirror up
to his own writing. A disjointed composition through which she flips at
random, the diary reflects this tendency to divorce words from meaning
and surface from depth. Like the poem Ana writes on Loreto Hill, it has
the pleasurable arbitrariness of the writing machine.12
As she scribbles in her journal, Ana even indulges in the tropes that char-
acterized Saturnino’s writing. Just as he makes walls speak, Ana personifies
her new residence: “The New House smiles upon us and we stop in front
of the coquettish canopy at its entrance; general silence for a moment. The
sun speaks; we rejoice” (609). Ana’s and Saturnino’s form of personification,
however, should be distinguished from that of Santos Barinaga. Santos’s
prosopopoeia is an interactive process: he speaks to Fermín’s door but also
hears its voice. It is a process of give and take like Ana’s reading in her
second phase. In the cathedral episode, in contrast, the give and the take are
separated. Saturnino’s projection of a false voice is contrasted with the
hidalgo’s wife’s reception of an actual one. Personification here is not a
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metaphor for reading as with Santos but a form of writing: Saturnino proj-
ects a bookish discourse onto the cathedral. Ana’s personification in her
diary resembles Saturnino’s. Unlike her reading in her second phase or
Santos’s prosopopoeia, she is writing over the world around her. Just as she
projected a spirit or being onto the thicket in her mystical vision on Loreto
Hill, here she projects a voice onto nature, which once again she perceives
through literature: “Sometimes I think of El Vivero as the setting for a play
or a novel” (610).
The childhoods of both Ana and Emma anticipate their development
as adults. The relation between youth and maturity, however, differs in the
two novels. The description of Emma’s childhood defines the character
traits that will lead her astray as a woman. We see how she moves from one
set of influences and clichés to another, how she is always longing for stim-
ulation no matter how shallow, how she strives to bring her lofty literature
into her world. The relation between the two periods of her life is one of
cause and effect. In the case of La Regenta, the childhood anticipates not
only the character of the adult heroine but also her options in life. As we
have seen, Emma’s youth is a continuity: one stage flows into the next and
eventually into her adult personality. Ana’s childhood, in contrast, is more
discontinuous. While it may seem that Ana, like Emma, soaks up the lan-
guage and influences around her, she is not simply sliding from one fad to
another. Each of the major stages of her development (her discovery of
St. Augustine, her turn to writing) breaks with the previous one and con-
trasts with it. These ruptures suggest that the influences in each period are
not simply new stimuli but rather represent different choices.
As we have seen, the first, second, and fourth stages in which Ana ex-
periences compassion and brotherhood (with the shepherds, Germán, and
the “soul” of St. Augustine) look forward to her spiritual brotherhood with
Fermín and the ideal he inspires her to pursue. The third and the fifth, in
contrast, anticipate Ana’s eventual relationship with Álvaro. At El Vivero
shortly before her seduction, Ana rediscovers not only writing (her hobby
in the fifth phase) but also the classical art of her father’s books (her influ-
ence in the third phase): “Gods, heroes, life in the open air, art as a reli-
gion, a heaven full of human passions, happiness in this world, no
thoughts for sorrow or the uncertain future” (611). Like the cathedral tour,
the chapters dedicated to Ana’s childhood sketch out the opposition that
will dominate the work.
Unlike Emma, who is always moving onward to something new, the
young Ana oscillates back and forth between these two poles several times.
This vacillation not only anticipates her later hesitation as an adult (she
will waver for many chapters in Part II) but also helps to clarify the nature
of her options and the forces that draw her to one pole or push her away
from the other. Were her third and fifth phases a single stage, for example,
it might seem that it is (as it is with Emma) the nature of the heroine’s
reading (the books on Greek mythology and art) that leads her astray. By
separating the two phases, Clarín makes it clear that Ana is emotionally
and sexually insensible to the erotic images to which she is exposed in the
third stage. As in the cathedral tour and the exploration of Álvaro as
Marguerite, it is not her reading but her impulse to project, to write over
reality, that causes problems. Where Emma slides from book to book, Ana
is choosing not only between literary models but also between two types
of activities—reading and writing.13 This opposition is one of Clarín’s
most significant departures from Flaubert. In The Gates of Horn, Harry
Levin distinguishes between the altruism of quixotism and the egotism of
Bovaryism: whereas Don Quixote is inspired (at least in part) by a utopian
ideal, by a desire to right the wrongs of society, Emma tends to think only
of herself and the gratification of her desire (205). In importing Emma to
Spain, Clarín is in a sense reconnecting her to her literary origins and re-
quixotizing her.14 Ana’s reading, like Don Quixote’s, makes her imagine a
fairer and better world. At the end of the novel, however, she abandons her
quixotism—“I must put an end to my brooding and my excessive, quixotic
projects; I want peace, I want tranquility. I shall be like all the other
women” (630–631)—and falls back into Bovaryism.
The difference in the possible trajectories of each heroine is reflected in
the use of imagery. Emma’s adulthood and adultery grow out of the soil in
which she is raised: she is a “flower nourished by manure and by the rain,
by the wind and the sun; and she was finally blooming in the fullness of
her nature” (227–228). Clarín too resorts to a horticultural metaphor to
describe Ana’s childhood and her guardian’s attempts to determine her fu-
ture. Ana is a rotting flower that must be transplanted to a “pedagogic
glass-house” (91) or propped to a stake like a “tender shoot” (83). Ana’s
adultery, however, is not totally determined by these forces. Where in
Madame Bovary transplantation is impossible—”Didn’t love, like Indian
plants, require rich soils, special temperatures?” (68–69)—Clarín uses
Frígilis’s experiments with grafting to explore the possibility of changing
nature, of making the exotic plant grow in Vetustan soil. Ana has the pos-
siblity of living a different life, of defying the laws of nature. When she is
under Fermín’s spiritual influence, Frígilis compares her to a tree that
begins to flower uncontrollably, draining its own sap and energy. This
imagery suggests that Ana could break with the past—the natural laws of
determination—and escape the inner force that propels Emma in her
movement from one lover or amusement to the next. Ana, in other words,
has an alternative, though she never exercises it. Her ultimate capitulation
to Álvaro is a renunciation of choice or a simulacrum of it.
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Ana’s third stage, which immediately follows the infamous boat ride
and Doña Camila’s theories of determinism, anticipates the passivity she
adopts in her relationship with Álvaro and clarifies the political implica-
tions of her failure to choose. Ana’s father, Don Carlos, is a former revolu-
tionary, but his views and behavior toward his wife and daughter often
contradict his liberal principles. Although he supports the emancipation of
women, he regards them as inferior and treats Ana’s mother with conde-
scension, never losing sight of her lower-class origins (90). Carlos’s stance
is not unlike that of Paco Vegallana, who idealizes the prostitute but post-
pones indefinitely the day of her liberation (the world will change only
after another invasion of barbarians). Carlos’s relationship with Ana is sim-
ilarly contradictory. Although he wishes for his daughter to choose freely
between good and evil, the narrator notes: “None the less, if his daughter
had been a tightrope-walker on a high wire, Don Carlos would have placed
a safety net below her, even though the exercise might thereby have lost
some merit” (88). Once again, he supports freedom and choice in theory
but in practice allows only an illusion of it. In this respect, Carlos antici-
pates Álvaro Mesía’s trompe l’œil. Álvaro is similarly able to create a revo-
lution effect while giving Ana a sense of security. The heroine is drawn to
him because he allows her to evade the tensions of choice: in Chapter 28
before she cedes to Álvaro, she tells herself, “I want peace, peace, no more
battles inside me” (641). He also allows her to eschew Vetustan vulgarity:
just as she took refuge in classical art to avoid the cursilería (bad taste) of
her bourgeois neighbors, so right before her affair, Ana returns to her fa-
ther’s books on Greek mythology to forget the commonness of her act in
the Nazarene procession. Ana’s ultimate adultery is not a return to her fa-
ther’s revolutionary principles but rather to his contradictory practice, to
the aestheticism, detached from social meaning, of his books.
Clarín’s reworking of Emma’s childhood in La Regenta functions in the
same way as his rewriting of the cathedral tour. Both episodes at first re-
store differences that Flaubert’s text blurs. In the latter, Clarín reaffirms the
opposition between the church and the factory and in the former, he draws
sharp distinctions between the stages of Ana’s childhood and the options
she will have in life. Whereas Emma moves from the eroticized religiosity
of Chateaubriand to the titillation of popular novels and never escapes the
circling of the tour or the writing machine, Clarín’s heroine vacillates bet-
ween opposed forces, between meaning and distortion. In his rewriting of
both episodes, these distinctions ultimately collapse. At the end of the
opening scene, the cathedral is indistinguishable from the tour. Ana’s child-
hood, similarly, anticipates her final renunciation of choice. In her fifth
stage and in her affair at the end of the novel, she takes refuge in the in-
differentiation of the writing machine. As we will see more clearly in what
follows, however, this indifferentiation functions differently from that

of Flaubert’s novel. Whereas the blurring of cathedral and factory in the
latter serves to parody and critique, the indistinction into which Ana falls
is an evasion of the choice she has the potential to make.
At the Theater
Of all the passages in which Clarín draws on Madame Bovary, the most
controversial in its time was undoubtedly the theater scene of Chapter 16.
In his scathing review of La Regenta, Luis Bonafoux singled out this
episode, which he considered a shameless plagiarism of the opera scene in
Part II, Chapter 15, of Madame Bovary. Clarín denied these charges, but
his response further complicated matters. Whereas the opera scene was an
insignificant and inessential episode in Madame Bovary, he argued, Ana’s
trip to the theater in Chapter 16 was crucial to La Regenta and a more
meaningful episode by far.15 His claim is in a sense counterintuitive. At the
opera, Emma reencounters Léon and launches into her second affair. The
scene is a turning point in the text for it marks the movement from
Rodolphe to Léon and from Part II to Part III. The episode in La Regenta,
in contrast, seems but another moment in Ana’s endless vacillation be-
tween two options.16
Though Clarín’s claims seem strange at first, if we take into account
what happens on stage in the two scenes, we may begin to see his point.
Consider, for example, the opening of the opera episode in Madame
Bovary:
It was a crossroad in a forest, on the right a spring shaded by an oak. A

group of country folk and nobles, all with tartans over their shoulders, sang
a hunting chorus; then a captain strode in and inveighed against an evil
spirit, raising both arms to heaven; another character joined him; they both
walked off, and the huntsmen repeated their chorus. (260–261)
Flaubert’s narrator is a terrible librettist. We are told what is seen on stage

but not what it means. The narrator describes a series of disconnected ges-
tures—“[the tenor] clasped Lucie in his arms, left her, returned to her,
seemed in despair: he would shout with rage, then let his voice expire,
plaintive and infinitely sweet” (262)—but never explains the plot that
unites them. The reader is left in the position of Charles Bovary, who by
the intermission is thoroughly confused. Flaubert’s strategy is to deflate the
romanticism and melodrama of opera by defamiliarizing it, by isolating its
ON TOUR 151
hyperbolic gestures from the narrative in which they make sense. In this
respect, Clarín’s claims begin to make sense: the opera scene in Madame
Bovary is less meaningful because Flaubert has deliberately drained the
spectacle of meaning. Removed from their context and reduced to a list,
the movements and gestures seem random—they resemble the arbitrari-
ness and disjunction of the writing machine, the bizarre juxtapositions of
Emma’s keepsake album or of Charles’s hat. Like the hidalgo listening to
Saturnino’s baroque rhetoric, Charles finds the spectacle dizzying and is
unable to put the parts together into a meaningful whole.
Although the description of the performance in La Regenta is some-
times clipped and listlike as well, the work in question, Juan Zorrilla’s Don
Juan Tenorio (1844), is a national classic, a play put on every All Saints’
Day and parts of which almost all Spaniards can recite. The piece is so
well-known that it is considered an anomaly that the heroine has never
seen it (364).17 As in Flaubert, the reader sees much of the work from the
perspective of the husband. In La Regenta, however, this is the vantage
point of an expert: Víctor Quintanar is a veritable theater scholar. Even if
one lacks this knowledge, however, the work is not inaccessible. Though
Ana is, like Charles, a first-time viewer, she has no difficulty making sense
of the play. Whereas in Madame Bovary the work on stage is an incoherent
jumble of clichés and gestures, in La Regenta it is meaningful for both the
novice spectator and the collectivity.
Not only does the performance regain significance in Clarín’s rewriting,
but so does the figure of the husband. In Madame Bovary, Charles is socially
awkward (he stumbles even in buying the tickets), and his conversation is
“flat as a sidewalk” (48)—a compendium of commonplaces. He often
seems a cipher, so conventional that he lacks any individuality whatsoever.
In La Regenta Víctor, who speaks in the style of whichever newspaper he has
been reading, is also given to clichés, but his conventionality results not so
much from the emptiness of his character as from its peculiarity: “If he had
been born to be anything it was, without doubt, to be a strolling player or,
rather, an amateur actor” (403). Víctor speaks others’ words not because he
lacks an identity but rather because he has a thespian nature. Obliged by
propriety to dedicate himself to other occupations, he treats his duties as
roles. Ironically, by not following his natural inclination to act, he is always
acting in real life. Unlike Charles, who is awkward and uncomfortable at
the opera, Víctor is most at home at the theater, though condemned to stay
on the wrong side of the footlights. The clichés that indicate Charles’s
emptiness and insignificance in Madame Bovary become in La Regenta a
sign of Víctor’s difference, a clue to the meaning of his identity.
Víctor’s knowledge of the theater ultimately provides a key to the mean-
ing of the passage. Praising Perales, the lead actor, Víctor recalls the mastery
with which the performer once rendered a speech from Agustín Moreto’s
El desdén con el desdén (1654). The speech, of which Víctor cites only the
beginning and the end, is a Neoplatonic reflection on love:
Los ojos, que se agradaron

de algún sujeto que vieron,
al corazón trasladaron
las especies que cogieron
y esta inflamación causaron. (vv. 1310–1314)
[The eyes, which took pleasure/ from some subject that they saw,/ trans-
ferred to the heart/ the attributes that they took/ and caused this inflamma-
tion (my translation).]
The plot of Madame Bovary is predicated on the idea that love is mediated
by texts or the desire of others (such as Lucie’s desire in Lucia di
Lammermoor). With these verses, in contrast, Víctor introduces a very dif-
ferent notion: the instantaneous, unmediated passion of Neoplatonism. This
distinction between mediated and unmediated experiences is what ultimately
differentiates the opera episode in Madame Bovary from the theater scene in
La Regenta. As a child, Emma passionately reads Walter Scott, and when she
sees Donizetti’s opera based on the novel, she recalls her earlier reading of it.
If she is able to understand the performance, to supply the plot the narrator
omits, it is because her experience of the opera is mediated by a text. Clarín’s
heroine, in contrast, has neither seen nor read the play she watches.
Like the hidalgo’s wife before the Murillo copy, Ana is seeing a compe-
tent reenactment of a Spanish classic for the first time and is deeply moved
by it. In both the cathedral episode and the theater scene, Clarín uses a sin-
cere first-time viewer to recover the freshness and vigor of a work that
through repetition and common knowledge is often taken for granted. Just
as Saturnino dismisses the Murillo because it is “terribly well known” (45),
Álvaro is taken aback by Ana’s enthusiasm for the tritest of plays—“Talking
about Don Juan Tenorio as if it were a brand-new play! Really, by now
Zorrilla’s Don Juan was only good for parodying!” (377). Through Ana’s re-
actions, Clarín is recovering the beauty of the work: “These lines—which
foolish prosaism has tried to make ridiculous and vulgar, running them
thousands upon thousands of times over its slimy lips, as slimy as the belly
of a toad—sounded that evening in Ana’s ears like the sublime expression
of a pure, innocent love” (379). Whereas Flaubert’s use of defamiliarization
reveals the absurdity of melodrama, Clarín recuperates and restores mean-
ing to a romantic classic.
The difference between the two heroines’ perspectives reflects the dif-
ferences in their childhood reading habits and adult experience. As a girl,
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Emma loves narrative and reads for the plot. Fittingly, this is what she sup-
plies as she watches the performance. Ana, in contrast, transforms those
“lanes of canvas” into the “poetry” of another age (375). The two women’s
approaches differ not only in their generic inclinations (narrative versus
lyric) but also in the degree to which they engage with the performance.
As in her childhood readings, in which she compensated for the dryness of
her governess’ texts by supplying a rich scenery collected from the nature
around her, Ana at the theater is at once projecting and receiving: her
imagination provides the setting that Vetusta’s impoverished theater can-
not afford. At this point in the performance, her reception of the play re-
sembles her reading: she is engaging with the content of what she sees and
is enhancing it. Emma, in contrast, is rereading or perhaps more accu-
rately, rewriting. Whereas Ana’s imagination gives a more natural or realis-
tic backdrop to the work, Emma projects a text onto the lavish costumes
and scenery on stage. For Flaubert’s heroine, the mise-en-scène functions
more as a blank page on which she writes her memories than as a text that
she deciphers and engages. At this stage, the emphasis in Madame Bovary
lies on what Emma supplies, whereas the focus in La Regenta is what Ana
receives.
This distinction between the women’s experiences reflects their differ-
ing relations with the works performed. Emma’s experience at the theater
is a repetition—the experience of the opera repeats that of the novel—and
ultimately it leads to a repetition—she is about to repeat the experience of
adultery as well as her relationship with Léon, with whom she has already
had a dalliance. Ana, in contrast, comes to the play totally inexperienced—
she knows neither the work nor love. The promiscuity of Don Juan and of
the Tenorio, which has been repeated on the lips of all, contrasts with Ana’s
virginity and her fresh perspective on the work. It is perhaps for this rea-
son that Clarín regards his scene as more significant. For Ana, the play has
not lost its meaning; she is not recycling literary or amorous thrills as
Emma is with Scott’s story and, later, in her relationship with Léon.
The two women are set apart not only by their perspective on the per-
formance but also by the progression of their reaction to it. As in the passages
about their childhood readings, Ana vacillates between two opposed modes
of response, while Emma’s experience is more continuous in its trajectory. At
Charles’s insistence, Emma arrives at the opera house early and spends a few
moments taking in the scene. From the outset, the theater is defined as a
bourgeois space. Waiting outside one can smell the warehouses nearby, and
among the audience members, the “conversation was about cotton, spirits
and indigo” (260). From the balcony, Emma looks down on the heads of the
old men, which are “like silver medals that had been tarnished by lead fumes”
(260). The heroine is delighted by the space and its hierarchies: she smiles
with satisfaction “seeing the crowd hurry off to the right down the corridor,
while she climbed the stairs leading to the first tier” (260). For Emma, the
thrill of the theater is in part that of distinguishing herself from the common
lot, of putting on “the airs of a duchess” (260).
As the opera begins, Emma is almost immediately taken back to her
childhood readings. She feels herself vibrate with the music of the opera and
imitates its heroine’s longings to “leave life behind and take wing in an em-
brace” (261). Once again, Emma would like to step into the fiction. After
Lagardy makes his appearance, however, the heroine’s reaction changes
slightly. While she is still reading in terms of her own life, what she observes
is not the similarities but the differences: “But no one on earth had ever
loved her with so great a love. That last moonlight night, when they had told
each other, ‘Till tomorrow! Till tomorrow!’ he had not wept as Edgar was
weeping now” (262). Here, Emma is beginning to dissociate her life from
the fiction. Later, she begins to question the ideal love portrayed in literature:
“But that kind of happiness was doubtless a lie, invented to make one de-
spair of any love. Now she well knew the true paltriness of the passions that
art painted so large.” She resolves to view the opera dispassionately as “an en-
joyable spectacle and nothing more” (263–264). At this point, Emma joins
Flaubert in deflating and demystifying romantic clichés, in identifying the
opera as nothing more than “fantasy.” She exhibits the same side of her per-
sonality that as a child drew her away from Chateaubriand’s lyrical land-
scapes and that will later allow her to laugh with the blind man as she dies.
Of course, Emma’s disdain is still a posture—she is always playing a role—
but she has now distanced herself from the fiction on stage.
Emma’s pose ends with the entrance of the tenor Lagardy. Although she
once again takes interest in the performance, she now sighs not for the char-
acter (Edgar) but for the actor who plays him. Lagardy is a “shrewd ham
actor” who “always saw to it that his publicity should include a poetic
phrase or two about the charm of his personality and the sensibility of his
soul” (262). Taken by his grandiose gestures, Emma begins to imagine what
her life might have been like with him, traveling from theater to theater in
Europe, and she at one point even convinces herself that he is gazing out at
her (265). Emma’s imagination again crosses the footlights but not to enter
the fiction. She is attracted rather to the “real-life” actor. Or, we might say,
she seeks to enter the commercial fiction rather than the performed one.
Either way, she is drawing closer to reality. The final step in the progression
is the entrance of Léon. At this point, Emma loses all interest in the opera
and directs her attention to the “real” and available man in her box. As in
her development as a child, she moves from aesthetic heights to more facile
and accessible forms of gratification, to literary thrills found in reality. She
turns away from fiction and toward her future lover.
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In Madame Bovary, Emma’s moment of demystification is a pivot in the

middle of the episode for it marks her gradual withdrawal from the fiction
as she begins to come back down to earth. Ana, in contrast, begins with
this moment. As Part II opens, the heroine sits at the dining-room table
after breakfast and is deeply depressed as she looks at the coffee pot and
cigar ash her husband has left out: “Her very soul was rent by the in-
significance of those objects” (351). As she glances at the newspaper, she is
saddened by its clichés, by the way even sublime ideas are “pawed over and
trodden on and sullied by fools and, by some miracle of stupidity, turned
into trivial nonsense, the mire of inanity” or are “jumbled up with the
prosaic, the false, the wicked” (352). Her criticism extends even to herself.
She remembers that she too has written “mannered and servile” imitations
of St. John and now realizes that they were “insignificant commonplaces”
(353), the product of emotions more fleeting than deep. The compositions
have little to do with her current reality. As she dismisses her adolescent
writing on Loreto Hill, Ana’s mood resembles Emma’s disdain for fiction
at the opera.
As we saw in the previous chapter, Ana is beginning to rise up against
her situation when Álvaro Mesía makes his appearance on a white horse
that “prance[s] and pirouette[s], as if it were showing impatience of its own
accord and not because of its rider’s hidden manœuvres” (361). Ana is now
taken by the false uprising, which is really a pleasurable descent—she feels
as if she were “falling into a well” (362). Álvaro is convinced that Ana is
experiencing a moment of weakness but is prevented from seducing her by
the balcony that separates them. At this point, Víctor appears on the scene
and encourages both of them to attend a performance of Don Juan Tenorio.
Though Álvaro secretly disdains the drama and prefers Molière’s version,
which he has not read, he joins Víctor in praising the “popular work”
(364). Ana agrees to attend “with her eyes fixed on Mesía” (365).
In rewriting Flaubert’s episode, thus, Clarín has shifted the order of the
influences and moods. Flaubert begins by confronting Emma with the per-
formance, which he unveils as an arbitrary conglomeration of gestures, a
product of the writing machine. He then allows his heroine to glimpse the
falseness of what is on stage. After this moment of demystification, Emma
looks to reality, fascinated first by the actor’s private life and then by Léon.
As the cathedral tour, which follows the opera scene, reveals, however, this
reality—the “real” lover—is just as marked by the writing machine as the
performance she has dismissed: Emma will end up circling the city in a
meaningless tour that recalls Binet’s tour-lathe, an icon of the ceaseless pro-
duction of insignificant fragments that characterizes the writing machine.
Clarín’s version of this episode changes the order of these events. It be-
gins with a moment of demystification in which Ana senses the aridity and
falseness of the world around her. Like Emma, Ana reacts by seeking satis-
faction in the world, in a seducer who happens to come along at just the
right moment. Álvaro threatens to pull Ana into the pozo or writing ma-
chine. It is at this point, however, that the heroine goes to see the play. At
first, as Ana enters the theater, it may seem that Mesía has gained his point.
She has decided to dejarse ir (“let [her will] go” 369), words that recall
Luísa’s fall in O primo Basílio (deixarse ir). As we will see, however, Álvaro’s
plan ultimately backfires. By placing the performance at the end rather
than at the beginning of the process, Clarín uses it not as a tool for seduc-
tion but rather as a way to introduce another option into Ana’s life. Emma,
in her moment of self-criticism, expresses frustration with the unreality of
literature. What makes her vulnerable to Léon is her desire to find in real
life the thrills she has looked for in books. The text foments desires and
frustrations that propel her toward adultery. Clarín’s heroine inverts this
trajectory: Ana turns away from the seducer and toward the play. What
makes her vulnerable to Álvaro at the beginning of the episode is the un-
literariness of reality, the aridity of a life without higher aspirations. By
placing the performance after the moment of disillusionment, Clarín re-
turns to it the function and meaning it lacks in Madame Bovary: it will
provide Ana with a new ideal and draw her away from adultery. The play
is not cause but solution.
Like Flaubert’s heroine, Ana spends her first few moments at the the-
ater taking in the scene. Her initial perspective is similar to Emma’s: both
women perceive the theater as a social space and observe the classes that
occupy it. Whereas the Rouen opera house is predominantly bourgeois,
however, the theater at Vetusta is complex in its hierarchies and involves
many subtle distinctions in rank: Álvaro’s box is differentiated from (but
imitated by) the wannabe Ronzal’s, whose occupants in turn disdain “the
masses” in the gallery below (371). This hierarchy is a performance in its
own right and competes with the Tenorio, for the Vetustans go to the the-
ater not to see but to be seen: each box is a small stage upon which class
difference is performed. As Ana settles into her box, it is her own per-
formance that interests her most. She is aware not only of the admiration
she inspires in the public but also of “God’s direct, manifest and singular
attention to her actions, her sorrows and joys, her destiny,” of the
“predilection with which He regarded her” (368).
Ana glances toward Álvaro’s box but is distracted by the play: “At that
moment Don Juan Tenorio was tearing the mask from his venerable father’s
face, and Ana had to look at the stage, because Don Juan’s extraordinary
temerity had produced a good effect on the gallery, which was applauding
with enthusiasm” (373). From the outset, the play competes with Álvaro for
the heroine’s attention. Ana is immediately drawn into the drama. By the
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beginning of the second act, Álvaro realizes that “he had a powerful rival
that evening: the play” (375). The moment at which Ana focuses on the
work is important. The Tenorio begins with a performance within a per-
formance: Don Juan and Luis Mejía meet at an inn and read the list of their
conquests before a crowd of onlookers, which includes two masked gentle-
men. These disguised men, who are the fathers of Juan and his betrothed,
Inés, have paid the innkeeper to sit at the inn to observe what is described
as an escena. As Gustavo Pérez Firmat has pointed out, in tearing off his
father’s mask, Don Juan is crossing the footlights, breaking down the
distinction between the audience and the stage, fiction and reality. This
gesture anticipates Ana’s response to the play, for she too will cross the
footlights and see herself on stage.
Significantly, it is the pueblo that appreciates Don Juan’s gesture in this
scene. Ana’s fascination with the play on stage distracts her from the social
performance around her—the hierarchies of the theatrical boxes—and
draws her closer to the poor people in the gallery:
Ana marvelled at the poetry in those lanes of canvas, which she saw as trans-
formed into solid constructions of another age—and marvelled no less at
the scorn with which it was viewed and heard in boxes and stalls. The
gallery, joyful and enthusiastic, seemed much more intelligent and cultured
than the high society of Vetusta. (375)
As she did in her childhood, Ana identifies with the common people and
finds poetry in the prosaic settings of Vetusta’s decayed theater.
Soon, however, Ana returns to the “sentimental egotism” (375) she felt
as she entered the theater. This shift is marked in the text through the use
of free indirect discourse, which Clarín often brackets with quotation
marks. Giving way to a “vague historical romanticism” that recalls Emma’s
reading of Walter Scott, Ana longs for the “poetry of those times.” Just as
she rejected the poverty and bad taste of her neighbors in Madrid, Ana dis-
misses the “filth, prose, naked ugliness” around her: “Even Don Álvaro
seemed to be a part of the dull prose all about her” (375–376). To com-
pensate, she begins to project, to “[dress] her adorer in the costume of the
actor” (376). Whereas at first she read the “lanes of canvas” as poetry, she
is now writing poetry in prose. To return to the terms of Chapter 1, she is
(like Paco Vegallana) projecting upon Álvaro’s Marguerite.
This projection contrasts with Ana’s reaction when Inés first appears on
stage: “The third act was a revelation of passionate poetry. Ana shuddered
when she saw Doña Inés in her cell. The novice looked so like her! As Ana
noticed the resemblance so did the audience—there was a murmur of ad-
miration, and many spectators ventured to take a furtive look at Vegallana’s
box” (376). In contrast to Ana’s force-fit of Álvaro and the tenor, the resem-
blance between Ana and the actress is real and confirmed by the general
public. In responding to Inés, Ana is reading rather than writing or project-
ing. Inés is a true mirror of her life rather than the product of a bricolage.
As Ana focuses again on the play and reads the actress’s “poetic realism,” she
ceases to create illusions by jumbling faces and bodies; she moves away from
Álvaro and the arbitrary projections of the writing machine.
Not only has her method changed, but so has the object of identifica-
tion. Before, Ana projected Álvaro’s face onto Perales, a mediocre and de-
rivative actor—an “imitator of Calvo” (373)—who fails to appreciate the
verisimilitude of his wife’s performance as Inés, which is at times quite
“original” (376). Known as La González, she has lived out in her private
life Emma’s fantasies about Lagardy; though born to a well-to-do family,
she has fallen in love and run off with an actor with whom she now per-
forms in provincial theaters. Because of her love for her husband, she is
particularly compelling when she plays opposite him:
[O]n occasions she made bold to be original, and was excellent in the role
of an enamoured virgin . . . She spoke Doña Inés’s lines in a trembling, crys-
talline voice, and in moments of rapture she allowed herself to be carried
away by true passion—since she was performing with her husband—and
achieved a poetic realism whose full worth neither Perales nor the greater
part of the audience was capable of appreciating.
But Ana was. (376)
La González is convincing because what she says is true, because the divi-
sion between fiction and reality has collapsed. Hers is an emotion un-
mediated by the text. Her performance contrasts with that of her husband,
which is mediated not only by the play but also by another actor’s rendi-
tion of it. La González repeats Inés’s words, but this repetition truly con-
veys the spirit of the original. Whereas her husband is, like Saturnino’s dark
painting, a peripheral phenomenon upon which one projects, La González
is, like the Murillo reproduction, a copy that transmits the vigor and
beauty of a national classic. Her sincere reproduction of the “enamoured
virgin” anticipates Ana’s attempts to imitate the Virgin in the Nazarene
procession. Both performances involve a social descent. Like La González,
who abandons her well-off family, Ana will defy upper-class notions of
propriety and “make a spectacle of herself ” (587).18
Like Flaubert, Clarín includes in his theater scene details about the
actors’ personal lives and loves. This romance, however, is no longer merely
the heroine’s fantasy: Ana never wishes to step into the performers’ private
lives. When Emma crosses the footlights, she is projecting desire upon the
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“real-life” actor. When Ana does so, she is responding to a verified similar-
ity to the actress that increases her sympathy for the fictional novice. As in
the passages about their childhood readings, Emma moves away from fic-
tion and toward the gratification of her desires in real life, while Ana turns
increasingly from her world to the fiction on stage.
Like Ana’s reading of Augustine, the experience of hearing Inés seems
“divine” and brings tears to her eyes. Not coincidentally, the scene that
touches her so profoundly is one of reading: Inés has discovered a letter
from Don Juan between the pages of her breviary and reads its contents
aloud. This is a scene not merely of reading but of ideal reading: through
the text, Inés feels the “supernatural nearness” of Don Juan; “love was fil-
tering through the walls” (376). The paper is a magical one that transmits
perfectly the spirit of its author. Just as Ana reading Augustine hears a
“voice” within her and receives his message directly as if unmediated by the
text and the centuries between them, so Don Juan’s writing breaks down
walls and seems to communicate his presence supernaturally. Both scenes,
moreover, involve coincidence. What makes Ana’s childhood experience so
powerful and even scary is that she anticipates (and does not simply imi-
tate) Augustine’s garden reading. Here too the coincidental similarity be-
tween Ana’s and Inés’s looks, a resemblance confirmed by the audience,
validates Ana’s subsequent identification with the play’s heroine. Clarín’s
use of coincidence in both episodes recalls his strategy at the end of
Chapter 15, in which the drunken Santos terrifies Fermín with his coinci-
dentally accurate descriptions of Paula’s money-counting inside the house
(see Chapter 1). Just as the spirit of Santos’s words seems to Fermín to go
beyond the phrase, to penetrate the walls of his house and to impose itself
on reality, so Augustine’s voice and Don Juan’s love eerily filter through the
text, the walls and Ana’s mirror image on stage to move the heroine pro-
foundly. Like Santos’s guesses in Chapter 15, this terrifying coincidence
contrasts with and reveals the superficiality of a more forced type of pro-
jection. In the same way that Barinaga’s coincidentally correct accusations
deflate Fermín’s Faustian reverie, the coincidences between Ana and
Augustine or between Ana and Inés contrast with the false mystical vision
the young heroine projects on the thicket while writing on Loreto Hill and
with her attempt to force-fit Álvaro and Perales in the theater scene.
Even though Ana is touched by the appearance of Inés in the third act,
as the play goes on she continues to try to project the poetry of the play
onto the prose of her life. Once again, Clarín uses free indirect discourse
to mark this movement away from the play and Ana’s compassion for Inés
and back toward herself and what he called before her “sentimental ego-
tism”: “Ozores Mansion was her convent, her husband the rigid order of
boredom and coldness in which she had professed a full eight years before,
and Don Juan—Don Juan was Mesía” (376). As she did before Inés’s ap-
pearance, the heroine attempts to force an allegory. When Álvaro visits her
box during intermission, Ana continues to project upon him and to write
poetry in prose: “Ana poured upon his prosaic imagination the torrent of
poetry which had flowed into her from the noble play, fresh and full of
beauty and colour, by the great Zorrilla” (377). As in her epiphany on
Loreto Hill, Ana is engaged not in dialogue but rather in writing. The di-
alogic reading that conveys the spirit of the author to the reader—that of
Inés before Juan’s letter or of Ana before Augustine—is replaced by a solip-
sistic projection in which Ana talks without listening: she assumes that
Álvaro agrees and never really hears his voice.
What Ana projects is difference: “Poor Ana spoke with impassioned elo-
quence, imagining that the leader of the Dynastic Liberal Party understood
her—that he was not like all the other Vetustans” (377). Álvaro reluctantly
plays along, taking on the pose of “the secret sentimentalist like the ones in
Feuillet’s plays and novels—a great deal of esprit concealing a heart of gold,
which keeps itself hidden for fear of the thorns of reality. That was the height
of distinction as understood by Don Álvaro” (377). Álvaro’s distinction is
but trompe l’œil, a “mirage” (377), an illusion of the surface. Ana’s projec-
tion and Álvaro’s false distinction contrast with the coincidence the audience
observes. The public’s recognition of an uncanny similarity between two
women who are fundamentally different recalls the disturbing experience of
the femmes du monde in Marguerite’s apartment. This is a moment that
breaks down hierarchy—it momentarily dispels Ana’s egotism and sense of
superiority and leads her to feel solidarity with a confined woman who is
about to be liberated, who is about to rise up against the social order that re-
presses her. Ana, however, is not yet ready to understand this scene. As
Clarín’s commentary on Álvaro’s role-playing makes clear, she is mistaken in
her attempt to connect this uprising to her relationship with the seducer.
With the beginning of the fourth act, however, Ana turns once more
toward the play and silences Álvaro. At this point, she can no longer draw
parallels with her own life (378) and must now focus on the play itself,
which she again finds poetic:
Doña Inés was saying:
“Don Juan, Don Juan, I thee implore,
I call on thy nobility . . . ”
. . . Ana could control herself no longer. She wept, wept, with infinite pity
for Inés. What was being enacted on stage was not now a love scene; it was
somehow religious, and Ana’s soul leapt on towards the highest ideals,
towards the pure, perfect sentiment of universal charity—she didn’t know
exactly what it was, all she knew was that she was almost fainting from such
intense emotion. (374)
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The beautiful verses of the sofa scene bring back the compassion Ana felt
as Inés read the letter, but this time she gives way to her feelings and weeps
freely. The description of her emotion as one of “universal charity” ties the
scene to the many instances in which Ana’s sympathy for poor children
brings tears to her eyes. In the Boulevard scene (Chapter 9), for example,
Ana cries on seeing street urchins before a candy shop unable to name the
sweets they crave. The fact that Inés is calling upon Don Juan’s nobility
suggests a similarity between the charity Ana feels at the play and her re-
action to the deprived children to whom she gives alms. In both the
Boulevard and theater scenes, Álvaro observes the heroine’s sudden emo-
tion but misunderstands it. On the Boulevard, he mistakenly thinks that
he is the cause of her change in feeling (198). At the theater, once again,
the seducer misreads Ana’s sentiments. What is for her a feeling of charity
and solidarity Álvaro takes as a response to “his own elegant and close pres-
ence,” to what he considers “a purely physiological influence” (379).
His mistake results from a misreading not only of Ana but also of the
Tenorio. When Álvaro and Víctor first discuss the play at the beginning of
the episode, the seducer silently disagrees with Quintanar, who condemns
the way Don Juan treats Luis Mejía and his betrothed, Doña Ana. At the
beginning of Part I, Act II, of the Tenorio, Don Juan overhears his rival
Luis setting up a tryst with Doña Ana. Having undertaken in a bet to se-
duce Doña Ana, Juan has Luis tied up and takes his place in her bed. As it
is dark, Doña Ana believes that she is surrendering her honor to her fiancé.
For Víctor, this use of force and deception is ungentlemanly and consti-
tutes a flaw in Zorrilla’s work. Álvaro, however, secretly approves. For him,
the trick is “a very realistic and ingenious and timely one. He had had ad-
ventures of that sort, which he had brought to a happy conclusion, and
that didn’t make him feel dishonoured” (364–365).
Víctor and Álvaro’s difference in opinion is reflected in a dispute in the
play itself. At the end of Part I, Act IV, Juan and Luis meet again and dis-
gree about the outcome of their bet from Act I. Don Juan believes that he
has won since he has both abducted Inés and seduced Ana. His rival, how-
ever, does not concede victory:
. . . habéis la casa asaltado,
usurpándome mi puesto;
y pues el mío tomasteis
para triunfar de doña Ana,
no sois vos, don Juan, quien gana,
porque por otro jugasteis. (vv. 2362–2367)
[you have assaulted the house/ usurping my position/ and since you took
mine/ in order to triumph over Doña Ana/ it is not you, Don Juan, who has
won/ because you played in the place of someone else (my translation).]
The disagreement between Juan and Luis is ultimately about language. As

Luis Fernández Cifuentes has argued, the play initially presents two con-
flicting attitudes toward words. In their lists, the two seducers use words
to record and represent reality, to keep an accurate account of their seduc-
tions. The seducer, however, uses language not only as a mirror that reflects
his triumphs but also as a tool with which to have an effect on reality, as a
means to persuade and seduce women. At the beginning of the play, for ex-
ample, Don Juan’s letter seems to us not a reflection of his feelings so much
as a means to an end, an instrument through which he may win Inés’s
heart. The disagreement between Juan and Luis at the end of Act IV is due
to their opposing approaches to words. Luis has adopted a representational
view of language: for him, the sign, “Luis,” which has triumphed, repre-
sents the reality to which it corresponds, and therefore, he is the victor. For
Juan, however, language is but a tool, a means to attain a physical end, and
it is this end that counts. Juan has triumphed by inserting his body into
the gap between the sign and its signified.
Álvaro secretly approves of Don Juan’s strategies in Act II, because he
adopts a similar approach to language. As we have seen, he too takes ad-
vantage of the breakdown of representation in Bonapartist fashion. His
approach resembles Don Juan’s strategy with Ana: when the heroine feels
that even the most sublime phrases have lost their meaning and is unable
to make sense of the newspaper in front of her, Álvaro shows up on his
horse, and inserts his “proud figure” into this vacuum of meaning.
Momentarily, he seems to fill the gap, to soothe the aridity in Ana’s soul.
To his frustration, however, he is not on the balcony with her and cannot
complete the seduction.
When Álvaro finally does share a balcony with Ana during the fourth act
of the play (he remains in her box after the intermission), this strategy is no
longer viable. Foolishly, he attempts to use it and “almost ruin[s] every-
thing” (379). What makes the seduction impossible at this moment is a
shift in the attitude toward language in the play. As Fernández Cifuentes
points out, the irony of the Tenorio is that the letter, which begins as a tool
of seduction, becomes by the end of Part I a mirror of reality. Don Juan’s
sincere confession in the sofa scene echoes the words of the letter read in
Act III. Though at first merely tools, they now represent reality. The gap be-
tween the sign and the signifier has been closed as the author’s emotions
and the contents of the letter, the voice and the writing, coincide.
Precisely at the moment that the letter becomes true, it ceases to have a
use or to be a tool. Unlike the reading scene that first moved Ana to tears,
the sofa scene is a moment of direct communication unmediated by texts;
the letter has no place in it. Don Juan’s phrases go directly from his lips to
Inés’s heart: his words, he tells her, “están/ filtrando insensiblemente tu
ON TOUR 163
corazón ya pendiente/ de los labios de don Juan” (vv. 2194–2197; are fil-
tering imperceptibly into your heart, already hanging on the words of Don
Juan’s lips; my translation). They go straight to Ana’s as well. If after Inés’s
reading of Juan’s letter Ana could still lapse back into false literary projec-
tions, after witnessing this perfect, unmediated communion of souls, she
ceases to use the play to mediate her perception of her own reality.19
Álvaro no longer has a place in her thoughts.20 There is no gap between
sign and signifier into which he may insert himself. At this moment,
meaning goes beyond the phrase. Whereas earlier Inés deciphered the
truth, the accurate representation, in Juan’s letter, now she is overwhelmed
by a meaning that exceeds its phrases and attracts her like a “mysterious
amulet” (v. 2237). And whereas during the reading of the letter Ana iden-
tified her appearance with the actress’s, she now sympathizes directly with
the heroine, Inés: her relationship with the novice is no longer mediated.
She has moved from recognizing a mirror of herself, a representation, to al-
lowing herself to internalize the emotions on stage and to incarnate the
figure: “Ana’s soul leapt towards the highest ideals, toward the pure, perfect
sentiment of universal charity” (379).
In Chapter 1, we saw how Clarín’s work hovers between two sets of op-
positions. The first is an opposition between representation (e.g., Fermín’s
dry sermons) and incarnation (Fortunato’s embodiment of the Passion) in
which the latter is privileged as an ideal revolutionary drive (Fortunato’s in-
carnations defy Vetustan notions of decorum and lead the parishioners to
feel universal brotherhood). We also saw, however, that Clarín draws a dis-
tinction between true and false representation, between accurate reflections
and the writing machine. In this opposition, correct representation is the
positive term, and its distortion is associated with the trompe l’œil of
Bonapartism. In both the description of Ana’s childhood and the treatment
of the play, Clarín gestures toward the first opposition: the distinction be-
tween representation and incarnation. This is clear in the difference between
the dryness of the first texts Ana reads and the idealized reading in which
Augustine’s voice seems to transcend the barrier of the page and in the dif-
ference between Ana’s reactions to the letter-reading and to the sofa scene of
the Tenorio. This opposition is part of what Clarín has added in his rewrit-
ing of Flaubert’s episode. Unlike Ana, Emma does not experience this type
of incarnation. She is choosing between the terms of the other opposition,
the distinction between false and true representations, between the writing
machine of the opera and figures whom she believes to be more real: Lagardy
and Léon (from our perspective, of course, they are equally textual: Lagardy’s
life is but an advertising scheme, and Léon is derivative). Flaubert’s heroine
rejects the fiction of the play because it does not correspond to reality and
moves instead toward a “real-life” lover. Ana, in contrast, accepts the fiction
because of all its eerie correspondences, because of the meaning that

overflows the performance, and allows it to draw her away from the poor
imitation of Don Juan sitting beside her. Whereas Emma identifies with
the fiction, then with the actor, and finally with the seducer (Léon), Ana
projects upon the seducer, is identified with the actress, and ultimately
sympathizes with Inés, the fictional character, whose feelings she internalizes
and reincarnates. By including this element of incarnation and deep
empathy, Clarín is introducing a revolutionary potential into the scene.
The inverse movement of the two heroines is reflected in the inverse
placement of the cathedral and theater scenes in the two novels. In
Madame Bovary the opera is placed at the end of Part II and is immediately
followed by the tour of the church in Chapter 1 of Part III. In La Regenta,
in contrast, the cathedral scene opens Part I and the theater scene opens
Part II. This structural difference is informed by the divergent trajectories
of the two heroines. Emma moves away from fiction, which she finds
meaningless and unrealistic, and toward the world only to find that her re-
ality is made up of the same empty phrases as her books. In Part III Emma
attempts to escape this indifferentiation and repetition, to save desire from
the writing machine. Nevertheless, as her affair is, from the outset, a repe-
tition (of her earlier flirtation with Léon in Part I, of her first adultery, and
of her readings of Walter Scott), imitation is unavoidable. After Emma and
Léon leave the cathedral, they consummate their love in a taxi that circles
the city at breakneck speed as the narrator ticks off for the reader the mon-
uments they pass. Though the blinds of the carriage have been drawn,
Emma and Léon are still on tour in both senses of the word: the circling
not only gives us a tour of the city but also recalls in its futility and repe-
tition Binet’s tour, the lathe. Emma may have escaped the self-parody of
the cathedral tower and dismissed the clichés of the opera and tour guide,
but she quickly falls back into the abyss of the writing machine, into a
morass of ever emptier words.
Ana, in contrast, has the possibility of escaping the tour through fic-
tion, through the higher ideals she glimpses in Zorrilla’s play as well as her
readings of St. Augustine and St. Theresa. The two scenes, consequently,
appear in inverse order in Clarín’s novel. Unlike Emma, Ana gradually dis-
covers meaning in what she views on stage, and as we watch with her, we
too recover the freshness of the play and of the new world it imagines. In
Chapter 1 of La Regenta, the cathedral scene ends with the triumph of the
writing machine. The episode presents the forces against which Ana, like
the hidalgo’s wife, must struggle: the indifferentiating language and hypo-
critical society of Vetusta. The theater scene at the beginning of Part II,
however, ends with Ana’s epiphany. Unlike Emma, Ana has escaped the
tour and found meaning in fiction. Her project in the chapters that follow
ON TOUR 165
will be not to save desire from meaninglessness but rather to save meaning
from a desire that dilutes or empties it. As we will see in the next chapter,
the theater marks the beginning of what I will call the dramatic arc of the
novel (Chapters 16–26), Ana’s struggle to recapture the meaning she has
discovered and to make it a part of her life. The episode in Chapter 16 is
followed immediately by Ana’s confession in which Fermín encourages her
to harness and rechannel the spiritual energy she has felt at the theater. Just
as she has now recovered the freshness of lines repeated so often that they
have become almost clichés, Ana will undertake a program of good works,
charity, and spiritual exercise that will reveal to her the poetry of the “trite
and commonplace” (396).
The Politics of Representation
One of the most important and, for contemporaries, disturbing innova-

tions of Madame Bovary was its refusal to bracket the language it ridiculed,
its blurring of the boundary between satire and its object. Like the works
it parodied, Madame Bovary was a compendium of trite language, a hotch-
potch of clichés that anticipated Flaubert’s later attempt to write a
Dictionnaire des idées reçues. Flaubert did not distinguish his own voice
from these discourses, a method perhaps best represented by the image of
Charles’s hat with which the novel opens. As we saw in Chapter 2, the rep-
resentation of the composite headgear offers a foretaste of the ridiculous
combinations of Emma’s books, of the absurd literature that Flaubert set
out to parody. The metaphors with which it is described (“one of those
wretched things whose mute hideousness suggests unplumbed depths, like
an idiot’s face” [4]), however, also gesture toward the blank gaze of the
blind beggar whose laughter deflates the heroine’s illusions as she dies. The
dual function of the hat reflects Flaubert’s technique, which consists of
making the target of his subversion the weapon with which it is subverted.
An example of this confusion in the episode we have just examined is
Emma’s brief rejection of the clichés of the opera. At this point in the
scene, the heroine seems to coincide with the author in deflating the trite
and unrealistic representation before her. As she does so, however, it is clear
that she is still posturing, repeating a cliché. Flaubert is dismissing clichés
with clichés. In so doing, of course, he risks being assimilated with the
object of his critique. As Dominick LaCapra has observed, “One could not
entirely divorce the parodic citation or mention of cliché from its use, and
the writer touching cliché would have to dirty his hands and face the
threat, perhaps the temptation, of embourgeoisement and bêtise” (80).
Ultimately, however, it is this apparent lack of originality that makes

Madame Bovary so original: the novel makes its critique not through ex-
plicit commentary (a narrator distinguished from the world he represents)
but rather through an accumulation of commonplaces, through the same-
ness of the novel with the clichés of the time. Flaubert’s challenge in
Madame Bovary is, like Ana’s in La Regenta, to create something new, to ex-
press original meaning, through the commonplaces of others.
Flaubert’s confusion of satire and its object, of the text and the social
discourse it parodied, was perhaps most famously encapsulated in his ex-
clamation, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!” Much of the innovation of his
writing lies in his identification with the heroine, in his ability to enter her
head in long passages of free indirect style. At the same time, however, the
work also condemns identification with literary characters. It is Emma’s
habit of projecting what she reads onto her life that gets her into trouble
in the first place.
In La Regenta, Clarín shares Flaubert’s preoccupation with identifica-
tion and similarly explores the possibility of an originality that emerges
from repetition. His own project is to create a novel that is new and dif-
ferent through its repetition of Madame Bovary.21 This challenge becomes
the subject of several episodes in the text. As we have seen, the cathedral
tour and the theater scene describe the breakthroughs that can emerge
from copies or repetitions (the Murillo reproduction or the yearly revival
of the Tenorio). As in Madame Bovary, the heroine and her relation with
literature are central to this exploration.
Clarín, however, handles these issues somewhat differently from his
French predecessor. Flaubert identifies positively with Emma through his
writing at the same time that he ridicules her tendency to identify with
characters through her reading. Clarín, in contrast, idealizes Ana’s identifi-
cation through reading, while he condemns her identification through
writing and (we will see) uses free indirect discourse himself in a somewhat
more negative way. In his reworking of the adulteress’s childhood, Clarín
makes it clear that Ana’s reading is a beneficial hobby, an expression of
compassion and solidarity that often transcends social hierarchy. When
Ana is reading, she approaches Flaubert’s identification with Emma: just as
Flaubert, stooping to stupidity, is original, so Ana rises above her mediocre
world when she embraces the cursilería of religious fanaticism, the com-
monplaces of beatería. What is condemned in La Regenta is not Ana’s read-
ing but her writing. Describing her poetic experimentation in the fifth
phase of her childhood, Clarín ridicules the way Ana projects literary
clichés (the erotic diction of St. John of the Cross) onto nature to confirm
her own aesthetic and social distinction. Ana’s “San Juan soy yo” lacks the
humility of Flaubert’s gesture.
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The positive forms of identification in the two novels (Flaubert’s writ-

ing and Ana’s reading) are similar in that both derive their freshness from
words that have become clichés and in that both can be read as sympa-
thetic gestures. Just as the utopian vision of La Regenta lies in Ana’s read-
ings and in the relationships they inform (her friendships with Germán
and Fermín), so Flaubert’s suppression of quotation marks in Madame
Bovary expresses what Ross Chambers calls a “demand for love” (179). The
two forms of identification, however, also differ in important ways.
Writing, after all, is not the same as reading. Flaubert enters the head of his
heroine and makes her discourse his own. Adopting Emma’s language, he
shows how she is trapped in textuality, how her attempts to express au-
thentic and original feelings are foiled by the worn-out phrases to which
she is confined. Ana, in contrast, does not parrot or enter the head of
St. Augustine, St. Theresa, or Zorrilla’s Inés but rather listens to them
speak. She hears the voice through the writing and does not simply
reproduce the writings that constitute the voice. In both Ana’s childhood
reading of Augustine and her reaction to the theater, her experience seems
strangely unmediated by the text. Clarín imagines the possibility of break-
ing through the divide that separates author and reader. He suggests that
Ana might be able to break out of a stifling subjectivity, to escape the
confining textuality that stymies Emma.
The difference between Ana’s two ways of identifying (her reading and
the “San Juan soy yo” of her writing) is reinforced by Clarín’s own use of
identification. Like Flaubert, Clarín at times adopts free indirect discourse
and enters his heroine’s head. He deploys the strategy, however, in a very
different way. Flaubert resorts to free indirect style not only to call atten-
tion to the discourses he is parodying (the absurdity of Emma’s language)
but also to speak through them, to identify his voice with hers. As
Chambers notes, the technique can at times “[encourage] a nonironic
reading, indeed an identificatory reading” (197). La Regenta, in contrast,
avoids this identification and the ambiguity it creates. Unlike Flaubert’s
narrator, Clarín’s tends to bracket and distance himself from the clichés he
cites. Free indirect style in La Regenta often appears in quotation marks,
which, as John Rutherford observes, tends to “destroy its ambiguity and
thus (when a character’s thoughts are being reported) to increase the illu-
sion of projection” (11): we are more aware of the act of citation than in
Flaubert’s purer use of the technique.22 By bracketing the quoted dis-
course, by making clear that it belongs to others, Clarín distances himself
from it. In the theater scene, as we have seen, the narrator uses free indi-
rect style to disidentify from the heroine, to indicate her movement away
from his ideal. He often enters her head not to give an insight into uni-
versal human longings but rather to ridicule her projections. When Clarín
identifies textually (through free indirect style) with Ana, he is generally

parodying, disidentifying from her spiritually. Conversely, when he identi-
fies with her spiritually (as in his treatment of her reading and her rapport
with Fermín), he disidentifies from her textually: he returns to a more tra-
ditional narrative style and avoids free indirect discourse.
The difference between these two modes is clear in Chapter 16. The
description of Ana’s dry interior monologue at the beginning of the episode
relies heavily on free indirect style and recalls Flaubert’s exploration of
Emma’s head in Madame Bovary. In this part of the passage, Ana fails to
escape the clichés around her; like Fermín in Chapter 15, she is but another
Trifón Cármenes reflecting melancholically from her balcony: “Had she
been a Trifona?” she asks herself. “Probably, and how painful it was to have
to direct at herself the scorn which her efforts deserved!” (352). The scene,
however, is followed by the performance of the Tenorio. In portraying Ana’s
intense identification with Inés during the sofa scene, the narrator no longer
speaks through her voice but rather describes her epiphany with his own.
This distancing of narrator and heroine is a strategy that guarantees the
authenticity of her experience. By returning to a “realist” voice, he con-
firms that this is a “real” event. While Flaubert risks allowing his own voice
to be contaminated by the inauthenticity of Emma’s through free indirect
style, Clarín lends Ana the authority of his by avoiding the technique.
Flaubert critiques the writing machine from within it. He turns its clichés
against themselves. In the world of Madame Bovary, it is never possible to
escape this textuality. Clarín, in contrast, attempts to protect his heroine’s
positive identification and the collective values she discovers through it
from the confusion in which Flaubert, through free indirect style, im-
merses himself.23 Emma’s tragedy is that she cannot escape the language of
others, the clichéd discourses of Yonville. Ana’s hope of salvation lies in her
ability to embrace this worn-out language, to feel a solidarity with others
that gives these words a meaning that goes beyond the triteness of the
phrase. Clarín’s technique of identification through disidentification, in a
sense, reflects this ideal of communication. Whereas Flaubert is ventrilo-
quizing, speaking through Emma’s voice, Clarín steps aside from Ana
when she is in touch with her most authentic self. Allowing her to exist
separately from himself, he is not speaking through her but rather engag-
ing in dialogue with her.
The difference between Flaubert’s and Clarín’s strategies may be related
to the distinct political contexts in which they wrote. As Chambers has
argued, Flaubert and contemporaries such as Baudelaire and Nerval inno-
vated many of the textual strategies we now associate with modernism in
order to avoid the censorship of the Second Empire (10). Their works are
not openly political and are difficult to place in the literary Left or Right, but
ON TOUR 169
they are not acritical (8). Bonapartism and its writing machine could not be
attacked directly by a satirical narrator or overt parody. Consequently, these
texts made their critique indirectly, from within the accepted discourses of
the period. The originality of a text such as Madame Bovary, its difference
and dissidence from the society of which it is born, must be expressed
through sameness. It cannot escape the textuality it satirizes.
Clarín’s novel, like Flaubert’s, parodies the indifferentiation of the writ-
ing machine that had come to dominate the political debates of the
Restoration. Through his portrayal of Vetusta, Clarín critiques the indif-
ferentiating turno político, a system of rigged elections and backstage poli-
tics that produced the illusion of a two-party system alternating in power.
Though the politics of Vetusta (and by extension Spain) have “the surface
appearance of bitter dissent,” behind the scenes the liberal and conserva-
tive factions are controlled by one individual (Álvaro Mesía) (158). There
is no real difference between the contenders. The society portrayed by the
novel is one in which ideological difference is projected onto parties that
are fundamentally the same.
Unlike Flaubert, however, Clarín is not limited to deconstructing this
system from within its circular discourses. He is able to attack it from with-
out, and his narrator is often explicitly critical. Because he can separate his
voice from his target, Clarín can imagine political alternatives; he can in-
clude an explicitly utopian element in his work. This alternate vision is
clear in the basic structure of the novel. Madame Bovary is the story of a
series of influences. Emma moves from one set of clichés to another, from
one man to the next. In La Regenta, in contrast, Ana faces various options
at once. What is a sequence in Flaubert becomes a tug-of-war in Clarín.
Whereas Emma is a discursive sponge who never escapes the trite language
she soaks up, Ana has an alternative and can make a choice. By reenacting
revolution and placing Ana in the position of the prostitute, the novel ex-
plores the possibility of a rebellion that is new despite its repetitions, of a
meaning that goes beyond the worn-out phrase, of a communication that
overcomes the blurring circularity of the writing machine.24 This utopian
possibility is expressed in Ana’s reading, in her movement toward the book.
Whereas Emma longs to escape textuality, to find meaning in the world
around her, Ana turns from a degrading reality toward a series of utopian
readings.
Like Flaubert’s writing, Ana’s reading involves a sameness that emerges
across a base of difference. Despite the distance of centuries and the bar-
rier of the footlights, Ana uncannily coincides with St. Augustine, Inés,
and St. Theresa just as Flaubert’s writing, though fundamentally opposed
to his character’s phrases, is identical to them. What makes Ana’s reading
different from Flaubert’s writing, however, is that it transcends and is
opposed to the writing machine. In Madame Bovary, the writing machine

is turned against itself. The novel achieves its subversion through the same
erosion of meaning that typified Bonapartism. In La Regenta, in contrast,
it is the erosion of meaning that ultimately foils the subversive elements of
the novel, which have struggled all along to escape the writing machine. In
Flaubert, difference and sameness are a matter of perspective. The text de-
pends on a reader who understands the ironies, who can pry apart the
voices that it confuses and recognize when they do in fact converge: it re-
lies on an audience that perceives (as Rodolphe cannot) “the dissimilarity
of feeling that might underlie similarities of expression” (224). It is never
clear whether the textual glass is full or empty. Clarín’s novel eliminates this
ambiguity: Ana’s reading is always opposed to the tour (writing machine)
and turno político, which is the expression of the writing machine in
politics. Here, the apparent sameness across a base of difference is not a
question of perspective but rather a confirmed phenomenon: the general
public recognizes the uncanniness of the similarity between Ana and Inés
in Chapter 17 and between Ana and the Virgin in Chapter 26.
What allows Clarín to re-separate the possibilities Flaubert’s text con-
fuses is his use of representation. As Tanner has argued, Madame Bovary is
a novel about the breakdown of representation. The novel makes its cri-
tique by turning nonrepresentation against itself, by allowing the writing
machine to reveal its own absurdity. Clarín makes a similar commentary,
but his novel is ultimately more concerned with the problem of represen-
tation itself, with both its political uses and the weaknesses that cause it to
break down. Clarín condemns the writing machine, the pozo, into which
Ana plummets with her adultery, but he dedicates almost a thousand pages
to the vacillations that precede this fall. As we saw in Chapter 1, Clarín’s
treatment of representation is somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand,
Fermín’s abstract representation is opposed to the bishop’s touching incar-
nation, to a meaning that goes beyond the phrase. In this context, repre-
sentation is a poor translation that drains projects and ideas of their energy
and meaning, a textual divide that separates us from a more authentic
voice or origin. At other points in the novel, however, representation is op-
posed to the writing machine, the phony incarnations of the false Mesía.
In this opposition, representation takes on a positive function: it is a basic
precondition for a meaningful exchange of ideas.
The two categories that are opposed to representation in La Regenta—the
meaning that goes beyond the phrase (incarnation) and the phrase that goes
beyond its content (the writing machine)—are confused in Madame Bovary
because representation has broken down. It is not always clear if Emma’s
meaning goes beyond her phrase or vice versa. In La Regenta, in contrast, rep-
resentation stands between these possibilities and helps to clarify matters: the
ON TOUR 171
novel vacillates not between two interpretative possibilities (a phrase that is

full or empty) but between two oppositions—representation versus incarna-
tion (a fuller phrase) and representation versus the writing machine (an emp-
tier phrase)—in which the value of each term is clearly defined with respect
to the other. Representation here is a hinge, a middle term, that separates the
two alternatives between which the novel pivots.
To put it another way, what is ambiguous in Madame Bovary is nonrepre-
sentation, the clichés of the writing machine that are deployed against them-
selves. What is ambiguous in La Regenta is representation. Representation at
once restores meaning to discourses confused by the writing machine and
frustrates Ana by forcing her always to imagine something “absent.” It is what
allows for genuine political expression and escapes the tour of the turno
político, but it is also what suppresses the voice of Marguerite Gautier and
buries her critique in a more comfortable bourgeois plot. It is in this ambi-
guity that we see Clarín’s reaction to French naturalism. While he resists the
breakdown of representation that is exemplified in Flaubert, he questions the
blunt equation of mimesis and critique that informed the novels of Zola and
his followers.
At this point, we may begin to put together the four novels we have
examined so far. In La dame aux camélias, as we have seen, the narrator and
the heroine are condemned to speak different languages. The narrator
translates Marguerite into his own tongue, that of bourgeois convention,
but her meaning, the revolutionary potential of the prostitute, constantly
leaks through. The tragedy of 1848 is that the narrator’s representation
falls short of the heroine’s incarnation, of the liberty that Dumas’s prosti-
tute, like the fille de joie at the Tuileries, embodies.
In Madame Bovary, in contrast, the narrator and the heroine are con-
demned to speak the same language: both express themselves with lieux
communs. Here, it is not the heroine’s voice that leaks through the narra-
tor’s, but rather the narrator’s (subversive) meaning that leaks through the
heroine’s clichés. The tragedy of this novel is not that of 1848—the repre-
sentation that drains meaning—but rather that of 1851—the breakdown
of representation altogether. As we have seen, there is no outside in this
novel, no representation that would separate critique from its object, no
other language into which to translate. Dumas’s narrator avoids incarna-
tion; it reburies the body of the prostitute. Flaubert’s, in contrast, is con-
stantly embodying himself in the heroine, speaking through her voice
(“Madame Bovary, c’est moi”). Because of this, however, it can be unclear
whether her meaning coincides with his or his parodies hers, whether his
incarnation is true or false.
Eça de Queirós avoids this ambiguity in his rewritings of Madame
Bovary. Flaubert’s novel is about the inescapability of textuality. Subversion
and norm are confused. In O primo Basílio, in contrast, textuality may be

escaped. The heroine steps into a text but is eventually pulled out of it by
Sebastião, a deus ex machina who sets the world aright. Reading serves
here not to confuse but rather to distinguish: the textual divide between
reader and character separates the revolutionary world Luísa seeks to enter
from the reality of her situation; it differentitates between subversion and
status quo and thus expels the indeterminacy of Flaubert’s novel. In the
end, this re-separation distances the political threat—the plot of the pros-
titute and 1848—that Eça is exploring.
In La Regenta, however, reading functions not to separate but rather to
bring together. In its ideal form, it creates a spiritual communion between
a character and a reader: St. Augustine speaks directly to Ana’s soul when
she reads his Confessions. Clarín, however, does not risk the confusions of
Flaubert’s novel. He avoids these by drawing a distinction not between the
side of the text one is on (Eça pulls Luísa out of the text; Emma pulls
Flaubert into it) but rather between two ways of engaging a text: reading
and writing. Each activity involves a blurring of the divide between author
and character, between the real and the literary worlds, but the force of this
blurring is clearly distinguished. In the case of Ana’s reading, Augustine or
St. Theresa speak directly to Ana as if there were neither text nor centuries
between them. She even reincarnates them (as when she finds herself reen-
acting Augustine’s garden reading). She gives old texts (most notably the
Tenorio) new meaning. In this respect, her reading has a subversive force:
like the experience of the femmes du monde in Marguerite’s apartment, it
produces a bizarre sameness across a base of difference, across the centuries
and languages that separate Ana from Augustine. It functions similarly to
Flaubert’s writing, but unlike the latter, it transcends textuality in a
utopian communion of souls. Ana’s writing, in contrast, blurs the bound-
ary between the text and the real in a more negative way. Her projection
of literary clichés on the world about her is inauthentic, and Clarín often
uses free indirect style to parody it. This stylistic strategy also involves in-
carnation (the narrator adopts the heroine’s voice and impersonates her),
but Clarín uses it not to engage in dialogue but rather to disidentify him-
self from Ana. Here, difference emerges across a base of sameness: though
Clarín speaks through his heroine and uses the same words, his meaning
differs from and ridicules hers. Whereas Ana in her reading gives old texts
new meaning, the free indirect style at the beginning of Chapter 16 reveals
how the new text she writes means little more than the old. By drawing
this distinction between reading and writing, Clarín is able to separate the
revolutionary potential from its failure, from the parody of revolution that
is Bonapartist discourse. Flaubert’s style allows him to make a negative cri-
tique, to parody the existing discourses, but it cannot convey explicitly a
ON TOUR 173
utopian vision (in my epilogue, I will attempt to show how he does so im-
plicitly). In Dumas, this revolutionary potential can only leak through.
Clarín’s clear separation of reading and writing, of positive and negative
forms of representation allows him both to make a critique and to imag-
ine an alternative. In Flaubert, the newness that emerges through repeti-
tion is a strategy for deflating social discourses. With Ana, however, this
technique of making a statement through clichés (her participation in the
Nazarene procession) becomes a revolutionary gesture, a way of imagining
a utopian brotherhood among men.
The distinction between Clarín’s project and Flaubert’s is perhaps best
condensed in the image with which this chapter began: the cathedral
tower. The representation of the Vetustan spire in La Regenta re-separates
the spheres that are confused in Flaubert’s evocation of the Rouen tower.
The construction Clarín describes is one that resists the affectation and
excesses of Obdulia Fandiño, her tour, and the writing machine. As the
novel begins, the tower rises above the garbage that circles in the wind
below: “This miscellany of left-overs, remnants of refuse, would come to-
gether like throngs of gutter urchins, stay still a moment as if half asleep,
and then jump up and scatter in alarm, scaling walls as far as the loose
panes of street lamps or the posters daubed up at street corners” (21).
Peaceful and noble, the spire is untouched by the whirling trash, by the
caprices of these paper gutter urchins. Madame Bovary too opens with an
ornate construction that is masterfully described: Charles Bovary’s hat. As
we have seen, however, this helmet gestures toward both what the novel
deflates and the strategies with which it does so. In its excess, impossibil-
ity, and the heterogeneity of its signs, it is the perfect icon of the writing
machine. Almost immediately it produces indifferentiation and chaos in
the classroom: when the children begin to repeat its owner’s compound
name, “Charbovari,” a charivari breaks out. Their ruckus is quieted only
when the teacher, like Aeolus taming unruly winds in Book 1 of the
Aeneid, issues his Quos ego. Whereas the tower in La Regenta rises above the
garbage in the wind that runs havoc like urchins, Charles Bovary’s hat
awakens the half-asleep schoolboys and generates their windy rebellion.
The subversion in Madame Bovary belongs to the wind generated by the
hat: it is this gust that lifts the peasant girl’s skirts in the blind man’s ditty
and that strips Emma of her illusions as she lies dying. But in La Regenta
it is the whirling garbage, the tour, and the turno that foil the true rebel-
lion of the novel, that convert the “romantic poem in stone” into the
“poem in prose” that is Ana’s adultery.
5
Graftings
La Regenta poses a complex problem. Not only are readers challenged to

understand how Clarín has reworked Madame Bovary, but they must also
take into consideration that he is at the same time responding to Eça’s
treatment of Flaubert in O primo Basílio. To grasp Clarín’s social com-
mentary, it is necessary to explore how he has departed from Eça’s rewrit-
ing.1 The most obvious divergence between the Spanish and Portuguese
reworkings of Madame Bovary regards what each adds to the plot of the
model. Eça’s main departure from Flaubert is the introduction of Juliana,
a greedy servant who extorts money from the heroine after discovering her
adultery. In responding to Eça’s novel in La Regenta, Clarín includes a
similar figure. Chapters 28 and 29 describe how Ana Ozores’s maid, Petra,
uses her knowledge of the affair to ruin her mistress and improve her own
lot in life. As in O primo Basílio, the servant’s plotting governs the novel’s
plot after the heroine’s fall: Petra’s machinations neatly determine the end-
ing of La Regenta.
Though it provides closure, however, Petra’s struggle with Ana never oc-
cupies the central position of Juliana’s blackmail scheme in O primo Basílio.
In reworking his models, Clarín has moved away from the emphasis of
Flaubert’s and Eça’s novels. In O primo Basílio as in Madame Bovary, the
adultery takes place early in the work. Emma and Luísa fall after two or
three encounters with the seducer. Ana, in contrast, hesitates for nearly
three years and a thousand pages. Half of Madame Bovary and over half of
O primo Basílio (Chapters 6–15) deal with the consequences of adultery:
the habits the heroine develops and the financial difficulties into which she
is led. This aspect of the plot occupies only a small part of the total space
of La Regenta.
176 IMPORTING MADAME BOVARY /ELIZABETH AMANN
What is central in Clarín’s work is the drama of temptation. In its em-

phasis on the heroine’s resistance, La Regenta is in many ways closer to
eighteenth-century sentimental fiction than to the nineteenth-century
adultery novel.2 As Margaret Cohen has observed, one of the reasons
sentimental novels are so long is that they have no natural closure. Realist
fiction moves toward a final revelation (usually the discovery of a hidden
economic reality), which the plot delays for most of the work: Madame
Bovary, for example, culminates with the revelation of Lestiboudois’s plot
against the heroine. In contrast, the fundamental truth of the sentimental
novel—the logic that governs its plot—is evident from the outset: the
opening scenes make clear an irresolvable conflict (usually between duty
and desire) from which all of the action will evolve. The ensuing episodes
merely confirm the inexorability of this conflict and attest to the inner
strength of the heroine in her resistance (Cohen 61). Because there is no
natural closure in revelation, the author must resort to violence (the rape
or death of the heroine) to put an end to his novel. The dénouements of
these works, consequently, can at times seem supplemental, closure for
closure’s sake. For its first 27 chapters, La Regenta functions like a senti-
mental novel: the accumulation of episodes does not create mysteries so
much as an impression of Ana’s inner self and the conflicts she faces. The
dénouement of the novel, however, represents an abrupt departure from
this mode: it is almost as though Clarín, perplexed as to how to end
La Regenta, turned in desperation to Eça’s work and repeated in fast for-
ward its peripeteia, the story of the self-interested maidservant. What most
distinguishes Clarín’s text from his models is his shift in emphasis in the
body of the narrative, his focus on the temptation and resistance rather
than on the seduction and its outcome.
The central figure in this drama of temptation is Fermín de Pas. Like
Juliana in O primo Basílio, Fermín is the principal deviation from Madame
Bovary in La Regenta. Flaubert’s novel is fundamentally about Emma.
Though it seems to begin as a bildungsroman about Charles, the narrator
quickly tires of him and turns instead to his more adventurous wife, who
occupies center stage for the rest of the work. The heroines of O primo
Basílio and La Regenta, in contrast, share the spotlight. As we saw in
Chapter 2, Luísa’s affair is mirrored in structure and imagery by Juliana’s
attempt to better her position through blackmail. Their struggle is the real
drama of the novel. In La Regenta, similarly, Fermín de Pas is a virtual
coprotagonist. In the exposition of the novel (Part I), he is given almost
equal billing: whereas Chapters 3–5 develop Ana’s character and Chapters
9–10 explore her experience after confessing with Fermín for the first time,
Chapters 11–15 follow a day in the life of Fermín, whose experiences
clearly echo the heroine’s longings and frustrations (Fermín’s balcony scene
GRAFTINGS 177
in Chapter 15, for example, points back in both its content and imagery
to Ana’s in Chapter 10). In Part II, his relationship with the heroine dom-
inates what I will call the dramatic arc of the novel (Chapters 16–26).
By incorporating into Flaubert’s plot a new protagonist, O primo Basílio
and La Regenta add an embodiment of revolution. Juliana, in her struggle
with Luísa, reenacts the plot of 1848, the story that the heroine attempts
to enter through her reading of La dame aux camélias. Fermín’s relationship
with Ana is similarly a rebellion, an attempt to rise up against the Vetustan
status quo. In addition to the canon theologian, however, Clarín has
created in Petra a reincarnation of Eça’s Juliana, a maidservant bent on
revenge and determined to invert the social order. This combination of
characters raises a series of important questions. Why does La Regenta in-
clude both a Fermín and a Petra? What is the function of this double
figuration of revolution? And how is Clarín commenting on Eça’s political
allegory?
To answer these questions, the analysis that follows will be divided into
four stages. First, it examines the character of Fermín, the coprotagonist and
primary figuration of rebellion in the novel. Situating the canon theologian
within a tradition of unfettered priests and titanic heroes (most
importantly, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk), the first section draws out the
revolutionary and utopian potential of the figure. The second part deals
with the reasons for Fermín’s failure, which Clarín explores through two
secondary figures, Santos Barinaga and Pompeyo Guimarán, whose story is
interwoven with that of Ana and Fermín. The third section turns to the
consequences of this failure by examining how Clarín rewrites Juliana in the
figure of Petra and by contrasting her “revolution” with Fermín’s. The final
part of the chapter considers how each novel resolves the conflicts it has
reenacted by introducing an eccentric bachelor who serves as a savior figure.
Monkish Fetters
Though overlooked in the criticism of La Regenta, the main model for

the portrayal of Fermín de Pas is Father Ambrosio, the hero of Matthew
Lewis’s gothic novel, The Monk (1796).3 Clarín draws from Lewis’s novel
not only the title character—the figure of the priest who throws off his
“monkish fetters” (345)—but also its general plot structure, which
informs the central chapters of Part II of La Regenta.4 Like La Regenta,
Lewis’s novel begins in a Spanish church where the city’s most eloquent
and charismatic priest is about to preach before an admiring congrega-
tion. In each novel, the hero acquits himself admirably: Ambrosio’s
homily enthralls his listeners, particularly female ones, and Fermín’s pol-
ished, almost erotic delivery—his “soaring eloquence”—produces an
“expectant, attentive, enraptured hush” in his audience (30). In the open-
ing scene, Ambrosio’s sermon impresses Antonia, a young woman in the
crowd, who feels herself mysteriously attracted to him: after he speaks, she
wonders if her love is reciprocated: “Dwelt She also in his heart?” (20).
Fermín’s effect upon female listeners is similar: “[T]he thoughts of the
faithful were for the elegant, well-graced preacher, melodious of voice and
distinguished in manner, not for the God about whom he was speaking”
(30). As confessors, Ambrosio and Fermín are popular among the fash-
ionable women of the congregation, and their sermons are public events
attended by the full community. Both owe this popularity in part to their
imposing physical presence: they are distinguished for their height, sturdy
build, and handsome looks. Their most striking feature, however, is their
eyes. Lewis ends his description of Ambrosio noting that “few could sus-
tain the glance of his eye at once fiery and penetrating” (18). Fermín’s eyes,
similarly, emit “a piercing gleam . . . —an unpleasant surprise, like find-
ing a needle in a feather pillow. Few people could bear that look” (26).
Both priests are objects not only of desire but also of fear. In the sermon
in Chapter 1, Ambrosio’s voice is “fraught with all the terrors of the
Tempest, while He inveighed against the vices of humanity, and described
the punishments reserved for them in a future state” (19). Fermín, simi-
larly, can be “an ecclesiastical hurricane, a biblical punishment, the scourge
of God” (29). Each is rigid in his convictions and upholds firmly the
doctrines of the church. Ambrosio is so severe that he is believed to be
incorruptible, and Fermín spends his spare time writing a defense of papal
infallibility. Their austerity is felt most within the religious community.
Both occupy important positions in the church and exercise their author-
ity unforgivingly. Ambrosio’s rule over his fellow monks is marked by his
“inflexibility” (22), and Fermín assigns “penances . . . out of all propor-
tion” (415).
The plot of The Monk begins with an example of this excessive author-
ity. After his sermon, Ambrosio is proud of his performance and begins to
imagine “splendid visions of aggrandizement” (39). His peace of mind,
however, is soon disturbed in two ways. Strolling through the abbey gar-
den, Ambrosio encounters his only friend, a young monk named Rosario,
in a state of melancholy and despair. Rosario, who is actually a woman
(Matilda) in disguise, speaks to Ambrosio briefly but refuses to explain the
cause of his sadness. Ambrosio leaves Rosario and goes to his chapel, where
he must hear the confession of the nuns of St. Clare. Here his tranquility
is again disturbed. As the nuns file out, Ambrosio discovers a letter that
one of the novices has written to her lover. The fallen woman, Agnes,
GRAFTINGS 179
is now pregnant and begs for leniency, but Ambrosio lends a deaf ear and
turns her over to the relentless prioress of her order. As she is taken away,
Agnes curses her accuser: when Ambrosio himself gives way to “impetuous
passions,” she prophesies, he too will “despair of pardon” (49). The pri-
oress imprisons Agnes in the tombs below the convent where her newborn
baby later starves to death.
The portrayal of Fermín in Part I of La Regenta introduces into Clarín’s
novel similar tensions and problems. In Chapters 11–15, Clarín follows
Fermín through the course of a day and offers a glimpse of his private life.
Like Ambrosio, Fermín is a proud and ambitious man who considers him-
self superior to his fellow Vetustans. At the beginning of Chapter 11, how-
ever, his spirit is troubled. Just as Ambrosio’s peace of mind is disturbed by
the figures of Matilda and Agnes, Fermín is distracted and concerned
about two women. As he attempts to study, he cannot take his mind off
the troubles of his new friend, Ana Ozores, with whom he has had his first
lengthy conversation the day before. When he leaves home at the begin-
ning of Chapter 12, he has another cause for worry. His first duty of the
day is to visit the house of one of his most loyal supporters, Don Francisco
de Assisi Carraspique, a rich Vetustan married to a fanatical Catholic
woman. Using his influence over the wife, Fermín has persuaded two of
the couple’s daughters to take vows. As Fermín enters the Carraspique
mansion, he runs into Don Robustiano, the physician of choice among the
Vestustan upper class. The doctor reports that one of Francisco’s daughters,
Sor Teresa, is dangerously ill because of the unhygienic conditions of the
Salesian convent, which is contaminated by the sewers of the area.
Robustiano and many of Fermín’s enemies blame him for her illness. They
accuse him of incarcerating in convents young women who have scarcely
seen the world. Later in the novel, when Sor Teresa dies, Fermín is de-
nounced in gothic terms as a “spiritual vampire” who condemns women to
waste away in unhealthy cells (506). Like Agnes in The Monk, Teresa is
buried alive, left to languish in inhuman and unhygienic conditions.5
The two novels are similar not only in their exposition but also in the
development of their plots. After Agnes’s curse, which concludes the open-
ing of The Monk, the story of Ambrosio’s life is divided into two parts,
which are separated by an intercalated tale that lasts almost a hundred
pages: the story of Agnes and the Bleeding Nun. The first part of the action
describes Ambrosio’s relationship with Rosario. Shortly after the episode
with Agnes, Rosario reveals to the hero that he is really a she, a woman
named Matilda who has fallen in love with him and entered the abbey dis-
guised as a monk to be near him. Ambrosio is at first horrified by Matilda’s
act but allows her to stay in the abbey and eventually is seduced by her.
What has attracted the monk is the physical charm of Matilda, who is
exactly like a painting of the Madonna that Ambrosio worships in his cell.
Though virginal in appearance, however, she has actively sought out the
monk as her lover and is herself the model of his beloved painting, which
she has had conveyed to his room. The first part of the novel ends as the
monk succumbs to Matilda for the first time.
This is followed by the long intercalated tale about Agnes’s past and the
Bleeding Nun, which divides the first and second stages of the monk’s sins.
Although Ambrosio is at first enthralled by the new pleasures and freedoms
Matilda bestows, he soon tires of her charms. While he continues to use her
to satisfy “the cravings of brutal appetite” (236), he is increasingly disgusted
by the way she “apes the Harlot, and glories in her prostitution” (243). The
woman who captivates Ambrosio in the second part is not Matilda but
Antonia, a poor but virtuous young lady who is loved by the noble Lorenzo,
Agnes’s brother. If Matilda is a prostitute who looks like the Virgin, Antonia
is a virgin who looks like the Venus de Medici (271). Ambrosio feels for her
not “the provocation of lust” but “a mingled sentiment of tenderness,
admiration, and respect” (242); in her presence, “[a] soft and delicious
melancholy infused itself into his soul” (242). At first, Ambrosio limits
himself to a friendship with Antonia, who has sought him as a confessor,
but as they begin to meet frequently, she unwittingly fans his desire (256).
In the meantime, Matilda, seeing that she has been cast aside, decides
to assist Ambrosio in his conquest of Antonia. Revealing that she has
magical powers, she offers to use her skill to facilitate the seduction.
With her help, Ambrosio spies on Antonia from the abbey and later enters
her bedroom while she is asleep. At the end of the novel, he fulfills his
desires, violating and killing Antonia—a rape that coincides with an
annual religious procession in which the most beautiful virgin in
Madrid is dressed as St. Clare, placed on a throne, and paraded through
the city as a living “Statue” (348). Lorenzo has come to the procession
to denounce the prioress, whom he believes has murdered his sister
Agnes. Supported by a sympathetic nun who has witnessed everything,
he reveals the abbess’s barbarity to an outraged “Mob,” which proceeds
to sack the convent and tear her apart with “savage” ferocity (356). As
they descend into the catacombs, they discover Ambrosio with Antonia.
His sins exposed, he is carried off by Matilda, who now reveals herself
to be the devil and informs Ambrosio that Elvira was his mother and
Antonia his sister. At the end of the novel, Lorenzo finds consolation for
the loss of Antonia in the figure of Virginia, a beautiful young noble-
woman who represented St. Clare in the procession during which his
beloved was raped and killed.
In its broad outline, the action of Lewis’s novel resembles that of
Chapters 16–26 of La Regenta, the dramatic arc of the novel. At first
GRAFTINGS 181
glance, these chapters might seem anything but dramatic, for Ana rarely
strays from home, and time passes slowly: the novel at this point adopts
the rhythm of everyday life, describes Ana’s daily habits, and follows the
cycle of the Vetustan year (the annual ball, Christmas mass, etc.)—a far cry
from the complex and fantastic episodes of Lewis’s gothic novel. What
makes them nevertheless dramatic is the silent tug-of-war between Álvaro
and Fermín. After the Nazarene procession of Chapter 26, Fermín’s pres-
ence is minimal; he never regains his foothold in Ana’s life. It is a foregone
conclusion that she will soon fall. Though more dramatic in the usual
sense of being action-packed, Chapters 27–33 are preprogrammed (we see
Petra plotting everything out before it happens), and Ana’s agency, her
active choice, is deemphasized: she has “let herself go,” and is now drawn
along by the plot and the plotting servant.
Just as the story of Agnes and the Bleeding Nun is a pivot in Lewis’s
novel, so the death in Chapter 22 of Sor Teresa, who is also in a sense
buried alive in her convent, divides the dramatic arc into two phases
(Chapters 16–22 and Chapters 23–26), which are dominated by two very
different female figures. In the first, Fermín falls under the spell of his maid
Teresina, who, like Matilda, lives with the priest, adopts an outwardly
religious demeanor and throws herself in his way to seduce him. Like
Lewis’s seductress, Teresina is promiscuous and forward in her manners but
eerily resembles the Virgin—she is compared to the Lady of the Dolours
(500). The first phase of Part II (the chapters that precede Sor Teresa’s
death) ends with a description of Fermín’s domestic life, which
reveals that he has yielded to temptation and slept with Teresina. Like
Ambrosio with Matilda, he now enjoys a new “freedom” (500).
The other woman in these chapters is, of course, Ana, whose relation-
ship with Fermín resembles Antonia’s with Ambrosio since both Ana and
Antonia engage in spiritual relationships with their confessors. Just as
Antonia inflames Ambrosio with her innocent attentions, Ana, never sus-
pecting Fermín’s partiality toward her, inadvertently sparks his desire: “Ana
was so certain that the flesh did not play any part in their friendship that
it was she who took each new liberty, each new step on the slippery ground
of intimacy between man and woman” (496). Like Ambrosio, Fermín be-
comes obsessed with his spiritual charge and spies on her from the church.
What he sees is irresistibly tempting: like Antonia, Ana is a virgin who re-
sembles the Venus de Medici (107).
Not only do Ana and Teresina mirror Antonia and Matilda, respec-
tively, but Fermín’s relationships with them also resemble those of Lewis’s
hero. Just as Ambrosio satisfies his carnal desire with Matilda while engag-
ing in a spiritual dialogue with Antonia, so Fermín “only managed to
resist the sudden furious rebellions of his flesh with the aid of shameful
truces which he regarded as a kind of infidelity” (509). He sleeps with

Teresina while guiding Ana, who aspires to be a latter-day St. Theresa.
Ambrosio’s and Fermín’s relationships are similar also in the images with
which they are described. Ambrosio conquers Antonia by giving her an
anesthetic and then having her seemingly dead body removed to a stifling
tomb. Fermín’s spiritual trysts with Ana take place in Doña Petronila’s
boudoir, a coffin-like space where Ana feels drowsy and almost suffocated:
“The house was pervaded by the silence of a padded coffin, the air was
warm and lightly perfumed with something which smelt of wax and balm
and maybe lavender. Ana felt drowsy, a pleasant yet somewhat alarming
feeling; it was good to be there, but it gave one a vague fear of suffocation”
(418). The culminating moment of both Fermín’s and Ambrosio’s power
is a religious procession with revolutionary overtones: that of the St. Clares
in The Monk and that of Good Friday in Chapter 26 of La Regenta, in
which Ana defies Vetustan convention to show solidarity for her reviled
soul brother (as we saw in Chapter 1). These scenes mark at once the
height of their power and the beginning of their downfall. Each ultimately
damns himself through an incestuous desire, for just as Ambrosio lusts for
a woman ultimately revealed to be his sister, Fermín desires his hermana del
alma (soul sister).6 At the end of the novel, Fermín, like Ambrosio, will
give himself over to the devil within: “The canon heard demoniacal laugh-
ter inside his body; yes, the devil had laughed at him, in his own bowels—
and that deep guffaw, with roots in his belly and his chest, was choking
him, suffocating him!” (663).
At first, it might seem that Clarín has drawn on the plot structure from
The Monk but left aside its fantastic and unrealistic elements, which would
clash with his naturalist project. The portrayal of Fermín, however, intro-
duces some of the gothic spirit of Lewis’s novel. Throughout the dramatic
arc of Part II, Fermín’s influence over Ana introduces irrational and super-
natural forces into her life and home. This gothic influence is anticipated
in Chapter 10, in which the heroine enters her husband’s office at night to
write a note to Fermín. Unable to see, Ana stumbles into one of Víctor’s
fox traps and finds herself caught.7 In this episode, Clarín elaborates an
image that is clearly gothic: the innocent woman trapped in a large house
by what Petra calls a “diabolical guillotine.” At this point in the story, how-
ever, we are still within the realms of the rational, for the accident has a
logical explanation. Nevertheless, the scene anticipates the eerie situations
that surround Ana and Fermín’s relationship as well as its potential eroti-
cism—suspecting an affair, Petra takes it upon herself to cover for her
mistress and tells Víctor that it was the cat who broke the trap.
This lie is repeated at the end of Chapter 17, which marks the begin-
ning of the dramatic arc. In this chapter, Fermín meets with Ana in the
GRAFTINGS 183
garden of the Ozores Palace and proposes to her a spiritual project that she
will attempt to put into practice. After he leaves, Frígilis, who tends
Víctor’s plants, enters the garden and finds that some seeds he left have
been spilt. Petra, once again, decides to shield Ana and scapegoats the cat.
From this episode on, as Fermín’s spiritual influence over Ana becomes
more pronounced, irrational forces begin to appear in the novel. Whereas
in Chapter 10 it was Ana who broke the trap in Víctor’s office, now the
machines rise up on their own and gothically malfunction: the inventions
in his study “had rebelled, bristling with the unexpected difficulties of ra-
tional mechanics. There upon the desk in the study, in all their dusty glory,
stood diabolical contraptions of steel and wood, waiting in provisional
postures” (409). Soon after the conversation in Chapter 17, moreover, Ana
begins to dream about ghosts.
The gothic images emerge with Fermín’s influence and disappear
when Ana distances herself from him. During her illness in Chapter 19,
for example, Ana is attended by the rational Doctor Benítez, and
Fermín’s influence briefly wanes. At this point, Víctor is able to fix his
machines and to invent new ones. This period ends, however, as Ana
rededicates herself to religion and Fermín. From this point on, Ana again
has nightmares about gothic priests (“repulsive emaciated spectres wear-
ing golden chasubles, copes and clerical cloaks, like bats’ wings” [430])
and scenarios that recall Lewis’s novel: “She thought she could still . . .
breathe the cold, almost viscous atmosphere of the underground tunnels
in which she had been imprisoned in her delirium” (429–430). Víctor
tries to work in his office, but to avoid disturbing Ana he must cover his
hammer with flannel “as if it were a catafalque” (487). Fermín’s influence
introduces a spectral force and gothic tone into the spaces Ana inhabits.
In the culminating moments of the novel, Fermín again disturbs the
order of Víctor’s study and Ana’s mind. Having discovered her infidelity,
Fermín visits Víctor and goads him to revenge. As the priest enters the
study, Víctor sees “a tall black ghost . . . gliding in,” who “looked like a
disinterred corpse,” with a “face so pale, with such a look in his eyes, that
he felt a vague, superstitious fear of him, the fear of unknown evil”
(681). When Ana returns to the cathedral after Víctor’s death, her
encounter with Fermín is similarly a gothic scene of terror and violence:
“[T]he dark box creaked loud, and from its centre sprang a tall black
figure. By the light of the lamp Ana saw a pale face and eyes which stung
like fire, staring in bewilderment like the eyes of the Christ on the altar.
The canon theologian stretched out an arm and stepped towards the
judge’s wife, as if to murder her” (714). As Fermín intervenes in Ana’s
life, he introduces the irrational and the fantastic, and he himself begins
to take on a gothic presence.
Clarín draws from Lewis’s novel not only Ambrosio’s supernatural force
but also the catalyst that provokes it. As Peter Brooks has observed, The
Monk is not at its beginning a fantastic or unrealistic tale. From the open-
ing sermon to Matilda’s seduction of Ambrosio, neither ghosts nor irra-
tional forces intervene. It is only with the story of the Bleeding Nun that
the novel veers toward the gothic and the supernatural. Only after this
episode does Matilda reveal and begin to exercise her magic powers. For
Brooks, what precipitates the emergence of the irrational is desire
(“Virtue” 256–257). In the intercalated story, Agnes’s family has decided
that she must become a nun. Agnes, however, has fallen in love with
Raymond. When her aunt objects to their match, Agnes attempts to flee
by impersonating the Bleeding Nun, the ghost of a relative who broke her
religious vows and who has ever since haunted the family estate. Before she
can make her escape, however, the ghost herself appears and takes Agnes’s
place in Raymond’s carriage. It is, thus, Agnes’s desire (mirrored by the
Bleeding Nun’s) that occasions the introduction of the fantastic in
the novel. What I would add to Brooks’s observation is that it is not simply
desire but also transgressive desire—the sacrilegious love of a nun (the
ghost) or a woman destined to be one (Agnes). Like Agnes’s and the
Bleeding Nun’s, Ambrosio’s loves in the second part are transgressive (they
lead him to break his vows and to enter the secular world) and involve many
occurrences that defy the boundaries between the real and the fantastic.
In La Regenta, the catalyst of Fermín’s gothic excesses is similarly a
transgressive desire—his forbidden (and even incestuous) love for his “soul
sister.” The supernatural force of this desire is perhaps clearest in Frígilis’s
speculation about Ana’s health. Frígilis, who is Víctor’s best friend, is an
amateur botanist who subscribes to the theories of Darwin. Grafting one
plant to another, Frígilis explores how species adapt to their environment.
In the novel, Ana becomes another object of his experimentation: he rec-
ommends that she partake of “the goodness given by nature. Health must
enter a tree through its roots” (117). At the beginning of Part II, Frígilis
begins to observe a new influence on Ana’s life. In Chapter 17, Ana and
Fermín converse in the garden of her house, and Fermín defines a spiritual
project that will harness and redirect the nervous energy she has been ex-
periencing. As he leaves, he accidentally spills some plant seeds that Frígilis
had left on the garden table. The conversation in Chapter 17 sets off a
bizarre transformation in Ana. It is as though the spilt seed has fertilized a
strange growth in her soul. Frígilis, who observes his friend’s wife as he
does his trees, notices that she has begun to develop in ways that defy the
laws of nature:
It was as if a tree began to produce flowers, and more and more flowers,
using up all its sap in the process, and it became thinner and thinner, and
GRAFTINGS 185
ever more flowers appeared on it. Then its roots, its trunk, its boughs and
branches all dried up, and the flowers became more and more beautiful and
fell to the ground together with the dead wood, and on the ground, . . .
unless there was a miracle, they withered, rotted, and turned into mud like
everything else. (487)
Fermín’s intervention causes a miraculous flowering in the tree that repre-

sents Ana. The goodness does not enter, as Frígilis would have it, through
the roots or body but rather supernaturally: Fermín, it seems, has spiritu-
ally impregnated her soul. As in The Monk, what precipitates the intro-
duction of the supernatural is Fermín’s desire. Petra’s assumption that the
seed is spilt during Ana and Fermín’s tryst suggests the erotic potential of
their encounter. As this potential is not realized, however, the body of the
tree suffers: Ana’s physical needs are left unfulfilled. Fermín’s desire pro-
vokes a flowering that circumvents the normal processes of nature, that de-
fies Frígilis’s Darwinist precepts.
In his portrayal of Fermín, Clarín draws on and conflates a number of
worldly priests of the European tradition as well as a series of romantic
archetypes. To understand Ana’s confessor, consequently, it is important to
sort out these models and to see how Clarín reshapes them. The descrip-
tion of the flowers supernaturally accumulating on the ground in the pas-
sage above recalls the dénouement of Zola’s La faute de l’abbé Mouret
(1875), another tale of a priest’s transgressive desire.8 At the end of Zola’s
novel, the heroine, pregnant with the protagonist’s child, mysteriously
commits suicide by surrounding herself with massive quantities of fallen
flowers. What Frígilis fears for Ana is a similarly bizarre death by flowers.
Clarín, however, treats this image somewhat differently: in his wayward
priest, he conflates aspects of Zola’s abbé with those of Lewis’s monk. All
three characters—Mouret, Ambrosio, and Fermín—are socially and sexu-
ally repressed and long to throw off the shackles of the church. Their sto-
ries differ, however, in the form and consequences of this release. Both
Lewis’s and Zola’s heroes break free primarily through carnal transgres-
sions. The difference between them is the consequence, which is spiritual
or supernatural in one case and bodily in the other. Whereas in The Monk,
the hero’s sin unleashes destructive supernatural powers, in Zola it pro-
vokes an inexorable natural process that ultimately saps the vital force of
the heroine. In a sense, the two novels make inverse commentaries. In his
transgression, Ambrosio rebels against the natural order of society. The
result is a supernatural destruction that introduces mayhem into the com-
munity and that violates its most basic taboo (the prohibition of incest).
For Zola, in contrast, society is unnatural; it represses Mouret’s physical
needs. To defy it, consequently, is to unleash natural forces, the botanical
overflowing of the dénouement. Unlike the chaos Ambrosio introduces,
the destruction in Zola takes place in an isolated garden, an Edenic space

cut off from the world of men.
In La Regenta, Clarín draws upon Zola’s metaphor of excessive flowering
but uses it to describe not a carnal transgression but rather a spiritual
uprising. Unlike Lewis’s and Zola’s heroes, Fermín attempts to channel his
physical desire, his natural urges, into a higher project. This project is, like
Mouret’s and Ambrosio’s transgressions, a defiance of society: Fermín
attempts to rise up against the Vetustan status quo. As in Zola, society un-
naturally suppresses the body beneath the soutane: Clarín dwells on the
physicality of the repressed body, on Fermín’s “muscles of steel” and “useless
power” (232). Fermín, however, seeks to overcome this repression not (as
Mouret does) by breaking his vows but rather by sublimating his desire in
a spiritual project. Whereas La faute de l’abbé Mouret imagines a release of
natural energies in a space far removed from society, Fermín attempts to
defy society from within it. What results is not the natural destruction of
Zola’s story but rather a supernatural force similar to that of Lewis’s monk.
This force, however, also differs from Ambrosio’s. Ambrosio’s story is about
the individual’s struggle against society, about a desire that conflicts with
duty. Fermín’s defiance, in contrast, is a communal project, a brotherhood
in revolt. It is not seeking to replace an ordered society with individual will
and natural instinct but rather a corrupt society with a fairer and more com-
munitarian one, an ideal toward which Fermín deflects his bodily impulses
and energies. Desire, the natural urge, is sublimated into duty, into a sort of
social desire, and, as a result, it takes an unnatural form. (As we will see at
the end of this chapter, the fantasy of a purely natural realm with which
Zola ends his novel belongs not to the priest but to Frígilis, who rejects
society for the solitude and tranquillity of the countryside.)
By rewriting Zola’s image of overflowering plants in spiritual and
supernatural terms, Clarín returns to the figure of the unfaithful priest the
larger-than-life aura it has in Lewis’s novel of the 1790s. At the same time,
he also recovers the revolutionary potential of the character. This potential
was apparent to Lewis’s earliest readers. In his Idées sur le roman (1800), the
Marquis de Sade observed that the horrors of the French Revolution could
be expressed in literature only through diabolical and supernatural ele-
ments and praised Lewis’s work as the best of its genre. As Ronald Paulson
notes, “The Gothic was quite clearly a metaphor with which some con-
temporaries in England tried to come to terms with what was happening
across the Channel” (“Gothic Fiction” 534). The revolutionary elements
Paulson identifies in The Monk include a mob that sacks a religious insti-
tution, a repressed priest who throws off the shackles of religion, and the
liberation of women confined in a convent. All of these elements play a
part in Fermín’s story as well: the rabble that demonstrates against him at
GRAFTINGS 187
the end of Chapter 22, the story of how Sor Teresa is buried alive in the
stifling Salesian convent, Fermín’s rebellion against his soutane, and his
abuse of his ecclesiastical position. In these respects, Clarín’s priest departs
from Zola’s model. La faute de l’abbé Mouret is a coming-of-age tale, the
story of an impressionable young man’s discovery of nature. Fermín, in
contrast, is a more worldly, sinister, and imposing figure—he is dangerous
not only for his sins but also for the threateningly subversive ideas they
represent. His story may also be presented as a bildungsroman of sorts, but
his growth is assigned a broader social significance: the possibility of car-
nal transgression is not merely a surrendering to one’s own nature; it also
introduces a revolutionary energy that seeks to change the world.
Clarín reinforces this radical potential by repeatedly gesturing toward
the towering, titanic figures of the revolutionary and romantic periods. We
have already seen the importance of Faust in the balcony scene of Chapter
15. The visit to the theater in Chapter 16 similarly points to an archetypal
romantic rebel, Zorrilla’s Don Juan. As we saw in the previous chapter,
Don Juan’s relationship with Inés ultimately does not anticipate Ana’s
adultery so much as it presents a model for Fermín’s friendship with Ana:
it illustrates an ideal communion of souls in which meaning goes beyond
the phrase. Fermín, thus, is consistently identified with larger-than-life ro-
mantic heroes. It is important, however, to distinguish these models and to
understand what Clarín takes from each in his portrayal of Fermín. All
three share certain characteristics. Like Ambrosio, both Faust and Don
Juan are heroes in a drama of salvation. At the end of each work, the pro-
tagonist stands between heaven and hell, his fate dependent on a woman
whom he has seduced. La Regenta reproduces this scenario in Fermín’s spir-
itual dependence on Ana: he regards her as his last chance at salvation
(“although she does not know it, she is saving me” [360]).
In its treatment of this motif, La Regenta differs once again from its
models. Clarín draws from Lewis’s and Goethe’s heroes a pattern of com-
pression and release. Both Ambrosio and Faust are scholars who have lived
confined in their cells (Goethe calls Faust’s study a “cell”) and who are
tempted by diabolical figures (Mephistopheles, Matilda) to experience new
sensations. Supernatural intervention allows them to fulfill their longings
and to wreak destruction on what they most love. In both cases,
impoverished women (Margaret and Antonia) are sacrificed to their all-
consuming desire. What distinguishes the two heroes, however, is the
nature of their quests. As Paulson notes, though Faust experiences love and
lust, he primarily seeks knowledge. The constraints from which he breaks
free are epistemological, and his story is an exploration of various forms of
wisdom (feeling, the occult, etc.). His quest is framed as a personal bet in
which he pledges never to try to make a moment eternal, never to abandon
Becoming for Being. His subsequent adventure is a tale of continual striv-

ing: the reality Faust encounters on his way—glimpses of nature and of
society—are subsumed within and subordinated to the tale of his intel-
lectual development, his acquisition of knowledge and experience. The
world unfolds before Faust so that he may experience it and form himself
through it.
In Lewis’s novel, in contrast, the bonds from which Ambrosio is liber-
ated are not epistemological limits but rather social and sexual repression:
as an infant, he was cast off by his family and confined in a cloister, which
he has never left. Ambrosio, thus, is the victim of an oppressive and back-
ward society. What propels him, consequently, is not becoming or the
search for knowledge but rather desire:
Although this pact with the Devil introduces the Faustus story, it is significant
that Ambrosio does not want the intellectual, spiritual, or specifically political
power we associate with the Enlightenment. He wants only sexual power. The
world of the Enlightenment no longer represented intellectual knowledge; the
Revolution had, in Burke’s and Lewis’ terms, exposed the reality under
Enlightenment to be unrestrained sexual “knowledge.” (Paulson 544)
Though Faust does experience love and Ambrosio is attracted to the spiri-
tual purity of Antonia, these are not the dominant urges: the Gretchen-
tragedie is subsumed within Faust’s epistemological quest (he will move be-
yond her to discover other spheres and objects of knowledge), whereas
what Ambrosio most wants from the virginal Antonia is carnal satisfaction
(the novel ends with her rape). The world in Faust is significant to the
extent that the hero comes to know it. The realities and social webs
described in The Monk, in contrast, are not what Ambrosio discovers so
much as what has formed him, constrained his energy, and opposed his
desire. His story is not a bet about his own behavior, a struggle against
himself, a test of his will, but rather a conflict with the world around him.
What is emphasized is not the continual (though at times destructive)
striving of the bourgeois mind but rather cycles of social violence—the
realities that have oppressed Ambrosio will in turn lead him to oppress and
destroy, and his destruction will be at once answered and mirrored by the
frenzy of the mob. Knowledge (in the nonbiblical sense) plays little part in
this—the novel is set in a backward and ignorant country. Both Faust and
Ambrosio embody the energy of the revolution, but Lewis’s tale focuses on
how this drive emerges from and is ultimately distorted by a social system.
What is a linear tale of journeys and discoveries in Faust is in The Monk a
cyclical story of social oppression, which culminates in incest—Ambrosio’s
violence emerges from and turns back on its origins.
GRAFTINGS 189
The portrayal of Fermín in La Regenta combines aspects of both heroes.

He emerges from the same backward society as Lewis’s hero and
suffers from similar “monkish fetters.” His response, however, resembles
Faust’s. In his nocturnal reflections in Chapter 15 and in his project with
Ana in Part II, he strives to experience a higher reality. As we saw in
Chapter 1, Clarín follows Eça in gesturing toward Faust but returns to the
legend its force and idealism. Hearing the Gounod aria, Fermín, unlike
Luísa, longs for transcendence, to rise above the limited and derivative
reality of Vetustan society and to glimpse a higher life.
Clarín’s inclusion of Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio clarifies the ideal to
which Fermín aspires. The figure of Don Juan has often been compared
to that of Faust since both emerge in the early-modern period and are
recovered in seminal romantic works (Goethe’s and Zorrilla’s plays) in
which they achieve the salvation they were denied in their prior incarna-
tions. In each case, this redemption results in part from the hero’s longing
for a higher reality—Faust’s continual striving and Don Juan’s ideal love
for Inés. The two men, however, are also inverse mirrors of one another.
Faust begins confined to a single space (his “cell”) and then breaks free in
order to explore the diversity of life, to embrace Becoming, continual striv-
ing. Zorrilla’s Don Juan, in contrast, moves from plurality—the amazing
sums of his legendary catalogue—to a unique relationship with Inés.
Whereas Faust continually resists the Augenblick, Don Juan ultimately
finds meaning in epiphany, in the blissful union of the sofa scene. Faust’s
drama is about knowledge; Don Juan’s is about language. What changes
from the beginning to the end of Zorrilla’s play is the way his words work:
the letter that begins as a tool of seduction (an instrumental use of
language) becomes by the end of Part I an accurate reflection of reality
(a representational use of language) (Fernández Cifuentes 43).
In his portrayal of Fermín, Clarín conflates Faust’s drama of scholastic
confinement and release with a quest for the sort of ideal language and
untrammeled communication that the romantic Don Juan achieves. As I
argued in the previous chapter, the epiphany of Zorrilla’s sofa scene forms
part of a series of episodes (Ana’s reading of Augustine and St. Theresa, her
childhood friendship with Germán) that are the basis of the spiritual proj-
ect that Ana undertakes with her confessor. Fermín’s quest will be to chan-
nel carnal desire into a meaningful social statement, to make the spiritual
content of their rebellion go beyond the corporeal phrase (Ana’s body on
display in the Nazarene procession). It is this desire to possess Ana spiritu-
ally that makes Fermín such a haunting figure in the novel: just as Don
Juan’s power seems to seep through the walls, Fermín’s presence introduces
the irrational, a supernatural development. Unlike Don Juan, however,
Fermín’s words lose their magic and cannot redeem him. After Ana’s
infidelity, Fermín’s language falls back into instrumentality: not only does
he use his words to goad Víctor to revenge but in his scheming he himself
becomes an instrument of Petra, who carefully plots the tragic end of the
protagonists. Faust and Don Juan are the explicit referents of the novel:
Fermín shares the former’s higher yearnings and longs for the ideal lan-
guage of the latter. His fate, however, is ultimately closest to that of Lewis’s
monk, the unspoken model that haunts the work. Like Ambrosio, Fermín
is denied salvation and in the end succumbs to a cycle of retribution and
destruction, to the societal forces that have formed him. Like Ambrosio’s,
Fermín’s is a story not of the triumph of the will but of the failure of
revolution.
Santos and Pompeyo
The allusions to titanic, romantic figures in La Regenta suggest Fermín’s

revolutionary potential. Clarín resorts to this sort of textual dialogue to
explore the reasons for his failure as well. The same chapters that gesture
in structure and imagery toward the defiant hero of The Monk also intro-
duce a subplot about two minor characters, Santos Barinaga and Pompeyo
Guimarán, who defy Vetustan convention and seek to stage a revolution
of their own. In their personalities, function, and relationship to one
another, Santos and Pompeyo recall Eça’s left-leaning duo, Julião and
Sebastião, who are themselves based on Flaubert’s revolutionaries, Sénécal
and Dussardier. As we saw in Chapter 2, Julião and Sebastião provide a
running commentary on the relationship between Luísa, the heroine, and
Juliana, Eça’s rebellious proletarian. Eça’s dialogue with L’éducation senti-
mentale is the key to deciphering the political reflections implicit in his
reworking of Madame Bovary. Santos and Pompeyo have a similar func-
tion in La Regenta: they clarify the political significance of the main plot
and comment on Clarín’s own revolutionary figure, Fermín de Pas. By
taking up Eça’s allusions to Dussardier and Sénécal, Clarín offers a com-
mentary on Eça’s commentary on Madame Bovary and clarifies how his
own critique differs from that of his Portuguese model.9
Like Dussardier and Sénécal, Santos and Pompeyo are rebellious figures
who defy the social order. Once a dealer in religious ware, Santos has been
ruined by Fermín’s underground monopoly on the sale of sacred articles. As
a result, he has become a bitter foe of the canon theologian whom he
denounces in his drunken monologues. Pompeyo, a wealthy atheist, en-
courages Santos’s condemnation of the church and pushes him toward even
more radical positions. Like Flaubert, Clarín pairs an abstract, dogmatic, and
GRAFTINGS 191
vain ideologue with a real victim who suffers in a concrete, physical way the
abuses of the institution he attacks. Just as Sénécal prides himself on his read-
ings and considers himself superior to his circle in the tenacity and theoret-
ical purity of his convictions, so Pompeyo enjoys being Vetusta’s only atheist
and is rigid in both his posture and beliefs. Santos, in contrast, is, like
Dussardier, directly affected by the injustice his friend decries and identifies
sympathetically rather than theoretically with their cause.
The friendship between the two men follows a course similar to
Dussardier and Sénécal’s. Just as Sénécal is at first marginalized within his
circle and then, as political tides shift, becomes the chairman of the left-
wing Club de l’Intelligence, so Pompeyo is initially excluded from elite
society (he is not welcome at Vetusta’s Gentlemen’s Club) but suddenly
becomes popular with a turn in fashion: in Chapter 20, Álvaro and Paco
invite him back to the club from which he had been expelled and throw a
dinner to celebrate his staunch atheism. Both figures, however, ultimately
cause more damage than good and betray the convictions they uphold.
Sénécal becomes a minion of Louis-Napoléon and kills Dussardier.
Similarly, Pompeyo hastens Santos’s demise by rejecting the food sent by
Christian charities only to renounce atheism on his own deathbed. Santos
and Dussardier also resemble one another. Both accept the abstract ideo-
logical platforms of their companions hesitatingly and wince at the conse-
quences of their own activism: Dussardier is horrified when, as a National
Guardsman, he kills a man, and Santos, truly devout at heart, is terrified
by the heterodox extremes to which Pompeyo pushes him.
Finally, both subplots frame, punctuate, and comment upon the main
plot of the novel. As with Sebastião and Julião in O primo Basílio and with
the treatment of Paco and Santos in La Regenta (see Chapter 1), the ideo-
logical implications of the heroine’s actions and the sentimental plot are
drawn out through male characters who engage directly in the political
sphere. The story of Santos and Pompeyo mirrors, accentuates, and clari-
fies the tensions of Chapters 16–26: it reformulates Ana’s everyday rituals
and constant mood swings as life-or-death drama and serves to separate the
stages of her development.
Specifically, the subplot divides these chapters into two narrative seg-
ments that closely parallel one another. The death of Santos marks the end
of the first segment (Chapters 16–22), and that of Pompeyo the end of the
second (Chapters 23–26).10 The parallelism between the two segments is
clear in the sequence of events. At the beginning of each segment, Ana goes
to a public spectacle (Don Juan Tenorio and the Christmas eve mass) that
moves her deeply and leads her to identify with the common people. After
each event, Fermín is troubled by Ana’s proximity to Álvaro and decides to
take a hard line with his spiritual charge.11 Although Ana at first accepts
Fermín’s intervention and rededicates herself to religion, she soon lapses

into her old ways. Fermín, who follows Ana’s actions from afar, is once
again displeased and rebukes her, taking her to Doña Petronila’s house, but
Ana reacts against his pressure and distances herself from his influence.
Eventually, however, her loneliness draws her back toward religious life,
and she experiences an epiphany that inspires tears of compassion and
leads her to return to her spiritual brother (reading St. Theresa and listen-
ing to the Stabat Mater).
Both sequences end with the death of one of the revolutionaries, which
is followed by a procession that hovers between the serious and the ridicu-
lous, the religious and the erotic, revolution and confusion. Santos’s
funeral, with which the first segment concludes, is for Fermín’s enemies
and many Vetustan liberals a political event (Fermín refers to its attendees
as “revolutionaries”). The Vetustan factory workers follow the atheist’s cas-
ket protesting the injustices of the church, but to Pompeyo’s chagrin, they
recite paternosters as they walk (526). “Vetusta,” Pompeyo sadly admits,
“was not ready for a true civil burial” (525). Neither are the women who
join the funeral demonstration:
Behind the coffin walked a few representatives of the weaker sex, but, ac-
cording to the girls with baskets and the women at the fountains, these were
“hussies.”
“Hey there, you little tart!”
“Where are you off to now, you whores?”
And Don Pompeyo’s female sympathizers shrieked with laughter thus
showing how shallow-rooted were their convictions. (526)
This passage looks forward to the procession at the end of the second
sequence. Shortly after Pompeyo’s death, Ana walks as a Nazarene behind
an image of the martyred Christ. Ana’s participation is at first a defiant ges-
ture, an attempt to defy Vetustan hypocrisy and to express solidarity for
her friend and “brother.” Like the contemptuous onlookers in Santos’s
funeral, however, she is ultimately able to see only her own prostitution,
which she condemns. Her revolution is as halfhearted and contradictory as
that of the Vestustan workers.
Through this summary of the plot, we begin to see that the novel folds
back on itself at the beginning of Chapter 23 and repeats the basic
sequence of Chapters 16–22 in Chapters 23–26. This parallel structure
raises a series of questions: Why is the sequence repeated? And how do the
two versions differ? Perhaps the most important change in the second
segment is the way the subplot is aligned with the central plot of these
chapters, the story of Ana and Fermín. The relation between the two
GRAFTINGS 193
threads of the novel is established through various textual details. As

I argued in my analysis of Chapter 15 (see Chapter 1), Santos is at first a
stand-in for the heroine: he models one of her options in the novel. In
Chapter 26, Ana has the opportunity to play Marguerite to Fermín’s
Armand: she may be the prostitute who subverts his projections, the body
that leaks through, the revolutionary meaning that goes beyond the bour-
geois phrase. This parallelism between Santos and Ana is confirmed at the
time of his death. The description of Barinaga’s end is drawn directly from
the death of Madame Bovary, the model for Clarín’s heroine: through this
borrowing, Clarín identifies Santos as a stand-in for Ana Ozores who reen-
acts in her stead part of Emma’s trajectory.12
The connection between Santos and Ana is also established through
textual echoes. Just as Ana feels herself to be “an exile who had no home-
land to return to or to sigh for” (205), Santos laments that he has no home
(344), and in Chapter 22, his physical hunger is paralleled by Ana’s
“hunger for love” (511). If the spiritual bread fails to allay the pangs in
Santos’s stomach, then Ana’s plan of sacrificing herself to Fermín to satisfy
her “hunger” is also bound to fail. At the same time, Ana’s relationship
with Fermín resembles Santos’s with Pompeyo. Just as Pompeyo’s dissi-
dence is theoretical while Santos’s is experienced viscerally, so Fermín’s
sermons are abstract and metaphysical while Ana’s rebellion is more empa-
thetic: she is moved by the story of the incarnation, the bodily suffering of
Christ, and identifies not with concepts so much as with people—Inés,
St. Theresa, and St. Augustine. Santos’s death, significantly, coincides with
that of Sor Teresa, whose name recalls Ana’s spiritual model.
In Chapter 22, however, the alignment of the characters begins to shift.
As the Vetustans begin to worry about Santos’s condition, his illness and
treatment become an object of debate. The physician, Don Robustiano,
argues that “deprivation of alcohol is precipitating that man’s demise—
even though his illness is caused by the abuse of alcohol” (503). A few
pages later, Clarín describes Fermín as “living exclusively on [his] refined
passion” for Ana, which stimulates a physical desire it cannot satisfy (509).
He too lives off what makes his life most unlivable. As Fermín begins to
mirror Santos, Ana takes the position of Pompeyo: both the atheist and the
heroine fail to satisfy the physical appetites of their friends. Pompeyo’s
position in the funeral march anticipates Ana’s in the Nazarene procession
of Chapter 26: attempting to express solidarity for a friend, Ana and
Pompeyo make a spectacle of themselves before the Vetustans, who fail to
understand their cause. In the end, both come to question the motives of
their actions. Just as Ana in the Nazarene procession condemns her own
“prostitution,” which seems a ridiculous gesture, so Pompeyo at the conclu-
sion of Chapter 22 regrets that Santos has been buried in a lonely civil
grave. What has motivated both of them to participate in these processions

is ultimately mere vanity. Pompeyo has always prided himself on being the
“only specimen” of a plant that “could not be acclimatized in Vetusta”
(443). The image recalls Ana’s own association of her marriage with
Frígilis’s acclimitazation of eucalyptus trees in Vetusta (“That man Frillity,
the planter of the eucalyptus-trees, was the culprit. He had talked her into
accepting Quintanar” 206). She too is a unique plant that does not thrive
in the soil to which it has been transplanted. As the first sequence ends and
the second begins, the relationship between the main plot and the subplot
begins to change: Ana is now aligned not with Santos but with Pompeyo.
This change in position raises yet another question: Why do the char-
acters shift places? What in the second sequence makes Ana, like Pompeyo,
turn away from her project of defiance? The episodes in Chapters 23–26
are different from those in Chapters 16–22 in several ways. After her
experience at the theater in Chapter 16, Ana is homebound for many days,
at first because of the rain, which she abhors, and later because of a pro-
tracted illness. Though at first she tries to follow Fermín’s program of piety
and good works, these attempts are short-lived and are not spiritually ful-
filling. After Chapter 23, however, all of the major episodes occur not at
home but in public spaces: Ana goes to the Christmas mass in Chapter 23,
to the ball in Chapter 24, and to the novena at the Chapel of St. Isidore in
Chapter 25, and walks in the Nazarene procession in Chapter 26. In the
second sequence, she is performing on a more public stage.
At the same time that Ana moves from the domestic to the public sphere,
the body becomes a central focus of the novel. As I mentioned before in the
discussion of The Monk, it is right before Sor Teresa’s and Santos’s deaths that
Fermín finally falls and accepts Teresina (the analogue in La Regenta of Lewis’s
Matilda) as his lover. Throughout the second sequence, Fermín will, like
Ambrosio, appease his physical desire with one woman while aggressively
pursuing another who is spiritually inclined and consequently less accessible.
Fermín’s desiring body is now a central player in the plot. So too is the
heroine’s. As she enters the public sphere, Fermín increasingly attempts to
monitor and control her body by dictating what she will wear at the ball and
parading her beauty through Vetusta in the Nazarene procession as if she were
“his prisoner in invisible chains” (595). The reticence about desire that char-
acterizes Ana and Fermín’s conversations throughout most of the novel ends
abruptly as Fermín betrays his feelings for Ana in Chapter 25.
These two shifts—the movement from the private to the public sphere
and the introduction of the bodily and the erotic—may at first seem con-
tradictory: the focus becomes at once more intimate and more exposed.
This double movement, however, is precisely the challenge that the hero-
ine must face if she is to carry out her project: Ana must learn to translate
GRAFTINGS 195
her spiritual longings and private sympathies for the deprived into a pub-
lic statement, into a collective desire for a better world. This translation is
a stumbling block for Ana, for within the logic of the novel and the
period, the symbol of rebellion is the public body, the prostitute. As a
child, Ana felt mortified when her solidarity with Germán was miscon-
strued in public as a symptom of wantonness. In the Nazarene procession,
she is similarly horrified to find that her expression of support for another
brother figure, Fermín, takes the form of a “singular prostitution.” Because
of this hesitation, the social content of Ana’s critique never transcends the
bodily phrase. What breaks down here is the movement from critique to
ideology, from individual identification to collective statement. The failure
of this revolution is a discursive failure, an inability to articulate a revolu-
tionary longing, a collective fantasy about a better world.
This failure is clarified by the subplot concerning Santos and Pompeyo.
At the end of Chapter 22, Pompeyo regrets seeing Santos buried in a civil
grave and wishes he had a more dignified (i.e., a Christian) resting place.
Just as Armand is horrified by the sight of Marguerite’s decomposing body
and seeks to rebury her in a bourgeois plot that will eternally cover her
decay and profession, so Pompeyo is disturbed by the idea of Santos rot-
ting in unhallowed ground and wishes to move his tomb. For the first
time, he begins to fear death, wonders about the afterlife, and questions his
convictions. This ideological reversal clarifies Ana’s own hesitation in the
Nazarene procession. Like Armand, she seeks to rebury the fille de joie,
to hide her naked feet, her “singular prostitution.” Pompeyo’s reaction to
Santos’s death at the end of the first segment of the dramatic arc spells out
in political and social terms the significance of her vacillation. She is not
merely hiding her feet but also betraying her own revolution. Like the
women who deride the female mourners at Santos’s funeral, she loses sight
of the content that goes beyond the bodily phrase. To return to the terms
we used in Chapter 1, she fails to make the spirit of Fermín’s revolution
live in herself and seeks to translate it back into a bourgeois plot, applying
to herself the vulgar prejudices of Vetustan society. In the transition from
the spirituality of the first segment of the dramatic arc to the physicality of
the second, Ana’s project collapses: she is unable to incarnate the beliefs
and ideals she espouses.
The treatment of Pompeyo in Chapter 22 makes this failure clear.
Pompeyo is “translating back” not only in his longing to rebury Santos in
a bourgeois plot but also in his ideological discourse. In L’éducation senti-
mentale, the subplot about Dussardier and Sénécal deals with the history
of France from 1848 to 1851; it is a story about class struggle. Santos and
Pompeyo, in contrast, crusade against the church. In a novel so deeply con-
cerned with clerical life, this focus is to a certain extent appropriate. One
might argue that Pompeyo’s “revolution” offers an inverted image of Ana’s.

Where his is an anticlerical movement that ends with his conversion to re-
ligion, hers is a spiritual exercise that is foiled by her fixation with the ma-
terial, with the body as an object of desire. At the same time, however,
Pompeyo’s battle against religion is also jarring. Although anticlericalism
was a potent revolutionary discourse in the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries (as illustrated in a text such as The Monk), by the 1870s
it was a blatant anachronism even in backward Vetusta. As the narrator
notes of Fermín:
The masses were not gossiping about the skirts business, however. There had
been talk during the Revolution [of 1868] about whether Don Fermín had
his little adventures in the poor quarters, but none of the people living there
remembered such tales now . . . All the talk now was of social revolution;
priests, it was said, were no better and no worse than the rest of the bour-
geoisie. Fanaticism was bad, but capital was worse. (453)
The narrator makes a point of indicating that Santos and Pompeyo are not
fighting the battle of Sénécal and Dussardier in 1848 nor that of the
Spanish masses in 1868. Rather, Pompeyo is translating back into the lan-
guage of bourgeois revolution, into the discourses of 1789. Even though
anticlericalism is by now a cliché, the workers are unable to voice it
without contradiction: they continue to mix prayers with protest. Ana’s
inability to articulate a revolutionary gesture is mirrored by that of the pro-
letariat, which is ideologically unprepared.
By focusing on anticlericalism, Clarín not only comments on Fermín’s
actions but also on his relation to Father Ambrosio in The Monk, one of
the archetypes of anticlerical literature. Lewis’s hero is at once hero and vil-
lain, a figuration of revolution and an embodiment of the institutional cor-
ruption that revolution must overcome: breaking free from his chains, he
imposes them pitilessly on others. This inversion is repeated at the end of
the novel by the mob, which rises up against Ambrosio but in its frenzy ul-
timately replicates his violence. Lewis’s novel, thus, captures the cyclical
nature of violence and oppression in society. In La Regenta, Fermín, like
Ambrosio, struggles to liberate himself from his monkish fetters while
bearing down on subordinates and supporters with all the weight of his ec-
clesiastical authority. As in The Monk, this contradiction is reflected in the
actions of the crowd that rises up against him. When the working-class
mourners follow Santos’s corpse to its final resting place, they at once
demonstrate against and reproduce (with prayers) the discourses of the
institution Fermín represents. In both novels, the difference between
revolution and the oppression it combats is blurred, but whereas in Lewis’s
GRAFTINGS 197
work this confusion illustrates the cyclical nature of the violence, in Clarín’s it
reveals rather the cyclical nature of the language—the discursive erosion that
drains this revolution of any real meaning. Just as Ana reburies the prostitute
in a bourgeois plot, so Fermín fails to incarnate his revolutionary project and
translates back into an abstract religious language that has lost its meaning
and immediacy (as we saw in Chapter 1, he can no longer connect the words
“Verbum factum est” to images and sentiments). Clarín’s gesture toward The
Monk suggests that Fermín has the potential to embody the revolutionary
energy that characterized the titanic figures born of 1789, but that these ges-
tures have ceased to convey meaning in Restoration Spain: anticlericalism and
the tales of the corrupt priest are now like the prayers the workers recite, ha-
bitual phrases, clichés thrown together in arbitrary and contradictory ways.
The relation between the revolutionary pair and the main plot in La
Regenta differs from that in L’éducation sentimentale and O primo Basílio. In
Flaubert’s novel, the activism and drama of Sénécal and Dussardier’s story
contrasts with the stagnation of the main plot and the indifference of many
of its characters. The subplot suggests the historical significance of Frédéric’s
story but at the same time reveals the divide between the protagonists and
the history that they are living, their failure to engage their moment. The
story of Sénécal and Dussardier, in contrast, is one of dramatic inversions
and cyclical violence. The gentle Dussardier finds himself obliged to kill
during the June Days and is himself murdered three years later during the
coup of 1851: the treachery of Sénécal in killing his friend replicates that of
Louis-Napoléon in declaring himself emperor. Like Louis-Napoléon,
Sénécal has manipulated revolutionary discourses to better his position, to
gain a place in the new regime.
Eça’s novel inverts the relation between the main plot and the subplot
in Flaubert’s. Whereas Dussardier and Sénécal’s engagement and activism
contrast with the ennui of the main characters, Julião and Sebastião seem
passive and inactive in comparison with the traumatic interactions of Luísa
and Juliana. The subplot serves not to reveal the distance between history
and the main characters but rather to impose a distance between them. In
their conversations, Julião and Sebastião seek to extract Luísa from the
historical process, the revolutionary turmoil, into which she has thrown
herself. As we saw in Chapter 2, their function at the end is to rebury rev-
olution in bourgeois clichés. What is a drama of inversion in Flaubert’s
subplot and in Eça’s main plot becomes in Julião and Sebastião’s story
conversion as a nonevent: the latter drop their revolutionary convictions
and embrace bourgeois orthodoxy without blinking an eye. Whereas
Flaubert’s rebellious pair seem to belong more to society than to the text
(their involvement in history is greater than their role in the plot), Eça’s
belong more to the text than to the world it describes: their function is to
put an end to the social forces that irrupt in the novel, to pull Luísa out of
a dangerous reality and back into the fictions of bourgeois domesticity.
In this respect, Clarín’s subplot resembles L’éducation sentimentale more
than O primo Basílio. Like Sénécal and Dussardier, Pompeyo and Santos
are more active and dramatic than their counterparts in the main plot.
Their function in the story, however, differs slightly. Whereas Flaubert’s
revolutionary pair reveal the main characters’ indifference to history (they
are the only figures to engage their moment actively), Clarín’s atheists serve
rather to clarify the political implications of the nuanced relationship
between Ana and her confessor. They serve neither to reveal nor to impose
a distance between the protagonists and their world but rather to bring the
two closer together by situating the sentimental plot in its social context.
Though structurally Santos and Pompeyo resemble Flaubert’s charac-
ters, the dénouement of their subplot recalls that of Eça’s revolutionary
pair. Like Sebastião and Julião’s, their story ends with the confusion of
political opposites. In Eça’s work, Left and Right prove indistinguishable
in the rigged constitutional democracy of the 1870s. In La Regenta, the
subplot about Santos and Pompeyo introduces a similar confusion of dis-
courses—anticlericalism and Christian rhetoric are haphazardly jumbled
together. Ultimately, however, the function of this confusion is very
different in each novel. Whereas Eça’s duo uses language to foil revolu-
tion—in a sense, they reproduce the techniques of Bonapartism—
Pompeyo and Santos’s revolution (as well as Ana and Fermín’s) is foiled by
the inadequacy of the language they adopt: unlike Dussardier, Vetusta’s
working class lacks the ideological preparation and discourses necessary to
carry out its uprising; it is unable to avoid ideological contradictions.13
From Juliana to Petra
The rest of the novel (Chapter 27 onward) explores the consequences of

this failure and the dangers to which it exposes Ana. It is in this part of the
novel that Clarín moves away from Fermín and Lewis’s defiant priest and
turns instead toward the maid servant, Petra, who is based on the figure of
Juliana, Eça’s representation of revolution.14 With this, we will see, the op-
positions that structure the novel begin to shift. In my discussion so far,
I have dealt with the opposition between incarnation and a translation or
representation that drains the former of urgency and enthusiasm. As we
saw in the first chapter of this book, this is the opposition in Dumas’s novel
and Marx’s analysis of 1848. With the rise of Petra, however, the novel
begins to reenact the triumph of Bonapartism and the legacy of 1851.
GRAFTINGS 199
From this point on, the novel is concerned with the opposition between
representation (as the precondition for political expression) and the writ-
ing machine (a breakdown of language that foils the articulation of a
coherent ideological project).
Like Juliana, Petra harbors suspicions about her mistress long before
they are warranted and attaches enormous importance to all of Ana’s ac-
tions. Both Juliana and Petra are particularly alert to compromising corre-
spondence. Juliana rummages in the garbage looking for Luísa’s letters, and
Petra assumes that the notes she carries from Ana to Fermín are billets
d’amour. Juliana smells Luísa’s clothes for signs of her infidelity; Petra
“scent[s] the dishonour of [her mistress’] house” (218) long before Ana
actually falls. What motivates both servants is social ambition. Juliana
amuses herself by standing on the balcony and allowing herself to be
mistaken for her mistress. Petra, similarly, imitates the manners of the
nobility—she and Teresina, “aristocrats among servants,” kiss one another
“in the manner of the young ladies of Vetusta” (235). At the same time,
however, they are also driven by resentment, jealousy, and revenge. Just as
Juliana seeks to bring down Luísa, whose beauty and position she envies,
so Petra longs “to mock her mistress, whom she hated ‘for being hypocrit-
ical, for being pretty, and for being proud’” (654). Assisting Álvaro in his
plans, she seeks to “[satisfy] what was perhaps her favorite passion apart
from lust—vindictiveness” (654).
Though Luísa and Ana are taken unawares by their maids’ plots, both
from the start feel an inexplicable dislike and anxiety when the latter are
present. Juliana’s tics “put Luísa’s nerves on edge” (16), and Ana “disliked
Petra—she feared her, not knowing why” (473). After Luísa and Ana fall,
this apprehension proves to be justified. Both Petra and Juliana quickly
discover their mistresses’ secrets and turn them to their own advantage.
Juliana extorts money from Luísa and, to Jorge’s dismay, ceases to do her
chores. Petra, similarly, becomes lax in her duties, causing Víctor to com-
plain of her indolence and arrogance (648–649). The two servants resem-
ble one another in their nature, aspirations, and plot function: upon the
heroines’ fall, both introduce into the novel the reality of class struggle and
embody the threat of social revolution.15
What has changed in La Regenta are the factors that lead to this situation.
Clarín complicates Eça’s novel by including not one but two representations
of revolution—not only a Juliana-like servant but also an Ambrosio-like
priest. This doubling is key to understanding the politics of the novel and,
particularly, Clarín’s response to Eça’s social commentary. In O primo Basílio,
it is Luísa’s reading that leads to her adultery and exposes her to Juliana’s
threat, to the anger of a vindictive working class. And it is this exposure that
makes Luísa vulnerable to the manipulation of a Louis-Napoléon figure (the
banker Castro) and that leads her momentarily to consider becoming like
the prostitutes of Lisbon’s red-light district.
In La Regenta, Clarín rearranges this sequence of events. Ana begins by
attempting to rise up against the Vetustan status quo through her readings
and her defiant brotherhood with Fermín de Pas. This effort leads her
momentarily to assume the revolutionary stance of the prostitute in the
streets (the Nazarene procession of Chapter 26). Whereas Luísa’s horror at
her own prostitution leads her to rebuff the Louis-Napoleonic banker, how-
ever, Ana’s disgust at her position pushes her into the arms of Álvaro Mesía,
a Bonapartist figure like Castro (in Chapters 1 and 4 we saw how his
manipulation of language and political parties resembles the strategies of
Louis-Napoléon). Too self-conscious to carry off the defiant tableau of the
fille de joie as Liberty, Ana in the end prefers to project, like Paco Vegallana,
upon Álvaro’s Marguerite Gautier. With her adultery, she falls into the writ-
ing machine, the black pit of indifferentiation and meaninglessness that is
Álvaro’s language. This writing—the male prostitution of a Louis-Napoléon
and the vacuum of signification he introduces—is what makes Ana vulner-
able to Petra’s plots. Whereas in Eça, it is Luísa’s slumming—her attempt to
be Marguerite Gautier and to step into the books she reads—and her subse-
quent exposure to the vengeance of the working class that allow for the emer-
gence of a Louis-Napoléon, in La Regenta it is a discursive emptiness that re-
sembles Bonapartism that allows for the rise of the vindictive proletarian.
Unlike Luísa’s, Ana’s slumming is not what makes her vulnerable. What con-
demns her is rather her resistance to slumming, her failure to carry out her
project of solidarity and subversion, her preference for the false social dis-
tinctions and rarefied pleasures Álvaro offers.
In both his treatment of the maidservant’s plot and his rewriting of
Sebastião and Julião in Santos and Pompeyo, Clarín shifts the emphasis
away from the social threat of the lower ranks and toward language, toward
the challenge of articulating a coherent ideological project. Just as Julião
and Sebastião’s conversations serve to recontain the threat of the proletariat
while the Santos-Pompeyo subplot illustrates the lower classes’ inability to
enunciate a noncontradictory political program, so Clarín’s revision of
Eça’s plot sequence suggests that the real threat is not the proximity of the
lower ranks or the irruption of class struggle (the blackmail plot) so much
as the rhetorical confusions caused by the revolutionaries’ discursive
failure: the anachronisms and half-hearted discourse of an 1848 make one
vulnerable to a Bonapartist manipulation of language, to the indifferenti-
ation introduced in France after 1851.
By including a Juliana-like servant as well as the explosive Fermín de Pas,
Clarín not only corrects Eça’s political commentary but also creates a contrast
between two types of uprising. The portrayal of Fermín is informed by the
GRAFTINGS 201
titanic figures of revolutionary literature, by the great myths that emerged out
of 1789. Bursting with energy and desire, Fermín is, like Ambrosio, Don
Juan, or Faust, an uncontainable force that seems to have supernatural effects:
he introduces irrationality and disarray into the lives he touches.
Fermín’s mysterious and auratic presence contrasts with the cool
rationality and rigorous logic of the scheming Petra. In the final chapters of
the novel, Ana’s maid becomes an authorial figure who carefully plans out
the dénouement of the novel, for she controls its timing and directs her
superiors as if they were her characters. Not only is Petra more calculating,
she is also more confined. Fermín is a figure of excess, of limitless energy
about to burst forth. Petra, in contrast, must work within a limited econ-
omy. After Ana falls, Álvaro uses Petra as an accomplice in order to enter
the Ozores Palace safely. He wins the maid over by seducing her. At first the
arrangement works well, but after a while Álvaro’s sexual energies are
depleted. He must now satisfy not one woman but two, and Ana, long
repressed, is particularly demanding in bed. As Álvaro begins to ration
Petra’s share of the pleasure, the maid becomes increasingly irate and has-
tens her plot against the adulterers. Whereas Fermín’s story revolves around
a boundless energy waiting to irrupt, the chapters in which Petra gains the
upper hand involve a zero-sum game, a limited economy in which each
character must struggle for her share of the pot. This opposition between
excess and economy is defined early in the novel.16 When the two rivals,
Fermín and Álvaro, pass one another on the street, the narrator contrasts
their reasons for exercising: “The canon went for long walks in order to
consume useless energy. Mesía in order to regain lost energy which he
hoped he would be needing before very long” (568). In his uprising, Fermín
unleashes pent-up energy on the world to change it, to break free from his
monkish fetters and join with his soul sister in a defiant, transgressive
union. Through the readings he recommends, he begets in Ana’s “tree” a
prodigious, beautiful, and irrepressible flowering that, to Frígilis’s dismay,
transcends the natural economy of the body. Petra, in contrast, must strug-
gle to claim her share of a limited resource, the aging Álvaro’s diminished
libido. Unlike Ana in her project with Fermín, the maid is not seeking to
change the existing system or to achieve an equitable distribution. Her goal
is rather to rise to the top of the hierarchy by pushing her mistress to
the bottom. Like Juliana’s, her goal is to overturn; her revolution is merely
a revolving.
The distinction between Fermín’s excess and Petra’s petty economy is
perhaps clearest in the way the erotic and the political are related in the
treatment of each character. The priest sublimates his desire in a revolu-
tionary project—he encourages Ana’s uprising and her solidarity with the
economically deprived. His sexual energy is channeled into a social cause.
In Petra’s case, in contrast, class struggle is reduced to sexual economy, to a

parody of revolution. What is with Juliana a scramble for real capital—the
bourgeois wife and the proletarian fight for the wealth of the household—
becomes in Clarín’s dénouement a struggle for erotic capital, for Álvaro’s
flagging sexual drive. This distinction is ultimately but another example of
the opposition we examined in Chapter 3: the difference between an eroti-
cism that stands for the political (the fille de joie as Liberty) and a politics
that is reduced to the erotic (Bonapartism).
The movement from Fermín’s revolution to Petra’s is accompanied by a
change in genre. Ana at first resembles the heroine of a sentimental novel:
from Chapters 1 to 26, she is torn between duty and desire. As in the fiction
that Margaret Cohen studies in The Sentimental Education of the Novel, the
hermeneutic and proairetic codes complement one another in her story:
the forward movement of the plot does not delay a final revelation (as in a
realist novel) but rather confirms a truth we already know—it strengthens
our sense of Ana’s fortitude as well as our awareness of the irreconcilability
of the forces that divide her. The focus of these chapters is the heroine’s
choice, the active dialogue in which she engages through her readings. From
Chapters 1 to 26, she is an agent choosing between two alternatives.
After Chapter 27, however, the novel adopts the logic of Petra’s plot,
which is informed by a very different genre, the feuilletons that Petra read
after Ana’s aunt discarded them (658).17 What prevails at the end of La
Regenta are the types of books Emma reads: overwrought plots generated
by a jumbling of tropes and motifs, by the outpouring of the writing ma-
chine. During these final chapters, Ana is no longer on center stage. The
focus is not her agency as a character (her political or ethical choice) but
Petra’s function as author, her construction of a plot.18 In the story the
maid elaborates, the proairetic and hermeneutic codes now work against
one another. Biding her time and delaying the final revelation of Ana’s sin,
Petra creates a tension between these narrative drives. Like the author of a
feuilleton, she produces suspense through deferral; she plans lucrative
installments by milking what she can out of plot and characters. In this
process, Ana has ceased to choose; she no longer engages in a decisive
dialogue with classic authors. Now, she is merely pulled along by an inex-
orable narrative logic, by the worn-out conventions of the feuilleton.
The literature that Petra introduces at the end of the novel is antici-
pated earlier in the description of an evening Ana spends at home while
her husband is at the theater:
But finally Ana found herself alone in the dining-room, by the

Churrigueresque fireplace with its great chimney-piece swarming with plas-
ter reliefs and painted in lizard colours; by the fireplace in whose warmth so
GRAFTINGS 203
many feuilletons had been read in former days by Señorita Doña

Anunciación Ozores, who was now resting in peace. No fire burned there
now; the uncovered fire-basket was a gaping hole of sadness.
Petra cleared away the coffee-service. Her movements were torpid. She
wandered in and out, several times, but Ana did not even see her, so intently
was she staring at the cold, black fire-basket. The maid was devouring her
mistress with her eyes. “She isn’t going to the theatre! Something’s up.” (204)
Though at first this passage seems merely a description of setting, its

juxtapositions serve to identify Ana’s aunt’s feuilletons with the chur-
rigueresque—an aesthetic associated with the writing machine in the
cathedral tour (62–63)—and with Petra’s melodramatic imagination.
Ana’s subsequent reflections take on the characteristics of this type of
literature. She laments the absence of plot and adventure in her life
(205)—and imagines a feuilletinesque scenario about what her life might
have been had she not married Víctor:
“With Don Frutos everything would have been different. She would have
had no option. He would have been so brutish, so coarse. Then Don Alvaro
would have abducted her, oh yes, and by now they would be at the end of
the world together. And if this had vexed Redondo he would have had to
fight a duel with Mesía.” Ana pictured Don Frutos, the wretched man
stretched out upon the sand, drowning in a pool of blood, like the blood she
had seen at bull fights, black blood, thick and foaming. (206–207)
This plot, of course, anticipates the one Petra elaborates at the end of the
novel. Terrified by what she has imagined, Ana enters Víctor’s office to
write to Fermín. As she crosses the room in the dark, however, she is
caught in one of her husband’s animal traps and must be released by Petra,
who calls the instrument a “diabolical guillotine,” a term that clarifies the
political significance of the plot the maid introduces at the end of the novel
(208). Petra’s revolution is that of the vindictive masses, a reign of terror.
As in Chapter 10, Ana at the end of the work falls into the trap of her
servant’s feuilleton and loses her freedom and agency. What remains to be
seen is the force that will draw her out of this plot in the final chapters.
Three Bachelors
The scene in Chapter 10 introduces not only Petra’s feuilletinesque plotting

but also Clarín’s solution to her threat: the intervention of Víctor’s best
friend, Don Tomás Crespo (known as “Frígilis”), who consoles Ana after her
husband’s death.19 Frígilis’ ultimate healing function is anticipated in

Chapter 21, in which Ana regards him as a shield against her maid:
She disliked Petra—she feared her, not knowing why. To make herself a little
calmer when she was assailed by nervous anguish she would ask her maid:
“Is Don Tomás in the garden?”
If he was, Ana knew that there was protection near at hand, and calmed
down. (473)
At the end of the novel, Frígilis and the garden will once again be a safe
haven for the heroine. In Chapter 10, however, Ana’s attitude toward her
husband’s friend is somewhat less benevolent:
[Víctor] loved Frillity more than his own wife. And what was Frillity? A
madman, likeable enough years earlier, but now quite out of his mind.
A man with a mania for acclimatization, who wanted to harmonize, mix
and confuse everything, who grafted pear-trees on to apple-trees and
believed that all was one and the same, and claimed that the important
thing was to “adapt oneself to the environment.” A man who in his orgy of
absurdities had reached the extreme of grafting English cockerels on to
Spanish cockerels—she had seen them herself! Poor creatures, with their
combs cut open and on them, held in place with pieces of rag, stumps of
raw, bleeding flesh—how nauseating! Frillity was a modern Herod; and this
Herod was her husband’s Pylades. (209)
Frígilis is a figure of tolerance: his nickname derives from his understand-

ing of the fragile (fragilis) nature of man. Unlike the Vetustans, he sees
through the falsity of social constructions and privileges the natural world.
At the same time, however, he tampers with nature and creates artificial
and seemingly useless combinations. He is an enigmatic figure with which
to conclude the novel.20
To begin to understand the function and significance of Víctor’s
Darwinist companion, it is important to trace the evolution of the charac-
ter type to which he belongs: the figure of the bachelor who has the
potential to save the adulteress from the dangers to which she has exposed
herself. In both Madame Bovary and O primo Basílio, the heroines at first
seek the help of bankers (Lestiboudois and Castro), but when the latter
make sexual advances, they turn instead to eccentric bachelors: the tax col-
lector, M. Binet, in Madame Bovary and Jorge’s best friend, Sebastião, in
O primo Basílio. At the end of La Regenta, similarly, it is the unmarried and
unconventional Frígilis who mitigates the tragedy and offers consolation.
M. Binet is one of the first Yonvillais whom the Bovarys meet. From the
outset, he is conspicuous for the regularity of his habits. Formerly a
GRAFTINGS 205
military man and now the local tax collector, he is rigid and unimagi-
native. Nevertheless, he has one peculiar hobby: using a lathe, he pro-
duces napkin rings and other useless ornaments that he then hoards in
his garret and refuses to sell. As the narrator remarks early on, he is
“jealous as an artist and stingy as a bourgeois” (90). Binet’s lathe or tour
is an important metatextual image in the work. As we have seen, his
ceaseless production of arbitrary objects mirrors the writing machine,
the endless outpouring of random signs and discourses that resist total-
ization and meaning. Like Charles Bovary’s hat, the objects that Binet
produces defy representation: he copies “one of those ivory ornaments
that beggar description, a conglomeration of half-moons and of spheres
carved one inside the other, the whole thing standing erect like an
obelisk and perfectly useless” (360).
The image of the lathe is not only textual but also vaguely sexual. At
the end of the novel, Binet’s neighbors spy on him as he is at work:
He was just beginning on the last section: the end was in sight! In the
chiaroscuro of his workshop the golden sawdust flew from his lathe like a
spray of sparks under the hooves of a galloping horse; the two wheels spun
and whirred: Binet was smiling, chin down and nostrils wide: he looked ab-
sorbed, in one of those states of utter bliss such as men seem to find only in
humble activities, which divert the mind with easy challenges and gratify it
with the most utter and complete success. (360)
In this passage, Binet’s hobby induces an almost orgasmic frenzy—the

whirring galloping of the lathe climaxes in “utter bliss.” Binet derives pleas-
ure not from women (he is later horrified when Emma makes advances)
but from this surrogate object. As we saw in the analysis of Flaubert’s
cathedral tour (see Chapter 4), the writing machine in Madame Bovary is
opposed to the erotic: just as Léon gets nowhere with Emma on the tour
of the church, Emma is powerless to seduce in the presence of Binet’s lathe
(his tour).
After his initial characterization at the beginning of Part II, Binet ap-
pears prominently in two episodes of the novel. The first occurs in the
country. Walking to meet Rodolphe, Emma comes across Binet while he is
illegally hunting. Both are surprised in a moment of transgression, in a
peccadillo that contradicts the law-abiding personae they adopt in public.
Later when Binet drops by the pharmacy, Emma trembles lest he expose
her sin. His function in this chapter is to introduce the possibility that her
adultery might be revealed. The second episode in which Binet appears
takes place in town. Having rejected the advances of the banker,
Lestiboudois, Emma visits Binet in his garret, where he is blissfully
working at his lathe. The episode is viewed from the perspective of two
gossiping neighbors, who are shocked to observe Emma grasping Binet’s
hands, her breast heaving: “[S]he must have been suggesting something
abominable, for the tax collector—and he was a man of courage: he had
fought at Bautzen and Lützen, and taken part in the French campaign, and
even been proposed for the Legion of Honor—suddenly recoiled as
though he had seen a snake” (361). Binet has the potential to be a savior
figure but refuses to accept the role. Whereas the episode in the country is
one of mutual transgression, in this more public encounter in town, Binet
reassumes his law-abiding, military persona and reacts with horror at the
unbridled female sexuality before him.
These two sides of Binet’s personality—the public façade and the
private deviation—are drawn out in Eça’s reworking of the figure of
the bachelor in O primo Basílio. Sebastião, Jorge’s best friend, is like Binet
an introverted single man who leads a quiet, orderly, and very private life.
At the end of the novel, however, he is more willing than Flaubert’s bach-
elor to come to the heroine’s rescue. His role is anticipated in Luísa’s night-
mare in which her husband, discovering her affair, stabs her in the chest.
As she falls, she is cradled by an “an archaic oak tree of heroic arrogance,
the trunk of which had a vague outline of a face and looked like Sebastião”
(222). The Sebastião-oak saves her by nursing her through its roots:
“[T]hen, as the earth was hard, the tree extended beneath her its roots,
downy like pillows of feathers, and as the sun was biting her, the tree
folded its branches over her, like the drapings of a tent; and from its leaves,
it let drip onto her lips drops of Madeira wine” (223). Sebastião aids Luísa
not only in dream but also in real life: at the end of the novel, he helps her
to avoid her husband’s vengeance. Though his intentions are good, how-
ever, his method is weak. As we saw in Chapter 2, he offers expedients
rather than principles—he covers Luísa’s sins but is unable to avert them
in the first place. As a result, he is unable to save her fully, to stave off the
illness that ends her life.
As in Madame Bovary, the bachelor’s failure to save the heroine is related
to the peculiarity of his personality and passions. Binet’s solitary obsession,
his rapt involvement in the indifferentiating lathe, makes him indifferent
to Emma’s pleas and erotic appeal. Similarly, Sebastião’s inability to save
Luísa is linked to the nature of his desire, for just as he hides his own
homoerotic inclinations, he can help Luísa only by putting her affair back
in the closet. Like Binet, Sebastião is concerned with the public display of
honor. What worries him is not the sin but the gossip it provokes. Just as
Binet partakes in military processions and presents himself as an upright
citizen, Sebastião saves Luísa by creating an illusion of legality. When he
confronts Juliana about her blackmail, he brings with him an off-duty
GRAFTINGS 207
policeman to scare her into compliance. As with Binet, however, this pub-
lic display of lawfulness is a façade that hides transgressive inclinations: just
as Binet secretly poaches, Sebastião has forbidden desires. His character is
more sympathetic and human than Binet’s (Eça models him after the love-
able revolutionary Dussardier), but though he recognizes social injustice,
he is, like Flaubert’s bachelor, unwilling and unable to fly in the face of con-
vention. Sebastião looks for a solution but seeks it only within the system.
Although Frígilis in La Regenta does not share this conformism, he is
in other respects very like Sebastião and Binet. He resembles them both
in his function as a savior figure (he nurses Ana back to health at the end
of the novel) and in his aberrant nature. Frígilis’s deviations are particu-
larly similar to those of Flaubert’s bachelor. Like Binet, Frígilis partici-
pates in a hunting that is forbidden. Ana does not allow her husband to
hunt before dawn, but he and his friend have developed a system whereby
Frígilis discreetly beckons Víctor to their early-morning expeditions.
Binet’s poaching is associated in Madame Bovary with both the heroine’s
adultery and the possibility of its revelation. Similarly, Frígilis and Víctor’s
hunting at once mirrors Ana’s transgressions and is part of the mechanism
by which they are discovered. Just as Víctor deceives his wife in his rela-
tionship with Frígilis, so Ana has secret trysts with Álvaro that involve
early-morning escapes. At the end of the novel, Petra sets Víctor’s alarm
clock back several hours so that he will witness Álvaro exiting from Ana’s
window. The bachelor’s hunting thus has a similar double function in
each novel, at once mirroring and revealing the heroine’s transgression.
Frígilis resembles Binet not only in these secret outings but also in his
favorite hobby. Just as Binet makes indescribable and useless objects on
his lathe, Frígilis grafts species of trees and animals to produce ridiculous
and unnecessary creatures.
The portrayal of Frígilis also draws upon that of Sebastião in O primo
Basílio. Frígilis’s hunting parallels Ana’s transgression not simply in that
Víctor disobeys his wife but also in that one senses that he is unfaithful
to her with his friend: he himself is “not sure that he didn’t love [Frillity]
as much as his darling Ana” (404). When Ana longs for a child, Víctor
can muster paternal enthusiasm only by thinking about “his decoy-
partridge, a choice present which Frillity had given him” (73). Víctor’s
relationship with Frígilis is framed as an infidelity to his wife. Just as
Luísa’s marriage with Jorge competes with Sebastião’s ambiguous friend-
ship with him, so Ana’s hold over Víctor is rivaled by Frígilis’s. As in O
primo Basílio, La Regenta hints at the homoerotic nature of the two
men’s bond. Frígilis and Víctor are twice referred to as Pylades and
Orestes, mythological hunters whose friendship was often eroticized in
literature of the period (Machado de Assis’s 1903 short story “Pilades
e Orestes” is a classic example). Frígilis’s love of grafting, moreover,

might be read as a metaphor for his desire, a longing to join what is not
brought together by nature.21
Frígilis resembles Sebastião not only in his ambiguous friendship with
the cuckold but also in his attempt to protect the heroine. Unlike Binet,
Frígilis and Sebastião are both good-natured and eager to guard their
friends’ honor. Sebastião, to whose care Jorge has entrusted his wife, seeks
to protect her from gossip, and after she falls, it is the Sebastião-oak that
will nurse her through its roots. Similarly, it is Víctor who realizes the pre-
cariousness of Ana’s situation and continues “watching over Don Víctor’s
trees and over his honour” (488). Like Sebastião, moreover, he is identified
in the text with a protective oak: Frígilis’s life is “like that of an intelligent
tree, and [Ana] leaned on him and almost rested her whole weight on him
as if he were indeed some venerable oak” (438). Later in the novel, Víctor
too longs for Frígilis’s natural, tree-like tranquility; he feels “an intense de-
sire to grow roots and branches and be covered with moss like one of those
age-old oaks which he could see crowning the peaks of Mount Areo”
(676). Just as the Sebastião-oak cures Luísa through its roots, Frígilis
remarks of Ana that “Health must enter a tree through its roots” (117).
Both Sebastião and Frígilis offer an arboreal peace at the end of the novel.
Clarín’s bachelor, however, differs from Eça’s in a number of ways. As
we have seen, the ideal union in O primo Basílio is that of the strong and
decisive Jorge with the passive Luísa. The trouble in the novel starts only
after they are separated. In this scenario, Sebastião is a weak substitute, un-
able to rein in the heroine. In normal circumstances, he has no place in the
Mendonças’ relationship: when the marriage is arranged, the “Jorge-
Sebastião society” dissolves, and Sebastião no longer visits his friend as
frequently. In La Regenta, in contrast, it is not the bachelor but the wife,
Ana, who is left out. Ana does not replace Frígilis but is rather a gift from
him to his friend Víctor (the marriage is Crespo’s idea). She does not dis-
rupt the homosocial relationship but is rather a mechanism or third
through which the two men’s affection is cemented. The ideal relationship
in the novel is not hers with Víctor but rather his with Frígilis. When
Mesía enters their lives, he is as much a threat to the friendship as he is to
the marriage: “Mesía was a kind of emerging rival to Frillity” (433). It is
Víctor’s infidelity to Frígilis with Mesía that gives the seducer access to the
Ozores Palace and precipitates Ana’s adultery. After Víctor’s death, more-
over, it is Frígilis rather than Ana who signs the forms for her widow’s pen-
sion. This detail suggests that Frígilis is the truly bereaved spouse in the
novel. It is the two men’s relationship that is to be mourned. Theirs is the
ideal union that is tragically destroyed. Unlike in O primo Basílio, where
Sebastião’s desire, unreciprocated and concealed, reflects his role in putting
GRAFTINGS 209
Luísa’s affair back in the closet, the homosocial bond in La Regenta is as-
signed a weight equal to and in certain ways greater than that of the mar-
riage. Frígilis in his ambiguous friendship with Víctor actually displaces
Ana and stands as a figure not of weakness and lack of conviction but
rather of tolerance and compassion for frailty.
Eça’s bachelor is an urban sophisticate: his home is a rarefied aesthetic
space, and his passion is playing the piano. When Jorge sets up his new
house, his friend has complete jurisdiction over matters of taste.
Sebastião lives in the city and stands for civilization. Frígilis, in contrast,
cannot stand society or life indoors. His home is nature: in his early-
morning expeditions, his personality gradually opens up as the train nears
the countryside. Whereas Eça has drawn out the conformist, town side of
Flaubert’s bachelor (the obsession with regularity and appearances),
Clarín isolates Binet’s country persona, his transgressive hunting, as well
as his pleasure in an odd type of creation. Because he occupies a space
outside the law and social convention, Frígilis rises above the weakness
and conformism of Sebastião. Sebastião seeks a resolution within the sys-
tem: he creates a simulacrum of the law by bringing the off-duty officer
to threaten Juliana. In contrast, the comfort and closure Frígilis offers at
the end of La Regenta are those of nature. He allows Ana simply “to veg-
etate by [his] side, watching him sow seeds and plant seedlings in the
garden and listening to his apologies for the eucalyptus” (712).
When O primo Basílio was published, critics ridiculed the arbitrariness
of its plot and particularly its dénouement. Machado de Assis regarded
Sebastião’s last-minute intervention as a deus ex machina, closure im-
posed by the author rather than the logic of the novel. In La Regenta,
Clarín avoids this sort of textual supplement. Unlike Juliana’s, Petra’s plot
is not halted midcourse. Its logic is inexorable and governs the conclusion
of the novel with frightening precision. In a sense, La Regenta too must
look outside itself for closure; it introduces an exterior force to resolve the
tensions it has unleashed. These forces, however, are exterior not to its
plot or narrative logic but rather to the social world it defines. Eça con-
cludes his novel by departing from the textual logic, but this artificial
intervention works from within the social system, through the corruption
of the police force. Clarín’s novel, in contrast, follows the logic of its plot
to its utmost consequences and offers instead a solution and solace that
lie outside Vetustan society.
This divergence in the way the novels achieve closure reflects the differ-
ence in the commentaries they make. Eça stops Juliana’s social revolution
through textual sabotage, a solution impossible in Vetusta. Sebastião’s per-
formance of authority, his manipulation of the signs of power, would have
no force in a world in which representation has broken down and language
has lost its meaning. In La Regenta, the solution does not lie in textual,
fictional, or ideological strategies. As we have seen in Clarín’s reworking of
Julião-Sebastião and the sequence of Eça’s novel, the emptiness of ideolog-
ical discourse is not the solution but the problem with Vetustan and
Spanish society. The chattering of Sebastião, Julião, and Acácio, their
indifferent and indifferentiated words, are effective in drowning out the
threat of a Juliana. In La Regenta, however, it is this discursive vacuum that
allows a Petra to emerge. The solution lies not in words but in nature.
This solution is represented symbolically in Frígilis’s grafting, which,
as we have seen, closely resembles Binet’s lathe. In nineteenth-century
literature, the bachelor often has a metatextual function.22 For example,
the circling of Binet’s lathe and the meaningless objects he endlessly
produces are a representation within the text of Flaubert’s modernism,
of the ambiguous outpouring of empty clichés that constitutes his writ-
ing. Frígilis’s grafting may also be regarded as a mirror of the novel
within the novel. Many critics, indeed, have interpreted Frígilis as
Clarín’s response to French naturalism. A fervent Darwinist, Frígilis
is fascinated by the relation between the individual and his environ-
ment. I would argue, however, that he is also Clarín’s answer to
Flaubert’s technique, which is explored in La Regenta through Ana and
Fermín’s project. As we saw in Chapter 4, Flaubert makes his critique by
adopting the discourse he is criticizing. His dissent is expressed through
an apparent sameness, which creates an ambiguity in the text. In La
Regenta, Fermín’s project for Ana and her experience in reading resem-
ble this practice. Like Flaubert’s narrator, Ana tries to be different by
being the same. Her originality lies in her cursilería, in her repetition of
religious models. Her project contrasts with the writing machine, with
the Vetustans’ tendency to project “subtle distinctions” upon entities
that are ultimately identical. Whereas Ana in her defiance produces a
confusion or sameness that is a form of dissent, the writing machine is
an indifferentiation that defuses criticism and drains political terms of
their edge and meaning. As we have seen, the difference between
Flaubert’s and Ana’s projects is that the narrator of Madame Bovary co-
incides with the writing machine (the writing machine is turned against
itself ), whereas Ana’s project resists and is opposed to it. Frígilis’s graft-
ing differs from both of these models. Whereas the writing machine
projects difference—flattering nuances—upon what is fundamentally
the same, and Fermín’s project creates eerie simulacra—a disturbing
similarity between what is actually different—in Frígilis’s grafting, dif-
ference is maintained within the assertion of identity. The plant is
always a single specimen but is composed of multiple species. His
experiments explore the coexistence of distinct beings.
GRAFTINGS 211
To put it in rhetorical terms, we might say that these three possibili-

ties—Ana’s project with Fermín, the writing machine, and Frígilis’s graft-
ing—correspond to three different tropes: metaphor, syllepsis, and
metonymy, respectively. Under Fermín’s direction, Ana seeks to become
a metaphor. During the Nazarene procession, she attempts to symbolize
with her body the values of solidarity and compassion, to construct a
similarity between herself and the Virgin behind whom she walks. If she
is successful, she will not merely represent but actually embody these
ideals; she will make the spirit of the scene live in herself. The story she
is enacting, that of the Incarnation, is ultimately the triumph of
metaphoricity. As Susan Handelman has observed, Christianity “cen-
ter[s] around substitutive sacrifice . . . It was . . . necessary that Jesus
share the substance of both the divine and the human, that he literally
be incarnated into the sinful flesh, in order to cancel it entirely—as in
the cancellation of the figurative term by its proper meaning. Thus Paul’s
claim that Jesus is the end of the law, a law that is fulfilled in its
destruction” (91). Just as in metaphor the literal (figurative) meaning is
subsumed by the spiritual (proper) meaning, the body of Christ is can-
celled by the spirit of God. Ana, however, is unable to lose sight of the
figural; she does not allow herself to be subsumed by the spirit that goes
beyond the bodily phrase.
After the Nazarene procession, she turns from Fermín to Álvaro, from
representation to its breakdown. In rhetorical terms, this is a movement
from metaphor to syllepsis. As Michael Riffaterre defines it, syllepsis is a
“trope that consists in understanding the same word in two different ways
at the same time.” The first way is according to the contextual meaning of
the word, the meaning “demanded by the word’s grammatical collocations,
by the word’s reference to other words in the text” (“Syllepsis” 637). The
other is according to the “intertextual meaning,” which is “another mean-
ing the word may possibly have, one of its dictionary meanings and/or one
actualized within an intertext” (638). An example of this in La Regenta is
the marchioness’s pun, in which the contextual meaning of sans-culotte
(“pantless” or effeminate) is at odds with its meaning in the context of
French political discourse, to which the text alludes (“revolutionary”).23
The relation between a word and its meaning is complicated by interfer-
ence from another concept. In syllepsis, the vehicle of a given tenor is in a
sense hijacked and rerouted, pushed in a different semantic direction.
Álvaro’s function in the novel is similar to this trope: he is a master at
inserting his own meaning into the gap between the signifier and the
signified. The result is a dissolution of representation: meaning breaks
down as it is submitted to the dispersion of intertextuality, to the circular-
ity of the writing machine.
In contrast to the two rivals, Frígilis’s grafting does not point to or

pretend to point to anything other than itself. The two species grafted
together coexist and live side by side. The solace he offers Ana at the end
of the novel is to allow her to vegetate beside the plants he tends: it is the
consolation of contiguity. Frígilis answers the metaphors and co-opted
metaphors (syllepses) of the main plot with metonymy. Whereas Ana,
under Fermín’s guidance, becomes a metaphorical flowering tree, Frígilis
literally tends to Ana by placing her beside his trees. The tree is not the
vehicle for the tenor that is Ana, but rather the trees and Ana stand side by
side; Frígilis converts metaphor into metonymy.
This metonymy is not only the answer of the text but also a figuration
of it. Metonymy is, after all, the fundamental trope of naturalism, which
studies contiguities, the relation between the individual and his or her sur-
roundings. Clarín’s portrayal of Frígilis is part of a complex commentary
on naturalism that involves a number of characters throughout the novel:
Doña Camila, Fermín, and Ana, among others. As we saw in the last
Chapter, Clarín juxtaposes two versions of naturalism in the treatment of
Ana’s childhood: the positive vision of Ana culling from nature to compose
a poem in her head before she learns to read and her governess’s more neg-
ative view of Ana as a rotten flower, contaminated by her mother’s blood.
In the former, Ana is an active creator. In the latter, she is the passive
victim of Camila’s pedagogical experimentation, of the stake and the
greenhouse to which she is confined. Fermín’s vision of Vetusta at the be-
ginning of the novel is, to a certain extent, a continuation of this form of
naturalism: he observes the city “like a naturalist studying a tiny section of
an organism under a powerful microscope,” each part (each person or
faction) subordinated to the greater logic of the whole. Like Camila’s,
Fermín’s naturalism assigns a passive role to the individual. As Lukács has
argued about Zola, it is a vision that reduces social tensions, the drama of
class struggle, to a pathological logic. The individual is subsumed within
the physiological workings of the system. Frígilis, in many ways, is a cor-
rective to this vision and returns to the active and aggregative naturalism
of Ana’s childhood poetry. Whereas Fermín reduces society, many individ-
uals, to an organism, a single body, whose workings govern them and all
of their interrelationships, Frígilis imagines an organism that consists of
many bodies and whose composite being is determined by their attempts
to adapt to one another.24 He avoids the determinism of Zolaesque natu-
ralism by emphasizing the more active concept of adaptation as well as
ideals of tolerance and coexistence.
Frígilis’s alternative is not only a social ideal—a revision of naturalist
doctrine—but also a metatextual illustration of the neutral space Clarín
inserts between representation and its breakdown or distortion, a space in
GRAFTINGS 213
which contradictory social discourses can be observed side by side.25 In his

metatextual function, Clarín’s bachelor differs from Flaubert’s. Though
Frígilis’s grafting might resembles Binet’s hobby in the arbitrariness of its
creation, what it produces is not the whirring that blurs meaning in
Flaubert’s text. In Madame Bovary, the same cliché can be read in different
ways depending on one’s perspective. With Frígilis, in contrast, the differ-
ent possibilities are not projected by the reader but rather coexist and stand
side by side in the grafting. The struggle over meaning is enacted in the
text itself and not merely in the reader’s mind. Frígilis is a figure for Clarín’s
own narrator, for the neutral ground that allows the struggle between rep-
resentation and its corruption to be acted out.
Epilogue
Studies of the drafts of Madame Bovary show that Flaubert carefully elimi-
nated dates or references to events that would place his story within history.
His characters, indeed, have been described as “singularly lacking in ‘sens
historique’” (Green 289). As is well known, Flaubert longed to write a livre
sur rien, “a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held to-
gether by the strength of its style” (cited in LaCapra 76). In light of this,
therefore, it might seem surprising that Madame Bovary should have
the catalyst for the social and historical reflections examined in these pages.
We might ask ourselves: Why Emma? What drew these Iberian novelists to
Flaubert’s text and prompted them to read and rewrite it historically?
The criticism of Madame Bovary has, for the most part, skirted the ques-
tion of its relation to history. Flaubert’s deliberate erasure of the past has led
many critics to privilege text over context, to fixate on the verbal play and
rhetorical feats that made him the hero of literary movements from aes-
theticism to deconstruction. Notably, the boom in Flaubert scholarship co-
incided with the heyday of poststructuralism for which his novel was a
defining example of “intertextuality.” For many critics, Flaubert seemed to
efface himself and his historical moment through the vagueness and imper-
sonality of his citations, unattributed borrowings that were “anonymous, un-
traceable and nevertheless already read” (Barthes, Image 160). The result was
a tendency to view his work in epochal rather than historical terms:
Flaubert as the hero of modernity, modernism, or postmodernism rather
than Flaubert, scribe of the Second Empire. As early as 1922, Albert
Thibaudet observed how in discussions of fiction Madame Bovary
“recur[red] invincibly in support of all theories,” of whatever was the liter-
ary fad at the moment (cited in LaCapra 150). To a large degree, this re-
mains true. Our tendency is to read Flaubert’s novel as the dawn of the
world we know rather than as a response to the one he knew.
Interpretations of Madame Bovary have generally regarded the novel as ei-
ther transparent or opaque, as a mirror of the world or as a textual web—in
Barthes’s phrase, a “play of codes” (S/Z 140)—that obscures it. In both
schools, we may find critics who have sought to read the novel historically.
This is perhaps clearest in the transparent readings. Disregarding Flaubert’s re-

jection of Champfleury and realism, many early critics attempted to situate
his work within the larger tradition of the nineteenth-century novel and its
quest for an objective representation of reality. Readers adopting this
approach draw our attention to the verisimilitude of description in the novel
and in their more partisan variants decry the “capitalist exploitation practiced
by money-lender, notary and tax-collector” (i.e., Lheureux, Guillaumin, and
Binet) (Ahearn 80). Such historical observations, however, are predicated on
an unsophisticated form of reflectionism, on the blunt equation of base and
superstructure that is associated with “vulgar Marxism.” At the same time,
this approach overlooks precisely those textual features that most draw read-
ers (including our Iberian novelists) to Flaubert’s work.
The opposite tendency, opaque interpretation, emerged in the wake of
Sartre’s study, L’idiot de la famille (1971–1972) that focused on Flaubert’s
cult of art for art’s sake. Critics such as Barthes, Culler, Chambers,
Riffaterre, and Tanner examined textual practices such as Flaubert’s use of
free indirect discourse, his blurring of difference and signification, and his
obsessive quotation of the clichés and stupidity (bêtise) of his contempo-
raries. In general, this tendency to regard the novel as opaque militated
against historicizing approaches. Even in this school, however, some critics
have raised (at least in passing) the question of the relation between text
and context. They approach the problem in two different ways: either by
trying to locate the context within the text or by attempting to show how
the context generated or necessitated the textual practices to which
Flaubert resorted. To put it another way, they establish a relation of either
identification (equating context with text) or causality (context as the
cause of textual features).
The first approach is exemplified by Michael Riffaterre’s essay
“Relevance of Theory/Theory of Relevance,” which argues that the entire
plot of Flaubert’s novel unfolds from a single word, adulteress, which in
the nineteenth century entailed a host of cultural biases and presupposi-
tions. In this reading, the historical context is implicit in the words that
compose the text, in its sociolect, and consequently, “no written historical
evidence is needed” to understand the relation of the novel to its time and
world (173). As Barbara Johnson has objected, however, this attempt to
locate the context within the text is ultimately “a defense against history as
exteriority” (177). It reduces history—the real struggles of peoples
and classes—to the mere play of language. Like Riffaterre, Lawrence
Rothfield in his “From Semiotic to Discursive Intertextuality” attempts to
locate the historicity of Madame Bovary in its intertextualities by examin-
ing medical treatises of the period that shed light on the representation of
Charles Bovary and the doctors in the work. Although Rothfield is more
EPILOGUE 217
willing than Riffaterre to consider history as “exterior” to the text, both

critics locate the novel’s historicity in its reflection of the language of its
moment. On the surface, their approach seems to depart from the realist
(or transparent) reading of Flaubert by presenting his work as a textual
web, a tissue of discourses. The metaphor that underlies both critics’ ap-
proaches, however, is ultimately that of the mirror. The only difference
from the “transparent” school is that what is now being reflected is not re-
ality but language. The passivity implicit in the notion of intertextuality
obscures the way the text works upon, filters, or distorts the discourses to-
ward which it gestures. The argument in this type of reading is ultimately
tautological: the clichés of nineteenth-century France appear in Flaubert’s
work; his work is therefore typically nineteenth-century French.
The other approach to understanding the relation between Flaubert’s
opaque textuality and its historical context is to explore the conditions of
possibility of his style, the social situation that caused him to adopt it.
Many critics have understood Flaubert’s style as a strategy for subverting
the limiting world in which he wrote. Jonathan Culler, for example, traces
how Flaubert gradually abandoned worn-out romantic postures (the con-
fessional or prophetic stance) and adopted instead an impersonal, ironic
style that destabilized the most fundamental conventions of novelistic
form (the notion of representation or transparency, the idea of a narrator
who communicates to the reader, the psychological verisimilitude of char-
acters). Unable to assume the grand gestures of a Chateaubriand or a
Hugo, the doctor’s son in Rouen could only become a “knight of noth-
ingness,” a debunker of meaning. By interpreting the collapse of represen-
tation as a symptom of the breakdown of bourgeois society, Tony Tanner
similarly reads Flaubert’s critique of meaning as subversive. Like
Riffaterre’s and Rothfield’s, however, Tanner’s argument ultimately falls
into reflectionism: whereas the former trace how the text mirrors
the discourses of the moment, Tanner believes that the text’s unraveling of
discourses mirrors the dissolution of conventions in society at large.
Others locate Flaubert’s commentary not in an attack on meaning but
rather in a duplicity of meaning. As Ross Chambers has argued, writers of
the Second Empire, unable to make their critique directly because of the
rigorous censorship of Louis-Napoléon’s regime, began to develop forms of
textual subterfuge—a series of literary techniques that we now identify
with modernism. Through ambiguity and free indirect speech, Flaubert
created a duplicitous style that could be read in several ways, from
Flaubert’s perspective or Emma’s, as satire or identification. The opacity of
Flaubert’s style allowed him to deliver his critique obliquely. Like
Chambers, Dominick LaCapra and Richard Terdiman attribute a critical
and demystifying function to Flaubert’s use of free indirect speech and his
practice of citation. For them, however, these strategies are informed less
by the political necessity of the Second Empire than by an ideological im-
passe in Flaubert’s thought, an inability to imagine positive alternatives
(LaCapra 140; Terdiman 29). For these critics, Flaubert’s style is not (as in
Tanner) subversively meaningless or (as in Chambers) duplicitously un-
dermining but rather indecisive, offering destructive but not constructive
criticism.
At the other end of the spectrum are those critics who read Flaubert’s
opaque style as reactionary or complicit. The most salient example here is
Sartre, who traced Flaubert’s obsession with bêtise and clichés to his experi-
ence growing up as the “family idiot,” a child from whom nothing was ex-
pected and who never developed a capacity to act. The result in his writing
was a tendency to isolate words and expressions from the human projects
that gave them significance. Sartre criticized Flaubert for his failure to em-
brace action, to define a meaningful ideological project that would work to
change his society. Flaubert’s works were devastating, but their attacks were
directed toward humanity in general rather than toward bourgeois ideology.
By taking down humankind instead of its erring individuals or groups,
Flaubert thwarted any hope of change—as no one escaped his critique,
there was no one who could overcome it. As a result, his work in the end
played into the hands of the middle class. LaCapra has observed that Sartre’s
Flaubert provided “what the bourgeoisie after 1848 really wanted: an ideol-
ogy of antihuman hatred masquerading as realism” (86). Though critical in
force, Flaubert’s stylistic opacity was reactionary in effect.1
Sartre supported this political conclusion by underscoring Flaubert’s ob-
session with clichés, with the bêtise of human speech. His reading is predi-
cated upon an understanding of the bête as a “sentence so mechanically rigid
as to exclude any living relation to a situation, to truth, or quite simply to
preceding sentences” (I, 598). For him, the stupidity of a phrase is recog-
nizable when it is isolated and decontextualized, cited in a vacuum as in the
entries of Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues. This conception of bêtise
influenced both Roland Barthes’s and Jonathan Culler’s writings on
Flaubert—stupidity is, for the latter, “language lifted away from the world”
(166), “a signifiant with an absent signifié” (176). Culler’s study takes this
notion of decontextualization a step further. He represents stupidity not
only as a property of language but also as a form of reception: “Stupidity is
a mode of perception which makes things stupid. Take anything, a sen-
tence, an activity, and isolate it, cut it off from the human intentions and
goals that might give it meaning, treat it, in short, as an object, and it will
become stupid” (178–179). Bêtise, here, lies in the eye of the beholder and
becomes, for Culler’s Flaubert, even “a positive quality” (179), a form of
aesthetic reception or reverie that “[contemplates] the object under another
EPILOGUE 219
aspect, denying or failing to reach the purpose which would integrate it”
(174). All of these readings ultimately depend on the same presupposition:
the existence of regular (non-stupid) language that is reflective, meaning-
fully tied to the world whose truth it expresses. They locate stupidity not in
the speaker or the circumstances in which he speaks but in the sentence it-
self and its relation (or lack of relation) to the truth or in the recipient and
his closure to the truth that is communicated.
To call a phrase stupid, however, is ultimately to transfer an attribute
of the speaker to his words. In an incisive essay, Gaillard has argued that
bêtise is not so much a matter of content as of context. Stupidity lies not
in the relation between words and reality but in the speaker and the con-
ditions in which he speaks. Her main example is the expression bras de fer
(iron arm), which appears in Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues, iso-
lated from any explanatory context or lived situation. In his novels, how-
ever, this expression always appears in specific circumstances, expressing
the self-interest of bourgeois characters after the outbreak of the
Revolution of 1848, their longing for an authoritarian government that
would restore order and reaffirm class hierarchies. Not only does the cliché
emerge from a concrete context, it also has a very real effect on it: the cho-
rus of voices calling for a bras de fer created the desire for a figure such as
Louis-Napoléon, who would restore order through the use of force. By
recontextualizing the cliché in relations of cause (class interest) and effect
(political outcome), Gaillard moves away from the notion of bêtise as
“language which has attained the ultimate degree of extenuation due to
repetition” (87) and emphasizes instead the collective significance and
ideological impact of these words: it is a matter “of convergence, and not of
repetition . . . ; of stereophony rather than of stereotype . . . the musical
metaphor that fits best is that of unison” (95). What is important here is
not (as in Sartre, Barthes, or Culler) the way words loosen themselves from
reality but rather the way they come to dominate it.
Gaillard’s reading inverts a common argument about Flaubert’s project.
For a critic such as Richard Terdiman, it is by suppressing the individual
speaker and attributing a phrase to the community at large that Flaubert
identifies it as a commonplace and deflates it. For Gaillard, in contrast, it
is only by avoiding a wide attribution and by recovering the context of
enunciation—the specific voice and concrete interests that inform such
speech—that we may recognize bêtise as ideology. Like the readings she
contests, however, Gaillard’s analysis does not open a space for a more con-
structive commentary. Stupidity, as she redefines it, is ideology in the most
negative sense of the word: a joining of voices with similar interests around
a common distorted idea. Although Gaillard recognizes Flaubert’s concrete
historical critique more successfully than other students of his clichés—she
realizes that the writing machine is not merely idiocy or language gone
awry but ideology—her reading does not identify an alternative.
It is here perhaps that we may take a lesson from Clarín. In Chapter 3,
we saw how the writing machine in La Regenta is associated with a
Bonapartist adventurer, Álvaro Mesía. Like the cliché in Gaillard, Álvaro
becomes a sign upon which various meanings are projected. And just as the
cliché, when widely attributed, appears meaningless rather than ideological,
the promiscuity of Álvaro’s sign, his erotic and semantic availability,
distracts us from its political function. Unlike Gaillard’s Flaubert, however,
Clarín imagines a “unison,” a chorus of clichés, that is not a product of the
writing machine. Under Fermín de Pas’s guidance, Ana Ozores, like
Flaubert, consciously cultivates the commonplaces of religion. In the Stabat
Mater scene, she joins her voice with the people’s, chants devotional words
that have been repeated for centuries, and feels inspired to rise above
Vetustan mediocrity. Whereas Flaubert’s merging of his own voice with the
Yonvillais’ incorporates him into the tour, however, Ana’s acceptance of
commonplaces, the unison in which she speaks the clichés of Catholicism,
allows her to rise above the writing machine, to transcend the indifferenti-
ated discourse of the Vetustans. In La Regenta, the chorus of commonplaces
is the space not of ideology (in the sense of mystifying and distorting rhet-
oric) but of a utopian project.
La Regenta offers a clue for rereading Madame Bovary, for recovering its
utopian vision from Flaubert’s destructive verbal play. As we saw in
Chapter 4, what opposes the writing machine in the French novel is the
heroine’s desire: Emma and Léon must flee the verger’s tour to realize their
erotic longings. In La Regenta, in contrast, what resists the writing machine
is a collective meaning that is associated with Ana’s revolutionary project
and her identificatory reading. Clarín, thus, situates the historical com-
mentary of his novel (its reimagining of society) in precisely the position
occupied by Emma’s desire in Madame Bovary. By converting Emma’s eros
into Ana’s utopian project, he deciphers the former into political terms and
identifies it as the site of the utopian in Flaubert’s novel. To recover the his-
torical vision of Madame Bovary, we must recover Emma’s desire; we must
save her eros from the erosion of Flaubert’s language.2
As we saw in Chapter 4, Flaubert’s strategy is to turn the writing
machine against itself. The provincials’ clichés are neither bracketed with
quotation marks nor deflated by a narrator, a voice exterior and immune to
such stupidity. Rather, the commonplaces merge seamlessly with the rest
of the text, and their absurdity becomes clear indirectly through sheer
accumulation (Flaubert’s notorious lists) or ridiculous juxtapositions. This
strategy opens the text to two different readings: the naïve and the com-
plicit. We can take Emma’s utterances either as the expression of genuine
EPILOGUE 221
longings or as a disingenuous parroting of circulating discourses. To read

them either way, however, is dangerous. If we take her meaning too seri-
ously, we too fall prey to Flaubert’s derision. But not to recognize Emma’s
perspective is also a mistake. As Ross Chambers has observed, if we
acknowledge only the parodic force of the text, we are no different from the
indifferent Rodolphe, who is himself an object of ridicule. For Chambers,
it is necessary to develop a “different type of irony . . . —one that fosters
the recognition of a certain textual sincerity and simplicity,” a reading that
acknowledges what he calls a “demand for love” (179).3
To read with Emma, however, it is not enough simply to take her seri-
ously when she utters a cliché. In Chapter 4, we distinguished between
Emma’s identification through reading and Flaubert’s identification
through writing, his famous Madame Bovary, c’est moi. Flaubert identifies
himself with Emma by subordinating his voice to hers, by speaking through
her language, and refrains from commenting on it from the outside. In so
doing, he explores a basic problem of language use: to communicate with
one another we must resort to common signs and conventions, to a lan-
guage that belongs to others and that in its commonality and repetition can
seem ungenuine or inadequate for conveying unique personal experiences.
As Flaubert famously put it, “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on
which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make
music that will melt the stars” (224). To identify with Emma in this way, as
Flaubert does in his writing, is to attribute emptiness to her language rather
than to her. It is an identification that rehumanizes Emma—it recovers her
as a character from readings that would construe her as little more than a
composite of discourses. The difficulty with this reading, however, is that it
universalizes her condition. To locate the vacuity in language rather than in
the person is merely to recognize the insufficiency of words in general for
human expression: the allegorical image of bears dancing to a cracked ket-
tle suggests the timelessness of this predicament. Although the complicit or
ironic reading drowns all meaning or character in universal bêtise, the naïve
or identificatory reading reduces Emma’s meaning to universal human frus-
trations. It fails to acknowledge the historical specificity of this predica-
ment; it is an attack on language rather than on the society that produced
it. To take the clichés at face value, to project life onto the writing machine,
is to recognize the universality of Emma’s failure rather than the particular-
ity of her attempt and her desire.
The key to the heroine’s desire is rather her identification through reading,
the influences that inform her vision. This aspect of the text has often been
neglected in Flaubert criticism, which has generally privileged intertextuality
over influence. For many contemporary interpreters, Flaubert’s interlocutors
are not literary predecessors so much as anonymous voices—commonplaces
of his age, phrases belonging to everyone and to no one in particular. His self-
avowed linguistic slumming—his willingness to have commerce with the
most inane clichés—has been taken so seriously that many readings have lost
sight of the clear fascination in Madame Bovary with the idea of influence as
an intersubjective encounter. While Flaubert is floating among the vacuous
clichés of his time, his heroine allows herself to be influenced by very specific
voices—the writers whom she reads and whose characters she imitates. Emma
has engaged the classics of romanticism (Chateaubriand, Scott, etc.) and im-
bibed their spirit, their authors’ longing to rise above the language of others.
Unlike her creator, she arduously seeks to distinguish her voice and feelings
and would be horrified by Rodolphe’s dismissal of her language as derivative.
Unwittingly, Emma speaks through romantic clichés, but in taking them up
she seeks to express her own meaning and to change her world. She is not pas-
sively absorbing and regurgitating but rather actively applying the literature
that influences her in order to realize an ideal vision. To recover Emma’s
desire and the utopian vision it encodes, one must move away from the de-
contextualization of the writing machine and toward a notion of influence, a
more meaningful form of repetition.
The first chapters of La Regenta suggest the importance of a new con-
cept of repetition for escaping the forces of the writing machine. What is
opposed to the mystification and indifferentiation of the tour in Clarín is
not newness or originality but the meaningful copy. The hidalgo’s prudent
and principled wife dismisses the empty Cenceño painting, an original
upon which Saturnino Bermúdez projects interpretations, and admires in-
stead a reproduction of Murillo’s St. John of God. Although the latter is so
widely known that it has become a commonplace, the copy in the cathedral
admirably transmits the spirit not only of the original but also of its subject,
the grief of St. John. Saturnino’s response to the Cenceño approaches
Sartre’s idea of bêtise: Bermúdez divorces the artwork from the human in-
tentions that inform it and contemplates it as an object, a catalyst of empty
reverie. The hidalgo’s wife, in contrast, allows herself to be influenced by the
Murillo, to listen to what the copy says. What Clarín introduces into
Flaubert’s scene is the possibility of a repetition that does not erode mean-
ing (as do clichés) but rather conveys it from one subject to another. It is
this idea that governs Ana’s project later in the novel. Allowing herself to be
influenced by texts, Ana attempts to inscribe herself within meaningful
conventions: in becoming a Nazarene, she seeks to communicate the spirit
of the story that originated this tradition. The opening scene of La Regenta
moves away from the empty repetitions of Saturnino Bermúdez and toward
the idea of a convention or repetition that carries a message.
To put it another way, Clarín turns away from the Flaubertian cliché—
the inescapable contortions of the writing machine—and toward a notion
EPILOGUE 223
of genre. Clichés and genres are both forms of repetition, verbal conven-
tions reiterated so often that they are easily recognized. This constant use,
however, produces a different effect in each case. In the cliché, the repeti-
tion leads to an erosion of meaning. Gaillard must remind us of the orig-
inal context and spirit of Flaubert’s commonplaces. The genre, in contrast,
is a form that accumulates meaning through its repetition. It experiences
what Fredric Jameson (borrowing Husserl’s term) has called a process of
sedimentation. A genre emerges in a given historical moment as a response
to a social problem or an attempt to work through an ideological contra-
diction. As it is reappropriated by later writers, it continues to carry the
ideological baggage of its origins as well as the meanings that have been
grafted onto it through its reiteration (140–141). After the 1790s, for ex-
ample, the gothic novel was forever marked by the revolutionary context
that it was taken up to express. To recover the constructive historical com-
mentary in Flaubert’s novel, its utopian vision, we must shift our focus
from clichés to genres.
The tendency in Flaubert scholarship has been to move in the opposite di-
rection. In The Order of Mimesis, for example, Christopher Prendergast briefly
recognizes the notion of genre only to collapse it into the vacuity of the cliché.
Interpreting the first sentence of Flaubert’s 1845 version of L’éducation
sentimentale, he observes how it gestures toward the “novel of the young-
man-up-from-the-provinces” (187). Prendergast acknowledges that this ges-
ture could be read ironically, “as a generalized quotation that . . . ironises, under
the sign of bêtise, an inherited body of texts” (188), but prefers to take it seri-
ously, as an attempt by Flaubert to participate in generic conventions.
Ultimately, however, Prendergast inscribes the novel within a genre only to
implicate Flaubert in the very stupidity and emptiness his novels condemn:
“Thus, if Beginnings are stereotyped, examples of bêtise . . ., how are we to
respond to the fact that Flaubert’s own novels must themselves necessarily
begin . . .?” (191). By reducing bildungsroman to bêtise, he loses sight of the
historical and ideological resonance of the form. Gaillard’s reading, in a sense,
makes an opposite argument: whereas Prendergast dehistoricizes the genre,
Gaillard recovers the ideological context of the cliché. In so doing, she is
reading against the grain of the cliché, against the wide attribution and deper-
sonalization of the phrase, and against the erosive repetition that naturalizes
ideology and that empties it of meaning. The cliché is, in a sense, a phrase that
goes beyond its meaning. Gaillard is effective in recovering the smallness of
that meaning: in the case of the bras de fer, she reveals the pettiness of the bour-
geoisie after the Revolution of 1848. The utopian side of the text—the
grandeur of its historical vision—however, lies not in the phrase that goes be-
yond its meaning but in the meaning that goes beyond the phrase—in Emma’s
desire, which exceeds the words that would express it, and in the genre around
which historical meaning accumulates and becomes sedimented. As Jameson

and Moretti, among others, have argued, the genre is an attempted resolution
of a historical contradiction. It is a site of collective fantasies.
In taking up the question of genre in Madame Bovary, it is important
to adopt a dialectical approach. Too often studies of the work have tended
to focus exclusively on its relation to the novel of adultery without recog-
nizing the other genres toward which Flaubert gestures and against which
the infidelity plot is defined.4 As Jameson has pointed out, to classify a
work within one genre rather than another is “to define the specificity of
this text or mode against the other genre, now grasped in dialectical op-
position to it” (142). The adultery novel, for example, may be considered
a female analog to the bildungsroman. Both genres involve narratives of
self-discovery and rise to prominence in the same period: they are the
canonical forms of the nineteenth-century novel. The bildungsroman, in
turn, might be understood, as Margaret Cohen has argued, as emerging
through an opposition with sentimental fiction, the dominant form of the
late eighteenth century.5 A dialectical approach to genre recognizes not
only a generic “other” but also the coexistence of and dialogue between
genres within any given text. The novel is a form particularly given to this
plurality, for as Jameson observes, it “is not so much an organic unity as a
symbolic act that must reunite or harmonize heterogeneous narrative
paradigms which have their own specific or contradictory ideological
meaning” (144). To understand the historical meaning of a novel, it is nec-
essary to explore the tension among genres within it.
Clarín’s novel is a helpful example of this heterogeneity. Unlike Madame
Bovary, which in its focus on the adulteress and her affairs, might seem to
conform to a single genre, La Regenta delays the infidelity story until the
very end of the novel and divides our attention through most of the work
between two characters—Fermín and Ana—whose plots correspond to
different narrative paradigms. From the beginning, we are confronted with
multiple forms that vie with one another. This conflict among genres is
more palpable in La Regenta also because Clarín has circumscribed the writ-
ing machine, clichés, and intertextuality that dominate Flaubert’s work.
Whereas Madame Bovary is from beginning to end a conglomeration of
commonplaces difficult to distinguish from Flaubert’s own voice, the circu-
lar discourses of the writing machine take over the plot of the Spanish novel
only after Ana’s fall. Before this, Clarín points toward a series of genres that
are charged with meaning and that contrast with the emptiness of the
Vetustans’ clichés: the gothic novel (Lewis’s The Monk), the tale of the pros-
titute (Dumas’s La dame aux camélias), the sentimental novel and romantic
theatre (Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio and Goethe’s Faust). Each of these
genres arises out of specific historical circumstances and carries ideological
EPILOGUE 225
sediment that has settled around it. By placing these influences and genres
in dialogue, Clarín is able to articulate his stance and refine his views on the
historical process that he examines in the novel. His dialogue with other
texts not only indicates the historical subtext of his work (the problem of
revolution) but also allows him to engage it actively: to imagine a utopian
revolution, to provide a running commentary on its failure, and to explore
the question of historical alignment.
In contrast to this generic diversity, the criticism of Madame Bovary has
tended to focus on the sameness of its episodes: adultery is no different from
marriage; Rodolphe no different from Léon. In this reading, the double
adultery serves only to show the emptiness of each affair, “the meaningless
repetition of patterns that is inherent in human endeavors” (Barnes 351).
This is the interpretation toward which Flaubert’s irony points, and many
passages support it: Emma and Rodolphe’s assignations take place “on the
same dilapidated rustic bench from which Léon used to stare at her so
amorously on summer evenings” (197–198); later in the novel, Léon meets
Emma in the same place “in the lane behind the garden—in the lane, just
like Rodolphe” (306). The novel encourages us to conflate the two men in
the sameness of the clichés they utter. If, however, we are reading with Emma
rather than against her, if we are reading naïvely rather than ironically, what
is important is not the objective sameness of her lovers but rather the differ-
ence between the desires or fantasies that lead her to each.
Sartre’s reading is exemplary in this respect for it draws attention to the
distinction between the two affairs, between Emma’s natural and “heav-
enly” love for Rodolphe and her perverse or “earthly” lust for Léon. To
make a distinction in terms of sincerity (love) and insincerity (lust mas-
querading as love), however, is to read with Emma when she is with
Rodolphe and against her when she is with Léon. If we are to understand
the contrast between the affairs from the perspective of Emma’s desire, the
distinction must reflect not quantity or intensity (the degree of her long-
ing) but rather quality or property (the specific nature of the fantasy that
impels her in each case). It is necessary, in other words, to register the dif-
ference between the genres that inform each episode.
Flaubert draws this distinction through a series of parallel passages.
Consider, as an example, the two seduction scenes:
“Do you really not know,” [Rodolphe] said, “that there exist souls that are
ceaselessly in torment? That are driven now to dreams, now to action,
driven from the purest passions to the most orgiastic pleasures? No wonder
we fling ourselves into all kinds of fantasies and follies!”
She stared at him as if he were a traveler from mythical lands. “We poor
women,” she said, “don’t have even that escape.” [. . .]
“Duty, duty, always duty—I’m sick of that word . . . I have my own idea
of duty. Our duty is to feel what is great and love what is beautiful—not to
accept all the social conventions and the infamies they impose on us.”
“Still . . . still . . . ” objected Madame Bovary.
“No! Why preach against the passions? Aren’t they the only beautiful
thing in this world, the source of heroism, enthusiasm, poetry, music, the
arts, everything?”
“But still,” said Emma, “we have to be guided a little by society’s opin-
ions; we have to follow its standards of morality.”
“Ah! But there are two moralities,” he replied. “The petty one, the con-
ventional one, the one invented by man, the one that keeps changing and
screaming its head off—that one’s noisy and vulgar, like that crowd of fools
you see out there. But the other one, the eternal one . . . Ah! This one’s all
around us and above us, like the landscape that surrounds us and the blue
sky that gives us light.” (168–170)
“So you decided to stay?” [Léon] asked.

“Yes,” she said, “and I was wrong. One can’t afford to be self-indulgent
if one has a thousand things to attend to.”
“Oh, I can imagine . . .”
“No, you can’t! You’re not a woman.”
But men had their troubles, too; and so the conversation got under way,
with philosophical reflections . . .
Finally she gave a sigh. “The worst thing of all, it seems to me, is to go
on leading a futile life the way I do. If our unhappiness were of use to some-
one, we could find consolation in the thought of sacrifice!”
He launched into a eulogy of virtue, duty, silent renunciation: he, too, he
said, had a fantastic need for selfless dedication that he was unable to satisfy.
“What I should love to do,” she said, “would be to join an order of nurs-
ing Sisters.”
“Alas!” he answered. “No such sacred missions are open to men.”
(275–277)
Both passages deal with duty and desire. Whereas Rodolphe conceives of
desire as a higher duty, however, Léon represents duty as an object of
desire. In the first scene, Emma longs for the liberty to pursue her passions,
which she sees incarnated in the aristocratic Rodolphe. The second
passage, in contrast, deals with Léon’s longing for sacrifice, for the con-
formity with bourgeois norms and expectations he sees embodied in the
middle-class Emma. In the first, Emma desires to be other than she is;
in the second it is Léon who longs to change his life.
All of these distinctions correspond to a difference in generic vision.
Emma’s affair with Rodolphe is about the tension between bourgeois duty
and a desire that is identified as aristocratic. As Nancy Armstrong has
shown, this is the tension at the heart of many sentimental or domestic
EPILOGUE 227
novels. This type of fiction allowed the ascendant bourgeoisie to define it-
self by opposing its moral austerity to the libertinism of the aristocracy.6
Léon’s affair with Emma, in contrast, is about the relation between the de-
sire of a young bourgeois male and the social and economic reality in
which he exists. Its focus is not the heroine’s surrender to the law of the
heart but rather a young’s man apprenticeship in the way of the world, his
internalization of roles and rules. In this sense, the story of the second af-
fair is a mini bildungsroman within the novel.
It is a bildungsroman of a specifically Balzacian kind. Earlier examples
of the genre (Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister or Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir) deal
with what Franco Moretti describes as “the opposition between the forma-
tion and socialization,” between the definition of one’s identity and the
need to adopt a social role. Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempré differs from these
heroes in that he is almost from the outset “a wholly social creature” (134):
“Nothing remains of Stendhalian autonomy, that sensation of being
bound, despite lies and compromises, to one’s ‘laws of the heart.’ Lucien
de Rubempré is already radar-like, outer-directed: when asked ‘Are you a
classicist or a romantic?’, he promptly replies ‘Which is the stronger
party?’” (Moretti 130). Léon similarly forms his desire according the pat-
terns and expectations of the society in which he lives. Whereas Rodolphe
in the first passage locates his desire outside the social world, Léon’s desire
is to play a role within it, to take on the posture of “selfless dedication.”
His trajectory in the episode resembles that of Balzac’s hero. As in
Les illusions perdues, Léon’s apprenticeship begins in the country under the
tutelage of an older married woman who is his first love. It is there that the
hero becomes intrigued by “the inaccessible great world” (101) beyond,
which he later explores as he moves to the city (Léon studies in Paris and
then moves to Rouen). In these urban spaces, the young hero moves
rapidly from one novelty to another and experiences the freedom and
instability of city life. As is typical in the French bildungsroman, the
conclusion of this period of exploration is regarded not as a meaningful
maturation (as in Wilhelm Meister) but rather as “a sort of betrayal”
(Moretti 8). Léon’s ultimate embourgeoisement—his promotion to head
clerk and rejection of sentimental dreams—empties his story of meaning.
With the end of his Bildung, he disappears from the novel.
Léon’s bildungsroman echoes the Balzacian model not only in its por-
trayal of the hero as a social creature but also in its representation of the
society in which he lives. Lucien de Rubempré comes of age during the
height of capitalism; as Moretti puts it, he converts himself into “a fash-
ionable commodity” (134). Léon’s tale in Madame Bovary is informed by
a similarly economic logic. Like Lucien, he becomes an erotic commodity
of sorts. To be with him, Emma goes into debt thinking of “the countless
love meetings those 2000 francs represented” (321). Whereas Emma’s

affair with Rodolphe deals with desire and duty, her relationship with Léon
is about desire and reality, the socioeconomic conditions with which the
lovers must deal.
This shift in focus, the turn toward economic realities, is made clear
through various parallel passages. During the first affair, Rodolphe tells the
heroine that he has often “passed a cemetery in the moonlight and asked
myself if I wouldn’t be better off lying the rest . . .” (163). Léon later echoes
these words in expressing to Emma his “longing for ‘the peace of the
grave”: “One night he had even written out his will, asking to be buried in
the beautiful velvet-striped coverlet she had given him.” (277). What is
moonlit reverie in Part II has become written testament in Part III.
Similarly, during both affairs, Charles’s mother descends on the Bovary
household to pronounce judgment on Emma’s conduct. In the first, her
concern is morality: Emma’s apparent neglect of her duty. The elder
Madame Bovary reproaches Charles for not forbidding his wife’s novel
reading. During her second visit (which coincides with Emma’s affair with
Léon), however, her concerns are not moral but financial: Emma and
Charles have a mounting debt that is worrisome to his interfering parent.
His mother’s advice is now to take away not Emma’s novels but the power
of attorney Charles has granted her.
This economic subtext imposes a different logic and temporality on the
last third of the novel. One of the distinguishing features of the second af-
fair is the lovers’ awareness of time, which is clear in repeated instances of
waiting or impatience. Their romance begins with Léon “looking at the
barber’s cuckoo clock” (282) as he waits for their tryst at the cathedral, a
scene in which their desire is intensified by their impatience with the
verger’s tour. Later, Emma must wait for Léon when he is detained by
Homais. Even the most idyllic and seemingly timeless experiences are de-
scribed with temporal images: when Emma and Léon take a boat to an is-
land in the river, the clinking of its oars sounds “like the beat of a
metronome” (303). As the story progresses, this temporal urgency becomes
identified with an economic subtext—Emma’s debts—of which Léon is
unaware. These debts lend a desperate rhythm to the narrative and to the
heroine’s desires. Emma is constantly buying time to postpone the revela-
tion of her financial circumstances and her infidelity.
This insistence on Emma’s race against the clock distinguishes the sec-
ond affair from the first. If we read the plot from Léon’s perspective, Part
III creates a tension between the forces that moves the story forward (what
Barthes calls the proairetic code) and the revelation of the truth (the
hermeneutic code). Léon is baffled by the excess and compulsiveness of
Emma’s desire, which moves her from one caprice to another: “He had no
EPILOGUE 229
idea what it was that was driving her more and more to fling herself into
a reckless pursuit of pleasure” (325). The urgency that drives her and the
plot forward distracts Léon from the economic truth that underlies this de-
sire—Emma’s frustration with her financial situation—and postpones its
final revelation. This tension between the proairetic and hermeneutic
codes contrasts with the first affair. With Rodolphe, the two codes are not
opposed (as in a realist novel) but rather work in tandem, as is typical of
the sentimental novel. As in the works Cohen studies, the forward move-
ment of the plot serves to confirm a truth that is laid out at its beginning—
the irreconcilability of the heroine’s duty and desire. At the beginning of
the affair, Emma asks Rodolphe for a wedding ring to make her desires
seem dutiful, but he dismisses her silliness. Later, in the operation episode,
Emma tries to make her duty desirable without success. As the conflict be-
tween duty and desire is clear from the beginning and as each episode
serves only to confirm it, the narrative of the affair has no natural closure.
Flaubert must break it off abruptly with Rodolphe’s good-bye letter. The
second affair, in contrast, moves toward a revelation. Upon learning of
Emma’s economic situation, Léon realizes how dangerous and expensive
she really is. It is this realization that leads to his loss of illusions and ulti-
mate embourgeoisement.
The movement from the structure of the sentimental novel in the first
affair to that of the realist bildungsroman in the second is clear not only in
the logic of the plots (the way that their codes interrelate) but also in a shift
in the protagonist of the romance. Whereas the initial adultery focuses on
Rodolphe’s effect on Emma and her emotional awakening, the second af-
fair examines Emma’s influence on Léon and his sentimental education.
This shift is clear in passages in Part III that echo the imagery of Part II.
With Rodolphe, Emma lives “in a blissful torpor, a drunkenness in which
her very soul lay drowned and shriveled, like the duke of Clarence in his
butt of malmsey” (224). In the second affair, however, it is not Emma but
Léon who feels this amorous inebriation: when with her, he feels “like a
drunkard at the sight of a strong liquor” (333). At the end of the affairs,
Emma and Léon are again in parallel positions. While looking at a fussy
miniature of Emma, Rodolphe finds that her image has become “confused
in his memory, as though the real face and the painted face had been rub-
bing against each other and wearing each other away” (235). This idea of
a love contaminated by kitsch or of a loss of aura is repeated in Part III,
but here it is not the seducer’s view of the heroine but rather Emma’s of
Léon: as she begins to find her lover “unheroic, weak, commonplace”
(332), the narrator warns that “we shouldn’t maltreat our idols: the gilt
comes off on our hands” (333). Finally, while Emma tells Rodolphe that
she is his “slave” and “concubine” and finds herself “in his bondage,” Léon
in the second adultery “was becoming her mistress” (327). In the second
affair, Léon supplants the heroine in the role that she has played in the
first. The focus is now his Bildung.
This shift is evident in the way Flaubert represents the lovers’ relation
to literature in each affair. The first adultery deals with Emma’s desire to
become a character, her attempts to project herself into the novels she
reads. After she yields to Rodolphe, she exults in the role she has assumed:
“‘I have a lover! I have a lover,’ she kept repeating to herself, reveling in the
thought . . . She remembered the heroines of novels she had read, and the
lyrical legion of those adulterous women began to sing in her memory with
sisterly voices that enchanted her. Now she saw herself as one of those
amoreuses whom she had so envied: she was becoming in reality, one of that
gallery of fictional figures” (190–191). In the second affair, it is Léon
rather than Emma who seeks to enter literature: he identifies in Emma “the
amoreuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague ‘she’ of all
the poetry books” (313). Léon now occupies the heroine’s position after
her first sexual encounter with Rodolphe. The postcoital portrayal of
Emma in the second affair, in contrast, effaces her individuality. Whereas
in the earlier affair she exulted in the role of having a lover, she now ap-
pears shrouded in anonymity: “A woman alighted from [the carriage] and
walked off, her veil down, without a backward glance” (290). By placing
Léon in Emma’s old roles, Flaubert defines him as the protagonist of a
Bildung, as a young man in search of a role, as a character in development.
The first affair deals with Emma’s subjective development, which is as-
similated to natural growth: “Her desires, her sorrows, her experience of sen-
suality, her ever-green illusions, had developed her step by step, like a flower
nourished by manure and by the rain, by the wind and the sun; and she was
finally blooming in the fullness of her nature” (228). The treatment of land-
scape in this episode reflects that of sentimental fiction, which typically deals
with a provincial heroine’s struggle to conform to her duty (the bourgeois
marriage contract) despite the temptations of desire, which are associated
with the natural world. At the Comices, Rodolphe defines a higher morality
that he compares to “the landscape that surrounds us and the blue sky that
gives us light” (170). Through adultery, Emma is reconnecting with a higher,
natural force that resides within. In the same conversation, Rodolphe in-
vokes the idea of elective affinities (174) and compares their love to a con-
vergence of natural forces, “two rivers flow[ing] together” (174). The scene
of her seduction, described with an uncharacteristic lyricism, reflects this
pantheistic vision of a higher truth residing in nature (189).
Whereas with Rodolphe she imagines how “from a mountain top they
would espy some splendid city” (229) and enjoys feeling above the “crowd
of fools” at the Comices, with Léon she enters Rouen and goes slumming.
EPILOGUE 231
This new space is that of the bildungsroman, which is almost invariably

situated in the city and chronicles the hero’s encounter not with natural de-
sire but with modernity and the social order it imposes. The seduction oc-
curs not in the privacy of the woods in communion with nature but in a
taxi cab in a scene that draws attention to the public gaze and to the dis-
connect between the interior and the exterior. Nature is generally excluded
from Part III, but when it does appear, it is always ironized or somehow
spoilt. Although Emma and Léon take boat trips on the city’s river, the
landscape they observe is an industrial one: “Wisps of tar smoke curled up
from among the trees, and on the river floated great oily patches” (302).
The narrator’s description, moreover, emphasizes the repetition involved in
these outings: their experience duplicates not only earlier moments—“It
wasn’t the first time in their lives that they had seen trees, blue sky and
lawn” (303)—but also the revelry of the disreputable girls and their lower-
class lovers who hired the boat the day before.
During her affair with Rodolphe, Emma also unwittingly resembles dis-
reputable women. In Flaubert’s famous description of man’s relation to
language, the heroine is compared to the prostitutes and mistresses of
Rodolphe’s past:
Emma was like all his other mistresses; and as the charm of novelty gradu-
ally slipped from her like a piece of her clothing, he saw revealed in all its
nakedness the eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same
forms and always speaks the same language. He had no perception—this
man of such vast experience—of the dissimilarity of feeling that might un-
derlie similarities in expression. Since he had heard the same words uttered
by loose women or prostitutes, he had little belief in their sincerity when he
heard them now: the more flowery a person’s speech, he thought, the more
suspect the feelings, or lack of feelings, it concealed. Whereas the truth is
that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language,
for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or thoughts
or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap
crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will
melt the stars. (224)
The treatment of this prostitution, however, differs from the allusions to

women of ill repute in the episode with Léon. In the passage above, the
narrator distinguishes Emma from the looser ladies who have been
Rodolphe’s mistresses. Her words may be the same as the prostitutes’, and
Rodolphe may confuse her with them, but her feelings are fundamentally
different. In Part III, in contrast, no such distinction is made.
The association of Emma with disreputable women diverges in the two
affairs not only in truth but also in trope. The passage above deals with a
similarity: Emma’s words resemble a prostitute’s. In the boat trip, in con-

trast, Emma occupies the same space as the disreputable women, and to-
ward the end of the episode, as she goes slumming with Léon, she finds
herself side by side with women of “the lowest class,” who “[disappear] like
mist blown off by the wind” (344). What is metaphor in Part II has be-
come metonymy, a relation of contiguity, in Part III. This difference in
trope reflects the generic distinction between the two affairs. In the senti-
mental novel, the setting reflects (and in so doing enhances) the genuine
feelings that are expressed in it. When Emma is in the forest with
Rodolphe, the narrator describes how “amidst the silence their words had
a crystalline ring that echoed and reechoed in their hearts” (198). The re-
lation between language and nature here is one of similarity, of echoing.
Metonymy, in contrast, is the trope of realism, which explores the relation
between people and their spaces. The Balzacian bildungsroman demon-
strates how the hero’s environment determines his character, language, and
development. This is the focus of the second romance in the novel.
This distinction between metaphor (similarity) and metonymy (conti-
guity) is clear in the treatment of time in the two affairs. One of the most
well-known passages of Part II is the description of Emma’s confusion of
the past and present in her reflections on Rodolphe:
Then a languor came over her; she remembered the vicomte who had
waltzed with her at La Vaubyessard and whose beard had given off this same
odor of vanilla and lemon; and automatically she half-closed her eyes to
breathe it more deeply. But as she did this, sitting up straight in her chair,
she saw in the distance, on the farthest horizon, the old stagecoach, the
Hirondelle, slowly descending the hill of Les Leux, trailing a long plume of
dust behind it. It was in this yellow carriage that Léon had so often returned
to her; and that was the road he had taken when he had left forever. For a
moment she thought she saw him across the square, at his window; then
everything became confused, and clouds passed before her eyes; it seemed
to her that she was still whirling in the waltz, under the blaze of the chan-
deliers, in the vicomte’s arms, and that Léon was not far off, that he was
coming . . . And yet all the while she was smelling the perfume of
Rodolphe’s hair beside her. The sweetness of this sensation permeated her
earlier desires, and like grains of sand in the wind, these whirled about in
the subtle fragrance that was filling her soul. (173)
This passage is echoed in a much briefer form in Emma and Léon’s initial
conversation in Part III: “In the sweetness of their ecstasy everything
merged—the past, the future, their memories and their dreams” (279). What
distinguishes the two passages is the catalyst of the temporal conflation in
each. In the first, the confusion is triggered by a perception of a resemblance
EPILOGUE 233
between the past and the present: the vicomte’s beard gave off a scent similar
to Rodolphe’s. In the second, however, what causes the “merging” is a series
of metonymies, Léon’s remembrance of the things that surrounded Emma in
the past: ‘“He spoke of the clematis bower, of the dresses she had worn, of the
furniture in her room—of everything in the house. ‘And our poor cactuses—
what’s become of them?’” (278). Even in the initial passage, Léon is presented
through this trope. Unlike the aristocratic figures—the vicomte and
Rodolphe—who are related through their similarity (the principle of
metaphor), Léon is recalled through a spatial association with the Hirondelle,
through proximity (the principle of metonymy). When Léon’s name is re-
peated in the passage, it is in terms of contiguity (“it seemed to her . . . that
Léon was not far off, that he was coming”). In contrast, the subsequent invo-
cation of the smell of Rodolphe’s hair introduces a highly metaphoric sen-
tence (the simile of grains of sand in the wind, which are similar to the
whirling at the ball with the vicomte).
This shift from metaphor to metonymy has the effect of revealing the
emptiness of language. This is clear in the contrast between the passage
about language cited above (“human speech is like a cracked kettle on
which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make
music that will melt the stars”) and the reflection on speech at the begin-
ning of Part III: “Speech is a rolling-machine that always stretches the feel-
ings it expresses!” (277). Critics have often juxtaposed and contrasted these
passages, but what has generally gone unobserved is that the first appears
during Emma’s affair with Rodolphe whereas the second describes her re-
lationship with Léon. The passage about the cracked kettle deals with a su-
perficial resemblance (“similarities in expression”) between people who are
fundamentally different. Emma is not a prostitute, and her feelings are
more sincere than Rodolphe’s other mistresses’, but her words happen to
be the same as theirs. In contrast, the rolling machine creates an appear-
ance of sentimental nuance that masks an underlying emotional empti-
ness. As we have seen in earlier chapters, the apparent similarity of funda-
mentally dissimilar elements is a disturbing spectacle, a jarring simu-
lacrum. Rodolphe’s perspective eliminates this uncanniness. He assumes
that Emma’s difference lies only on the surface and that fundamentally she
is the same as all his other mistresses. For him, her superficial novelty has
slipped from her “like a piece of her clothing” to reveal “in all its naked-
ness the eternal monotony of passion,” her underlying sameness with the
rest of his women. Rodolphe has subsumed Emma in an indifference and
indifferentiation that defuses her meaning. His perspective is that of the
rolling machine or the writing machine.
The opposition between the cracked cauldron and the rolling machine
reflects the workings of Emma’s desire in the two affairs. Emma’s affection
for Rodolphe emerges out of an opposition: “Every day her love for
Rodolphe was fanned by her aversion for her husband. The more completely
she surrendered to the one, the more intensely she loathed the other” (219).
Her words and clichés might be the same as other women’s, but what un-
derlies them is a sentimental difference, an opposition between the two men
in her life. In her affair with Léon, in contrast, difference does not lie in
Emma’s sentiment (as in the opposition between Rodolphe and Charles) so
much as on the surface in her words and gestures before the world: “If she
said that she had walked down the right-hand side of a street the day before,
it meant that she had gone down the left” (319). What propels her in this
relationship is not an emotional opposition but a substitution, not the con-
trast between the desired object and her reality but rather the replacement of
her lover with an ideal version of him: “As her pen flew over the paper she
was aware of the presence of another man, a phantom embodying her most
ardent memories, the most beautiful things she had read and her strongest
desires. In the end he became so real and accessible that she tingled with ex-
citement, unable though she was to picture him clearly, so hidden was he,
godlike, under his manifold attributes” (343).
As Emma’s adultery with Léon is based on substitution (Léon as a re-
placement for Rodolphe, the ideal lover as a replacement for Léon), Part III
is dominated by pronouns. The lovers are repeatedly introduced into pas-
sages as “he” or “she” without clear antecedents. When Léon spies Emma in
the church, we are told through free indirect speech that “It was she!” (284);
later as Emma enters Rouen, “She recognized him from afar” (311). In the
taxi scene, Léon is not Léon but “a voice from within” (288), and Emma,
“a woman [who] alighted” (290). They delight in saying “‘our room,’ ‘our
carpet,’ ‘our chairs’; she even said ‘our slippers’” (312–313). This emphasis
on pronouns shifts the focus from individuality and identity (e.g., Emma’s
fascination with Rodolphe’s difference from her husband) to the universal
linguistic positions that the lovers occupy, positions in which they may
easily be substituted. They are drawn together more by a desire to play a role
than by an attraction to one another. Whereas the sentimental novel deals
with an opposition between ideological values (the libertinism of the
aristocrat versus the asceticism of the bourgeoisie), the bildungsroman
explores the process of becoming a normative subject, of becoming a “he”
or of being integrated into an “our.” Emma is prescient when she tells Léon,
“‘You’ll be like all the others.’ ‘What others?’ ‘Why, men—all men’” (317).
Part III is ultimately the story of this socialization.
In the first affair, Rodolphe can remove Emma from the substitutability
and indifferentiation that are the hallmarks of the writing machine. Their
affair is not consummated at the Comices but in a Rousseauian natural space
in which the individual feels the plenitude of his or her being. Léon, in
EPILOGUE 235
contrast, tries to escape the tour, the indifferent and indifferentiating lan-
guage of the verger, but ends up in a taxi that repeats with its circling the
meaningless, dizzying spinning of the writing machine. Desire in this rela-
tionship is not the natural, metaphorical force of sentimental fiction but
rather socially determined, a product of the metonymies of urban life; it
emerges from within the empty discourses that surround the lovers.
It is this distinction between genres that allows us to register the histor-
ical commentary implicit in the novel. As Cohen has argued, the senti-
mental novel attempted to work through the ideological contradictions in
Enlightenment thought that had hampered the French Revolution: the op-
position between individual freedom and the collective welfare. Not only
did the genre work through the revolution, but historians of the time also
understood their turbulent moment through the prism of the genre: “Across
the historiographical spectrum, historians represent the Revolution’s
tragedies in terms that make French history resemble a sentimental novel”
(71–72). By drawing on the genre and its basic contradictions, Flaubert ges-
tures toward the plot of 1789 in his treatment of Emma and Rodolphe.
This dialogue with sentimental fiction was not uncommon in the nine-
teenth-century novel. Cohen has shown how in their early works Balzac and
Stendhal defined their realist project by opposing it to the schematic and
hyperbolic conventions of the sentimental novel. Sentimentality in these
later texts becomes but a stage in the protagonist’s youth, an illusion to be
lost in the process of learning the way of the world. As Cohen puts it,
“[T]he opposition mutates from individual freedom against collective wel-
fare to individuals seeking self-gratification against repressive authority and
each other” (100). The competing principles of sentimental fiction are re-
placed by the struggle for power in the realist novel. For Cohen, this shift
is the hallmark of the July Monarchy, during which ethical arguments were
supplanted by political debates about social inequality. In moving from the
codes of sentimental fiction toward those of the bildungsroman, Flaubert is
picking up on a convention of the realist novel.
Unlike Balzac and Stendhal, however, Flaubert is placing these genres in
dialogue with the hindsight of 1848–1851, and this context clearly informs
the way they interact in his works. Not only does he choose the bildungsro-
man as the form with which to narrate the Revolution of 1848 and its after-
math in L’éducation sentimentale, but the culmination of Léon’s coming-of-age
story within Madame Bovary is also made to coincide with the uprising. As
LaCapra observes, “Emma takes her life just about when the revolution
should come” (201). Studies of the drafts of the novel show that Flaubert
omitted the dates “mardi 22 février 1848” and “jeudi 4 décembre 1851,”
which were included in early versions (Green 289). The chronology of the
novel, thus, suggests that the collapse of the second affair, the dénouement of
the bildungsroman plot, is an analog to the failure of revolution. Madame

Bovary might indeed be read, as Eça de Queirós does in O primo Basílio, as
an inverted image of L’éducation sentimentale: just as Madame Arnoux is a
Bovary figure in Flaubert’s story of 1848, so Léon’s Bildung
introduces the social world of Frédéric’s life into the adultery novel. Sartre ex-
plained the double affair in Madame Bovary as an example of the cyclical na-
ture of life: “Everything always recommences but by ceaselessly
degrading itself. Thus he would willingly apply to the events of an individual
life the remark which Marx will make a little later concerning the great events
of history” (cited in Barnes, 359). In reading Madame Bovary, however, we
should take Marx’s tenor as seriously as his vehicle. The movement from
Rodolphe to Léon is not from tragedy to farce so much as from the revolu-
tionary vision of 1789 to its degradation in 1848.
This shift in historical context distances Flaubert’s treatment of the
dialogue between sentimental fiction and the bildungsroman from that of
earlier writers such as Balzac. In the realist bildungsroman of the July
Monarchy, the ethical conflict between duty (collective welfare) and desire
(individual freedom) is resolved in favor of the latter. These novels tell of
how desire struggles not against conscience but against reality, against
the social obstacles to its gratification. Characters such as Rastignacs learn
the way of the world by learning to have their way with the world. In
Flaubert, in contrast, the opposition between duty and desire is settled
more toward the former than toward the latter. As we have seen, Léon’s
story is not about the realization of his deepest longings so much as about
his internalization of social roles and codes as his desire. To put it another
way, the point of the novel is not (as many “transparent” readings suggest)
to deflate Emma’s quixotic dreams by confronting them with a disillusion-
ing reality. Were this the case a single seducer would have sufficed. As is
clear in Emma’s reflections during the opera scene, her experience with
Rodolphe has debunked her literary illusions (“Now she well knew the
true paltriness of the passions that art painted so large” [263]). The shift
from the sentimental novel toward the bildungsroman in the second affair
does not serve (as in the realist novels Cohen studies) to expose desire to
the obstacles of reality but rather to confront two forms of desire: the
powerful utopian dreams of the sentimental novel, which are defined in
opposition to societal duties and conventions, and a longing that forms
itself in the image of the social world from which it emerges.
This shift from one form of desire to another is clear in the way Emma
and Léon regard their relationship. In contrast to the first affair, in which
the heroine “was living as though immersed in advance in her future hap-
piness” (227), Emma and Léon present themselves to one another as “they
would have liked to be: what they were doing was to dream up ideals and
EPILOGUE 237
then refashion their past lives to match them. Speech is a rolling-machine

that always stretches the feelings it expresses” (277). What in the first af-
fair is a utopian vision of the future becomes in the second a falsification
of the past. Whereas with Rodolphe Emma tries to ignore her social world
and taste her future freedom as an individual, with Léon she force-fits her
personal experiences in the past to the ideal role he would like her to play.
Like 1789, the first affair is about imagining a better future, about realiz-
ing a utopian vision. The second, in contrast, is like 1848 about resusci-
tating a past with phrases that go beyond the feeling. This is not the tri-
umphant self-realization of the bourgeois bildungsroman hero who makes
his way in the world but rather a retrospective self-fashioning according to
ideals and roles that can no longer be realized—what “they would have
liked to be.”
The contrast between the cracked cauldron and the rolling machine
clarifies this shift in vision. At the level of the narrative (the tenor of the
metaphors), this is a distinction between a language that seeks (unsuccess-
fully) to convey meaning (Emma’s use of clichés with Rodolphe) and
words that distort reality to seduce (Emma and Léon’s reshaping of their
past). The vehicles, however, tell a different story. The image of the caul-
dron offers a performative view of language. What the human speaker
(Emma) wishes to do with words is not to represent or convey a content
but rather to cause an effect on reality: to make the stars weep. The
speaker’s failure is not to misrepresent but to cause the wrong effect, to
make music to which bears dance. In the first affair, the goal is to change
the world, to realize a utopian dream. The image of the rolling machine,
in contrast, implies an expressive (or constative) vision of language.
According to the vehicle here, the lovers’ phrases serve not to change the
world or to affect an interlocutor but rather to distort a truth. Although
Léon will have his way with Emma, he will not have it with the world. His
words neither make stars weep nor bears dance. This shift from words that
seek to change the world to phrases that distort it conveys Flaubert’s com-
mentary on the movement from 1789 to 1848.
The portrayal of the bildungsroman hero in Madame Bovary also
gestures toward the new historical context that Flaubert is exploring. Like
other seducers we have seen, Léon may be regarded as a Louis-Napoléonic
figure. Just as the Nephew draped himself in Bonapartist rhetoric, took
advantage of empty signs, and became a sort of homme entretenu, Léon
maintains Emma’s affection through historical reenactment (he dresses like
Louis XI), speaks like a rolling machine, and becomes her “mistress” (327).
As we have seen, he is gradually reduced to the role he represents and
ultimately is merely a substitute, a pronoun or phantom lover to whom
Emma writes. Like Louis-Napoléon, he is a simulacrum upon whom the
bourgeois heroine may project. By revising the dialogue between the sen-
timental novel and the bildungsroman, Flaubert makes a different histori-
cal commentary from that of earlier authors who combined these genres.
Whereas these authors contrast the abstract ethical contradictions of 1789
with the concrete social oppositions (class struggle) of the July Monarchy,
Flaubert is exploring the breach between a utopian revolutionary vision
and a degraded repetition in which fantasy fails (1848).
It was this exploration that made Flaubert’s novel so ideal for the his-
torical reflections of Iberian novelists. This may seem at first counterintu-
itive. After all, the one feature of Madame Bovary that both rewritings omit
is the double adultery, the contrast between two affairs in which I have
located Flaubert’s historical commentary. I would argue, however, that this
omission is precisely the point. What is a historical trajectory—a sequence
of events—for the French writer is for Eça or Clarín an either/or. The
question they are exploring is not how to interpret a historical process but
rather what would happen were similar conflicts to break out in Spain or
Portugal. In La Regenta, Ana chooses between two alternatives—Fermín,
who recalls the figure of the unfettered priest in revolutionary literature,
and Álvaro, a Louis-Napoléonic character who introduces the distortions
of the writing machine. It was to sort out these options and to understand
the history and destiny of their own nations that Iberian novelists
imported Emma.
Acknowledgments
This book, which was written in four cities over a period of four years,
would not have been possible without the colleagues and friends who wel-
comed me to these places. I had the fortune of arriving at the University
of Chicago the same year as Fred de Armas, who has been a constant
source of encouragement and mentorship. I am very grateful to him for his
poise, humor, and friendship. Paco Caudet, who arrived at the Chicago
Cervantes Institute at that time, generously took me under his wing and
shared his vast knowledge of nineteenth-century Spanish literature. I also
enjoyed lively conversations with Patrick O’Connor, whose
unwavering faith in the project buoyed me during tough times. Given the
transnational nature of this work, the experience of working in a Romance
Languages and Literatures department was particularly enriching. I am
very indebted to my colleagues in the French and Italian sections at the
University of Chicago, particularly Françoise Meltzer, Thomas Pavel, and
Armando Maggi, for their support of my work. Miguel Tamen graciously
read and gave feedback on an early draft of my discussion of O primo
Basílio. Tamar Herzog has been a continual source of wisdom, inspiration,
and joy. I am grateful to her and Yuval Erlich for so often offering me a
retreat in the cities where they have lived.
Fiona Carnegie was particularly generous in helping me to settle into
life in Barcelona and facilitated my teaching and research there. I am also
grateful to Gemma Delicado for her optimism and encouragement in
Chicago and Barcelona.
At Yale University, Roberto González Echevarría was a kind colleague
and mentor. Rolena Adorno, Fernando Rosenberg, and Guillermo Irizarry
also went out of their way to welcome me to New Haven. Noël Valis shared
with me her love of Clarín and her extensive knowledge of modern Spanish
literature. I would like to thank her for many delightful conversations.
At Columbia University, Gonzalo Sobejano, my former adviser and
now colleague, has been a constant source of reassurance and wisdom.
Special thanks go to Patricia Grieve, who twice brought me to Columbia,
for all of her guidance and encouragement. For over eight years, she has
been a mentor and model to me. Félix Martínez-Bonati, Philip Silver,

Mirella Servodidio and Priscilla Ferguson offered helpful comments on
this project in its embryonic form. It is difficult to put into words my debt
to Gustavo Pérez Firmat, who painstakingly read and commented upon
the final version of the manuscript and who guided me through the pub-
lication process. Without his encouragement, I might never have sent off
the manuscript.
I would like to thank my friends for their good humor and enriching
conversation over the past few years: Tom Augst, Michael Cavaliere,
Evelyn Cole, Matthew Connelly, Tricia Dailey, Rubén Gallo, Julio
González Ruiz, Jane Korach, Anne Kornhauser, Muisi Krosi, Caroline
Rieger, Mary Ruth Strzeszewski, Chenxi Tang, Julio Vélez Sáenz and
Steven Wagschal. Matthew Gumpert offered insight and inspiration
during the early stages of this project. David T. Gies, who has advised me
since I was a freshman in college, has been unstintingly generous in his
encouragement.
I am very grateful to my editor Farideh Koohi-Kamali for her support
of this project, to her assistant, Julia Cohen, for her patience and good
cheer, and to Elizabeth Sabo at Palgrave, as well as to the staff of
Macmillan India, for all of their work on the manuscript. I would also like
to thank the anonymous readers of the manuscript for Palgrave. Adam
Winkel and Susan Polise graciously tracked down references in the final
stages of the project, and Elyse Kovalsky prepared the index. Patrick
McMorrow, Kosmas Pissakos, Gabriel Martínez, Barbara Britten, Juanita
Denson, Sandra Guardo, and Ginny Hernández have offered invaluable
administrative support.
Finally, I would like to thank Danielle Hasse-Dubosc, Mihaela Bacou,
and Naby Avcioglu of the Columbia University Institute for Scholars in
Paris, where I am writing these lines, for their hospitality and cordiality
this summer.
This book is dedicated to my parents, Ross and Marguerite Amann,
who first inspired me with their love of literature and words.
An earlier version of part of Chapter 3 appeared in the Bulletin of
Hispanic Studies 78, no. 3 (July 2001): 319–338. I thank the editors for the
permission to reprint. I have cited from Francis Steegmuller’s translation
of Madame Bovary and John Rutherford’s of La Regenta. All translations of
O primo Basílio are my own, with parenthetical references to the corre-
sponding pages in the Portuguese text.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. On the reception of Alas’s novel, see María José Tintoré, “La Regenta” de Clarín
y la crítica de su tiempo. The most famous attack on his work was that of the
Cuban critic Luis Bonafoux, who accused him of copying the opera scene of
Madame Bovary. On the conflict between Clarín and Bonafoux, see Martínez
Cachero, “Luis Bonafoux y Quintero, ‘Aramis,’ contra ‘Clarín’ (Historia de una
enemistad literaria).” The novelist and critic Emilia Pardo Bazán, whom Clarín
often ridiculed in his writings, repeated Bonafoux’s charge in her study of mod-
ern French literature (Melón Ruiz de Gordejuela, “Clarin y el Bovarysmo” 70).
Eça de Queirós was similarly accused of being a “denationalizer” and plagia-
rist. In his case, the charges were so severe that entire studies have been dedi-
cated to defending his work (for example, Claudio Basto’s 1924 Foi Eça de
Queirós um plagiador?). Eça’s main antagonist was the Brazilian novelist and
critic Machado de Assis. The latter’s objections to the novel will be discussed
in Chapter 2 of this book.
2. This presupposition is common in statements on the genre. In an aside in his
Aesthetic Theory, for example, Adorno attributes the prevalence of adultery in
the novel to the social institutions of the period: “Although adultery filled
Victorian and early-twentieth-century novels, it is scarcely possible to em-
pathize directly with this literature now, given the dissolution of the high-
bourgeois nuclear family and the loosening of monogamy” (4). The studies of
Ciplijauskaité, Overton, Tanner, Armstrong, Geyer-Ryan, D. A. Williams,
and Jann Matlock (“The Limits”) also illustrate this tendency. An example of
this approach within Hispanism is the work of Jo Labanyi, who relates Clarín’s
portrayal of Ana Ozores to the debates about civil marriage in the 1870s and
1880s in Spain (Gender 222).
3. Other examples of this argument include Geyer-Ryan’s discussion of novels of
adultery as “rebellious texts” and D. A. Williams’s thesis that the genre “inter-
nally distantiates” patriarchal ideology. Laura Kipnis’s 1998 article in Critical
Inquiry, proposed as a “manual” for adulterers, similarly illustrates the ten-
dency to read the infidelity plot as subversive.
242 NOTES
4. For a critique of homologies such as those used in the work of Lucien

Goldmann, see Raymond Williams’s Marxism and Literature, 104–107.
5. Bill Overton makes a similar critique of the “terminological promiscuity” in
Tanner, Segal, and Sinclair: “[T]he question whether or not adultery actually
occurs is fraught with consequence in fiction as in life itself ” (3).
6. Noël Valis summarizes this situation well in an essay on La Regenta: “It seemed
very important to prove that Spanish naturalism was not like French naturalism,
never so disgusting, so material, or so godless as the Zola model of degeneration
and decomposition. Thinly disguised nationalistic impulses often defended the
Spanish literary movement either as a spiritual one or as a modernized reversion
to an earlier strain of realism quintessentially Spanish (Cervantes, the pica-
resque)” (“On Monstrous Birth” 191).
7. Carlos Clavería, for example, claims that “There can be no plagiarism, even if
others’ techniques are followed, when there is originality in the observation”
(182; my translation). This insistence on local specificity leads Clavería to na-
tionalize the universal themes of which Flaubert wrote: Clarín presents “a very
Spanish inflection of boredom”—a “taedium hispanum” (189)—and a “specifi-
cally Spanish ‘bêtise humaine’” (192). Girodon makes a similar argument about
Eça’s novel: “It is precisely the Portuguese blood that circulates through O primo
Basílio that gives the work its profound originality” (224; my translation).
8. In this respect, my approach differs considerably from that of Elisa Marti-
López, whose study Borrowed Words examines imitations of French fiction
(specifically of Eugène Sue’s Mystères de Paris) in pre-1870 Spanish popular nov-
els. Although I agree with her rejection of the assumption that imitation is cul-
tural betrayal and coincide with her in using terms such as appropriation and
dialogue to describe cross-national literary relations, I do not accept her defini-
tion of these terms or theoretical approach. Marti-López adopts Bakhtin’s no-
tion of “the internally persuasive discourse,” a word “caught in a creative strug-
gle–in a ‘play of boundaries’—with other discourses existing within a linguistic
and ideological consciousness which prepares the introduction of a new word
(a word ‘half-ours and half-someone else’s’)” (29). By displacing agency from
authors to texts or words, this concept, like that of intertextuality, limits the
complexity of the thought informing these reworkings: it reduces the meaning
of the intersection of the foreign and the local to existing disparities between
languages and cultural presuppositions. While this approach does foreground a
contrast by which national identity may be defined, it ultimately does not go
beyond mere reflection of reality and misses the complex commentaries that
these authors create by actively combining and reshaping textual models.
9. In his seminal work on Benito Pérez Galdós, Galdós and the Art of the European
Novel: 1867–1887, Stephen Gilman has developed a notion of “inter-novel di-
alogue” which is useful for approaching the authors of his circle (Eça, Clarín,
Pardo Bazán, etc.). As Gilman points out, these dialogues are often “poly-
phonic”: “The voice of each novelist interlocutor is accompanied by the voices
of all those other novelists to whom he has listened most attentively in the
past” (184). Whereas Gilman sees these dialogues as attempts to answer uni-
versal questions—the problem of “What Men Live By” (160)—however, my
NOTES 243
study explores how they are used to work through the pressing historical and
political questions of the day.
10. In Hispanism, this approach is reflected in the work of Jo Labanyi, who has
argued that the adultery in La Regenta introduces a “blurring of distinctions”
that “represents a threat to the status quo” (“City” 54) and “implies a critique
of increased State regulation” (Gender 218, n. 10). Hazel Gold similarly re-
gards the adultery at the end of Clarín’s novel as “Ana’s rebellion” (64).
11. Examples of this assumption within Hispanism include Jo Labanyi’s work on
La Regenta, Hazel Gold’s view of digression as transgression (“Literature in a
Paralytic Mode”) and Elizabeth Sánchez’s “Beyond the Realist Paradigm:
Subversive Strategems in La Regenta and Madame Bovary,” which reads
Clarín’s and Flaubert’s destabilizing textual practices as subversive maneuvers.
12. In Clarín’s obituary for Cristino Martos (a key figure of the revolutionary
sexennium of 1868–1874) from February 1, 1893, it is clear that Clarín drew
a connection between 1868 and the French Revolution (Beser 408). This
comparative logic is evident in Clarín’s reflections on earlier moments of
Spanish history as well. Lecturing on the failure of the “liberal triennium” of
1820–1823 before the Ateneo in 1885–1886, Clarín implicitly contrasted the
French Revolution with the Revolution of 1820 in Spain. The latter, he
claimed, was far from those “true revolutions, which the people desire and
which happen by themselves, animated by the spirit of society, which are born
of what Savigny called the guts of the people” (cited by Beser 407; my trans-
lation).
13. In contesting Tanner’s thesis, my work moves in a direction similar to that of
Barbara Leckie’s Culture and Adultery: The Novel, the Newspaper, and the Law,
1857–1914, which argues against the critical tendency to study “adultery in the
novel only in terms of transgression” (5). As Leckie deals with the English novel,
in which adultery was never explicit, however, her study focuses more on the
mechanisms of censorship by which the subject was controlled and the textual
strategies through which it was elliptically represented than on the symbolic
function of the plot. In dealing with more explicit Iberian novels, in which
French influences are not repressed, my study examines a more conscious polit-
ical commentary, expressed through overt literary dialogue and allegory.
CHAPTER 1
1. In recent years, many critics have begun to explore the impact of uneven mod-
ernization on nineteenth-century Spanish literature. See, for example,
Stephanie Sieburth’s Inventing High and Low, Jo Labanyi’s Gender and
Modernization in the Spanish Realist Novel, and Noel Valis’s The Culture of
Cursilería: Bad Taste, Kitsch, and Class in Modern Spain.
2. The connection between prostitution and 1848 is reinforced in Flaubert’s
novel in the ironic place-trading of Frédéric and M. Arnoux during the
February Days. The protagonist relieves Arnoux on the front and thus allows
his friend to take his own place in the bed of the prostitute, Rosanette.
244 NOTES
3. In a 1954 essay, Francis Steegmuller observed in passing that, unlike Luísa,

Emma is “not haunted by a memory but by an anticipation” (cited in Coleman
116). As I argue here, this difference is key to understanding the political
commentary of Eça’s novel.
4. For another perspective on prostitution in La Regenta, see Noël Valis’s “On
Monstrous Birth.” Valis considers the prostitute as a symptom of urban disease
and anxiety about modernization (201). In what follows, I will expand on her
observations by studying the figure not (as Valis does) in relation to historical
documents on the prostitute in nineteenth-century society but rather in rela-
tion to literary representations of the figure, such as Dumas’s. My focus is more
idiological than social: this chapter will examine how the figure of the prosti-
tute functions as an icon of revolution within a concrete political allegory.
5. On the use of coincidence in the novel, see Laura Rivkin’s insightful
“Melodramatic Plotting in Clarín’s La Regenta.” Rivkin analyzes a similar use
of coincidence to create a “zone of doubt” in the duel scene at the end of the
novel (197).
6. On the importance of prostitution in the social critique of the 1840s, see Jann
Matlock’s Scenes of Seduction.
7. This type of illusion will also allow Álvaro to carry on the affair once it has
begun. When he visits Ana in her house each night, he enters and leaves by
steps he has grooved in the garden wall: “Álvaro compared his disguised lad-
der to the pictures on matchboxes bearing the well-known legend, ‘Where is
the shepherdess?’ Where was the ladder? Once you had seen it you could see
nothing else, but until it was pointed out it was invisible” (657). Like his
“esprit,” the ladder tricks the eye.
8. As Barbey d’Aurevilly writes in Du Dandysme, the dandy is “undecided” in
gender and often veers toward the foreign: the word dandy “will remain for-
eign, like the thing it represents” (25).
9. As Rhonda Garelick has observed, there is nothing “politically subversive”
about the figure; its prototype was Beau Brummell, a close friend of the king
(209, n. 11).
10. “He was a little like his beloved cathedral tower, also powerful, well-
proportioned, well-built and elegant and mystical; but made of stone.” (233)
11. Jackson, Oleza, and Bécarud observe similarities between Clarín’s representation
of Álvaro and his treatment of Cánovas. Cánovas helped to institutionalize the
turno político, a parody of democracy not unlike Bonapartism, in Spain.
Clarín’s denunciation of “formalism in politics” as “the current gangrene of the
State” (cited in Oleza II, 35) recalls Marx’s critique of the proliferation of
meaningless signs during the Second Empire in the Brumaire.
12. In her reading of La Regenta, Stephanie Sieburth draws attention to one side
of Clarín’s exploration of language: the opposition between “an accurate
discourse” (which she identifies with the suppressed sexual truth of the novel)
and “a beautiful one,” a distorting eloquence that masks these realities in
euphemisms (“Kiss and Tell” 98). As I argue in this chapter, however, Clarín
distinguishes not two but three types of language use. He establishes not only
the opposition between accurate representation and indifferentiating language
NOTES 245
but also an opposition between representation and incarnation. It is in the latter

distinction that the utopian message of the novel resides.
13. In Zola’s La Fortune des Rougon, the Bonapartist Pierre Rougon recaptures the
city hall of Plassans from the Republican Antoine Macquart and uses his
adversary’s speech to lay claim to the town. In typical Bonapartist fashion, he
appropriates the signs of revolution for his own ends.
14. Some recent critics, influenced by post-structuralist and feminist theory, have
represented Ana as an empty or shifting signifier, a sign open to the Vetustans’
projections. For Lou Charnon-Deutsch, “Ana’s subjectivity is really not the
issue; rather she displays herself to others thereby catalyzing subjects of desire”
(70), and for Diane Urey, she is constantly projected upon, always “writing”
and never “presence.” Stephanie Sieburth argues that “Ana, like the text, is a
sign constantly shifting in meaning” (“Interpreting La Regenta” 290). In my
view, however, these readings, which project upon Ana the insignificance and
indifferentiation of Vetustan discourse, fail to recognize how she struggles
against it throughout the novel. As I argue in this chapter and in Chapters 3
and 4, the novel is the story of her attempt to impose coherence upon her
world and to carry out a meaningful project.
15. In my reading of Ana’s gesture in Chapter 26, I differ from Stephanie
Sieburth, who associates Ana’s mysticism with a negative form of repetition:
“Repetition, rather than revitalizing a classic, reifies it, transforms it into
a series of formulas. This process is accentuated by the ostentation with which
Ana reproduces the gestures of religious piety. Mysticism is actualized in
La Regenta only in empty signs, such as isolation, tears, eyes raised to heaven.
It appears as a cliché, deprived of the spirit, or signified, it once contained”
(“La Regenta as Quixotic Novel” 322). Although Sieburth’s words are an
excellent description of Ana’s own view of her actions during the procession,
Clarín nevertheless makes it clear that her gesture is inspired by a genuine will
to change the world and that it has the potential to be truly meaningful. I
develop this point from a different angle in my article “‘La forma es fondo’:
The Politics of Camp in La Regenta,” which deals extensively with this scene.
16. Ana’s effort to make her content exceed the paltriness of the phrase might be
related to Gonzalo Sobejano’s and Gemma Roberts’s discussions of Ana’s story
as an example of “romanticism of disillusionment” (Lukács) in which “the soul
is broader than the destinies that life can offer” (Sobejano, Clarín en su obra
ejemplar 121; my translation). In my analysis, however, what is at stake is not
Ana’s relation to her world but her relation to language.
17. In identifying Ana’s failure with her inability to carry off this tableau, I am
departing from a line of interpretation that identifies Ana’s “primal fault” as
her “disobedience to nature” (Nimetz 251) and diagnoses a form of hysteria
resulting from sexual repression (e.g., Resina). Although many of the charac-
ters (particularly her doctor) attribute her problems to physical causes, this is
but one of many interpretations of the heroine within the text. Clarín’s
extended foray into Ana’s moral and spiritual vacillations suggests that her
predicament cannot be reduced to purely physiological terms. As Noël Valis
has shown in a penetrating essay, Clarín resisted the materialist or medical
246 NOTES
readings of Ana’s model, Saint Theresa, that were increasingly popular in the
1870s and 1880s. The “delicate zone of untouchability” (“Hysteria” 339) with
which he shrouds the saint in his writings suggests that Ana’s aspirations are
not merely symptoms of a psychic disturbance.
18. Many critics have argued that Celedonio is a stand-in for Fermín: “Celedonio
attains what de Pas has been denied: to kiss Ana Ozores” (Valis, Decadent
Vision 32). This argument is echoed in Kronik (523), Resina (244), Rogers
(93), Gullón (147), and Sieburth (“Kiss and Tell” 94). In an insightful study,
however, Gonzalo Sobejano rejects the idea of Celedonio as “a delegate of the
repressed lust of Fermín . . . How could [Clarín] be insinuating the unsatis-
fied ‘lust’ of the lover when the text, in concluding, describes not a burning or
frothy kiss but a cold and viscous one, which is depravedly experimental ‘in
order to enjoy a strange pleasure or to see if it pleased him’?” (“La Regenta: De
su final a su finalidad” 708; my translation). I agree with Sobejano’s conclu-
sion that the kiss represents the forces that condemn Ana, the bêtise humaine
that Alas denounces in the Vetustans (722).
CHAPTER 2
1. An example of these accusations is Chapter 4 of António Cabral’s study of Eça

de Queirós, which identifies the author’s numerous “plagiarisms.” In 1924,
Fialho called Eça “the greatest denationalizer that modern Portugal has had”
(cited in Chaves 195, n. 1; my translation).
2. A number of critics have addressed the relationship between Eça and Flaubert.
Girodon identifies passages drawn from Flaubert but does not analyze these
borrowings. Chaves focuses on stylistic differences between the two authors,
while Coleman and Stevens probe broader philosophical divergences in the
conception of the two works. Santiago focuses on the metatextual subtext of
O primo Basílio (Ernestinho’s play), which he sees as the site of Eça’s com-
mentary on Flaubert. In a perceptive piece, Mourão contrasts the two hero-
ines’ use of language. With regard to Machado’s accusations of arbitrariness,
Carlos Reis has sought to defend Eça by relating the causality of O primo
Basílio to naturalist precepts of the period.
3. A more recent critic, for example, has described the novel as “an allegory of
collective misery” in which each character represents a social type: Acácio stands
for the hypocrisy of monarchist constitutionalism; Julião for a scientific posi-
tivism “indifferent to the pain of the oppressed people”; Juliana for “the misery
of the Portuguese people in its submission”; Luísa and Jorge for the leisured
bourgeoisie; and Basílio for the threat of English capitalism (Jarnaes 32–33).
4. Machado de Assis was among the first to draw attention to this passivity,
which has been observed in most discussions of the two novels.
5. As Silviano Santiago observes, Paris is both the “center of France for the
province” and the “center of Europe for Portugal.” This creates an identifica-
tion between Yonville and Lisbon, which are both represented as peripheral
spaces (56).
NOTES 247
6. Both, for example, take pride in their boots: Juliana’s greatest pleasure is to
strut the boots on which she squanders her salary, and Julião defies the snob-
bish Basílio by showing off his own: “I showed him my boots unabashedly . . .
I take great honor in them; they are worker’s boots . . . “ (101). In this same
encounter with Basílio, Julião embarrasses Luísa by fingering a medical text on
diseases of the uterus, a taboo subject in polite society. The reference points
back to an earlier passage about Juliana’s history. Her mother, a promiscuous
woman maintained by a rich lover, died of a uterine illness, an ailment that
seemed divine retribution for her sinful life.
7. For other examples, see pp. 16, 39, 47, 71, 84, 314, 317 of the Portuguese
text. At the opera later in the novel, Luísa’s counterpart, Marguerite, is simi-
larly an apparition of whiteness (281).
8. This divide between discourse (the male pair) and embodiment or action (the
female pair) is clear in the characters’ stances toward the slavery debate.
Whereas we have seen that Luísa and Juliana embody white and black,
respectively, Acácio and Julião merely discuss the issue. It is symptomatic of
the latter pair’s politics that Julião, the soi-disant revolutionary, supports slav-
ery, while the conservative Acácio opposes it. This reversal of our expectations
contrasts strikingly with the serious and utterly irreconcilable opposition be-
tween the two women.
9. On the semiotic rectangle, see Greimas, Du Sens and Jameson, The Prison-
House of Language (163–168) and The Political Unconscious (Chapters 3 and 4).
10. Julião’s opinion coincides with the author’s. In 1872, Eça wrote that “[a]
Portuguese girl has no initiative, no determination, no will. She has to be or-
dered and governed” (cited in Coleman 79).
11. On the role of these figures in the novel, see Chantal de Grandpré, “Sénécal
et Dussardier: La République en effigie,” and Robert T. Denommé, “From
Innocence to Experience: A Retrospective View of Dussardier in L’education
sentimentale.”
12. Sénécal boasts to Frédéric, “I work for my living at least! I’m a poor man!”
(64). Nevertheless, when Frédéric replies, “That’s pretty obvious” (64), Sénécal
bitterly resents it: “The schoolmaster never forgave him for that remark” (64).
Similarly, Julião observes proudly that his are the boots “of one who works,”
but is actually embarrassed: “[H]e was in the habit of publicly glorying in a
poverty that privately did not cease to humiliate him” (101).
13. For another, compelling reading of the description of Charles’s hat, see Ross
Chambers’s discussion of metatextual moments in Madame Bovary in The Writing
of Melancholy. See also Dennis Porter, “Madame Bovary and the Question of
Pleasure,” and Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty, 91–94.
CHAPTER 3
1. Within Hispanism, these arguments are reproduced in the work of Jo Labanyi,

who claims that the adultery in La Regenta ushers in “a generalized breakdown
of categories which threatens society with dissolution” (“City, Country and
248 NOTES
Adultery” 63) and that Ana is “contributing to the breakdown of the system
of representation constituting national life” (Gender 261).
2. As Stephanie Sieburth astutely notes, “The signified of classic words [in
La Regenta] has been eroded and forgotten, and the classic signifier circulates,
turned into cliché, misunderstood, misquoted, and made to serve a value
system antithetical to its own” (“Kiss and Tell” 91).
3. I differ from critics such as Jo Labanyi (“City” 58) and Benigno Sánchez-
Eppler (206), who believe that Clarín associates Germán with Mesía through
Ana’s stream of thought. The abrupt jumps in Ana’s thoughts at both the
beginning and end of her flashback suggest an opposition between the trou-
bling memories of the past and the pleasant image with which she reassures
herself and calms her inner rebellion.
4. For an insightful close reading of this scene in Chapter 16 and particularly
Ana’s thoughts before her encounter with Álvaro, see Gonzalo Sobejano’s
“La inadaptada.”
5. As Diane Urey observes, “The ‘pozo negro’ suggests the threatening void
behind words that can never be reality” (33).
6. For a different interpretation of Ana’s tears, see Stephanie Sieburth’s
“La Regenta as Quixotic Novel.” Sieburth argues that the heroine falls short of
St. Theresa’s “don de lágrimas” (gift of tears) (323–334).
7. On Ana’s relationship with St. Theresa, see Gonzalo Sobejano’s introduction
to La Regenta, 46–50; Stephanie Sieburth’s “La Regenta as Quixtoic Novel”;
and Noël Valis’s “Hysteria and Historical Context in La Regenta.”
8. In dealing with this scene, I depart in several instances from John Rutherford’s
rendering in order to give a sense of some of the original word play. My emen-
dations are indicated in brackets.
9. The narrator’s reference to the magic lantern, often a metaphor for textuality,
further suggests that Fermín is encountering writing in this episode.
CHAPTER 4
1. Gonzalo Sobejano observes this borrowing in “Madame Bovary en La Regenta”

(24), but it has been overlooked in most discussions of Clarín’s debt to
Flaubert.
2. Clarín’s dialogue with Flaubert has generated an extensive bibliography. Helmut
Hatzfeld draws attention to stylistic similarities (such as the use of tripartite
structures and free indirect discourse). Carlos Clavería identifies common
themes and preoccupations (quixotism, a fascination with commonplaces, a dis-
dain for bêtise, and bourgeois mediocrity), and G. Laffitte and Magdalena Mora
contrast the characterization of the protagonists in the two novels. Sherman Eoff
finds similarities between Emma’s and Ana’s search for a more human God
through amorous relationships. Gonzalo Sobejano goes into greater detail on
textual overlaps in his insightful essays “De Clarín a Flaubert” and “Madame
Bovary en La Regenta,” which are reprised in his book Clarín en su obra ejemplar.
Elizabeth Sánchez compares the destabilizing strategies in the two novels and
NOTES 249
contrasts the relation between the heroine and her world in Flaubert and Clarín
(“Beyond the Realist Paradigm”). In a book-length study of the two novels,
Préneron Vinche has argued that Clarín rejects Flaubert’s demoralizing and
romantic tendencies and the corruption of French culture by parodying
Madame Bovary in La Regenta, which defends “traditional Spanish ideology”
(12). As will become clear in the analyses that follow, this portrayal of Clarín as
a Bible-thumping xenophobe is unnuanced and inaccurate. Other related stud-
ies include: Agudiez; Arroyo de López-Rey; Correa; Hernández; and Núñez,
Sainz, and Samblancat.
3. On the digressive, nonlinear language in La Regenta, see Hazel Gold’s
“Literature in a Paralytic Mode,” particularly 61–62. I do not accept, however,
Gold’s view that these textual features have a transgressive function in the
novel. As I argued in the previous chapter, the indifferentiating and self-
proliferating discourses of Vetusta are rather the means by which the true
revolutionary project of the work is foiled and contained.
4. As Michael Nimetz observes, “Obdulia is a monstruous desdoblamiento
[doubling] of Ana” (249).
5. In the criticism of La Regenta, Saturnino Bermúdez has often been interpreted
as a stand-in for Fermín de Pas because of his clerical appearance and man-
nerisms. Michael Nimetz describes him as “a doubling of De Pas” (249), a
view shared by Rogers (88–89) and Sieburth (“Interpreting La Regenta” 281).
The allusion to Flaubert, however, aligns Saturnino with the seducer. Several
critics have recognized the parallelism between Saturnino and the seducer. See,
for example, López (88) and Gullón (128).
6. In this reading, I differ from Joan Ramón Resina, who writes that “Ana can-
not resort to the memory of her mother except in the form of an interdiction
on her own sexuality. Remembering the Italian dressmaker stirs up shame, and
the very love Ana feels for her feeds the pathos of self-coercion” (237). Ana’s
reflections on her mother inspire not shame but rather indignation at society
(as in her reflections in Chapter 3) or solidarity with its victims (as in the
Boulevard scene in Chapter 9). Ultimately, it is this reaction that is the cata-
lyst for Ana’s revolutionary project with Fermín.
7. As María Cruz Toledano García observes, Emma’s readings increase her
“personal appetites” whereas Ana’s are too eclectic to push her in one direction
or another and actually serve to repress her desires later in life (791).
8. Diane Urey has argued that Ana projects onto Augustine’s text: “Ana hears the
voice como si, as if it were Augustine’s, but it is really her own . . . the apparent
lack of distance between Ana’s discourse and that of Augustine is an
optical illusion. An invisible distance always separates Ana from the presence
of the other that she seeks” (35). This explanation, however, cannot account
for the fact that Ana reproduces Augustine’s epiphany before she even reads
about it. Clarín does not ironize this moment of Ana’s experience, which
seems to transcend the divide between text and world. Nor does he represent
Augustine (as Jo Labanyi claims) as “a negative influence on Ana,” which
heightens her awareness of original sin (Gender 238). The passage Ana reads
in this scene is not Augustine’s condemnation of carnal love but rather his
250 NOTES
description of his epiphany and conversion and of his mother’s impact on his
inner life. The experience of reading the Confessions is represented not as a
harmful influence but as one of the catalysts of Ana’s revolutionary project, her
attempt to restore meaning and solidarity to Vetustan life.
9. In her excellent piece on the treatment of St. Theresa in La Regenta, Noël Valis
draws an apt comparison between Clarín’s heroine and the description of
St. Theresa at the beginning of George Eliot’s Middlemarch: “Here and there is
born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs
after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances,
instead of centering in some long-recognized deed” (cited in Valis, “Hysteria”
341). As Valis argues, Clarín’s treatment of the heroine and her relation with St.
Augustine and St. Theresa is closer to this ideal than to the psychologizing read-
ings of the saint that were popular in the period in which he wrote.
10. Through this analysis, I seek to contest Diane Urey’s conclusions about Ana’s
reading. According to Urey, “The danger for Ana is not when she reads with-
out comprehension . . . but when she seems to find an already existent reality
in the words that she reads” (33). Urey’s example of the former is Ana’s read-
ing of the pious manual in Chapter 3, and her example of the latter is Ana’s
reading during what I have called her second phase. As I will attempt to show
in this analysis, however, Ana is threatened not by her identification with her
reading but rather by the meaningless writing she and the Vetustans project
upon the world. It is precisely when she revels in insignificant discourse, lan-
guage without meaning, that she is most vulnerable.
11. In my reading, I disagree with James Mandrell’s assertion that Ana’s poetry
“brings her closer to a mystical union with the Logos” (“Malevolent
Insemination” 21) and with Gonzalo’s Sobejano’s view of Ana’s writing as an
idealized form of expression (“La inspiración de Ana Ozores”). This epiphanic
experience is induced only by Ana’s reading.
12. My reading of Chapter 27 departs considerably from that of Gonzalo
Sobejano (“La inspiración de Ana Ozores”), who reads it as an idyllic interlude
that models a different ending for the novel. Though Clarín does suggest a
tranquil, country life, he also emphasizes the artificiality of the space as well as
Ana’s frivolity and self-involvement.
13. This crucial distinction has been overlooked in Clarín criticism, which tends
to argue either that both activities are negative (e.g., Archer 352) or that they
are positive (e.g., Sobejano, “La inspiración de Ana Ozores”).
14. In his seminal study of Galdós, Stephen Gilman observed how Don Quixote
mediated Clarín’s reception of Flaubert. La Regenta answers, “Not the simple
question of what an Emma would have been like in priest-ridden Spain rather
than in Yonville, which would at best have resulted in a Doña Perfecta-like
novel of some sort, but rather how could her quixotism be recreated in Spanish
provincial terms” (166). His conclusions about Clarín’s answer to these ques-
tions, however, are disputable. Gilman believes that Galdós in Fortunata y
Jacinta reworked the Cervantine subtext of La Regenta in order to teach Clarín
that Don Quixote’s “windmill jousting is eventually absorbed by a higher and
nobler variety of incitation” (170). As is clear in the connection between
NOTES 251
Ana Ozores’s reading and her social project, however, this “lesson” is already
implicit in Alas’s novel.
15. On the Bonafoux-Clarín controversy, see Martínez Cachero.
16. This scene has generated a considerable bibliography within La Regenta criti-
cism. See Ignacio López, Carlos Javier García, and James Mandrell. On
Clarín’s insistence on theatricality in the rest of the novel, see Roberto
Sánchez’s studies.
17. As the vanguard writer Ramón Pérez de Ayala later observed, “Every Spaniard
knew [Don Juan Tenorio] before seeing it for the first time. That is to say, that
he never really sees it for the first time. From his earliest years, much before
going to the theatre, we hear allusions, paraphrases, jokes at the expense of the
Tenorio. This means that no Spaniard has a personal experience, a virgin and
emotional experience of the Tenorio” (cited in Mandrell, “Nostalgia” 47; my
translation).
18. In aligning Ana’s epiphanic response to the letter-reading (and later to the sofa
scene) with her religious project and relationship with Fermín, I am departing
from the standard reading of this scene, which interprets it as an anticipation (or
catalyst) of the adultery at the end of the novel: Mandrell, for example, argues
that “Don Juan Tenorio aids and abets Mesía’s aims” (“Malevolent Insemination”
20). This reading is encouraged by some passages in the text. Not only does
Clarín repeatedly refer to Álvaro as Vetusta’s “Tenorio,” but also in Chapter 10
Álvaro seems to filter through the walls of Ana’s house much as Don Juan does
those of Inés’s convent (López 95). Ultimately, however, the text suggests that the
play is more of a “rival” to Mesía than an ally, and Ana’s reaction is very different
from the response that we (and even Fermín) expect. As we will see, Clarín’s rep-
resentation of Ana’s reception of the letter and sofa scenes links it to a series of
epiphanic experiences (such as her reading of St. Augustine and St. Theresa),
which inspire Ana to pursue the ideals Fermín encourages her to realize.
19. Robert Archer has claimed that “[b]y the time Ana sees Zorrilla’s play, the
habit [of making books say what she wishes to hear] is so entrenched that she
can find meaning in it only to the extent that it provides direct analogies with
her own life and allows her to transcend her dull existence on a wave of emo-
tionalism” (353). Although this description does correspond to Ana’s attempt
to force an allegory earlier in the episode, her epiphany during the sofa scene
suggests a direct reaction to what is occurring on stage, which involves com-
passion rather than self-involvement.
20. As Don Juan’s use of language on stage shifts away from Álvaro’s instrumental
model, the latter character ceases to influence Ana, who gives way to a mysti-
cal epiphany that reinforces her spiritual yearnings. James Mandrell has argued
that “Don Álvaro’s rival is not to be found in any text, but, rather, in the guise
of Ana’s confessor” (“Malevolent Insemination” 18), who prohibits her the-
ater-going. The sequence of events, however, suggests that it is the play that
draws Ana away from Álvaro and confirms her spiritual project and brother-
hood with Mesía.
21. After being accused of plagiarizing Madame Bovary in La Regenta, Clarín made
the protagonist of his second novel, Su único hijo, a copyist who aspires to be
252 NOTES
original. Through this figure, he explored the possibility of an originality that

emerges through repetition. For an enlightening discussion of these issues in
Flaubert and Su único hijo, see Noël Valis, “The Perfect Copy.”
22. For a detailed discussion of Clarín’s modes of citation, see Rutherford,
Leopoldo Alas: La Regenta, 58–64. Rutherford refers to this technique as “en-
closed free indirect discourse” (60). Helmut Hatzfeld has also observed how
“Clarín in many cases destroys the ambiguity of [free indirect discourse] with
didactic quotation marks, which attribute the enclosed ideas clearly to inter-
locutors without leaving any part for the narrator” (49).
23. It is perhaps the distinction between these techniques that leads Gonzalo
Sobejano to conclude that “the basic difference between Madame Bovary and
La Regenta is that the former is an anti-romantic novel about a deteriorated ro-
mantic soul, and La Regenta a romantic novel against an anti-romantic world
and in homage to a beautiful and good soul, destroyed but inadaptable”
(“Madame Bovary en La Regenta” 26; my translation). I would argue, however,
that Flaubert’s novel opens itself to an ambiguity that allows not only for an
ironic, anti-romantic reading but also for an interpretation similar to
Sobejano’s view of Clarín’s novel.
24. It is this possibility that Jo Labanyi overlooks in her claim that Ana’s imitation
of devout women cheapens her religious practice (Gender 245) and that Flaubert
and Clarín suggest “the impossibility of articulating experience in words with-
out reducing it to clichés” (Gender 258). Although Clarín, like his French pre-
cursor, is obsessed with commonplaces, he is also fascinated (as Flaubert was as
well) with the idea of a new experience that is expressed through hackneyed
phrases, a form of imitation very different from that of most of the Vetustans.
Labanyi is right to observe that representation is inescapable in the novel. It is
not always the case, however, that “representation constitutes the real” (259).
Throughout the novel, Clarín explores the possibility of an expression in which
the real energy and meaning of the speaker exceed the banality of his phrase.
CHAPTER 5
1. Clarín’s dialogue with Eça has been the subject of several studies: García
Álvarez, Núñez Rey, and López, 81–85.
2. Although Bill Overton observes that “La Regenta looks back to an earlier, eigh-
teenth-century form: the novel of seduction” (199), this connection has not
been explored in the criticism of the novel.
3. An avid reader and well-versed in European literature, Clarín probably knew
Lewis’s novel, which was available in both French and Spanish translations.
Montesinos includes two entries for The Monk in his list of Spanish transla-
tions of foreign novels from 1800–1850: El fraile o historia del Padre Ambrosio
y de la bella Antonia from 1822 and an undated El fraile translated by León
Compte (218).
4. The gothic overtones of the portrayal of Fermín have generally been over-
looked in the criticism of the novel. In The Decadent Vision, Noël Valis notes
NOTES 253
that his “unnatural pallor” recalls that of “gothic types” such as Byron’s or
Radcliffe’s heroes (35–36). Joan Ramón Resina observes “a touch of the
gothic” (242) in the juxtaposition of the Fermín with a bat that touches him
with its “diabolical wings” (322) in Chapter 14.
5. Gilman’s attempt to relate Fermín’s treatment of dying Sor Teresa to Vautrin’s
of Esther in Balzac’s Splendeurs et misères des courtesanes is unconvincing
because of dissimilarities both in the women’s vocations (the nun versus the
prostitute) and in the men’s motives (Fermín, indifferent to Teresa’s suffering,
follows the rules of the church, whereas Vautrin wishes to deprive Lucien of
his lover). Fermín’s motives and action coincide more clearly with those of
Lewis’s monk, who is similarly merciless in his insistence on church protocol.
6. Jo Labanyi has observed the incestuous overtones of the relationship between
Ana and Fermín but fails to recognize its revolutionary implications or to
distinguish it from that of Ana and Mesía. In her view as in Tanner’s, the bour-
geois novel “[poses] figurative incest as the alternative to adultery” to show
that “the breakdown of distinctions between the social and the natural is
unavoidable” (56). As I have sought to show, however, the distinction between
these two relationships is the key to the political commentary of the novel,
which contrasts the revolutionary potential of the priest who throws off his
monkish fetters with the empty clichés of the writing machine, which drains
political expression of meaning.
7. For a thoughtful consideration of this chapter, see Valis’s “Order and Meaning
in Clarín’s La Regenta.”
8. On the relation between La Regenta and Zola’s novel, see Gonzalo Sobejano’s
“Clarín y el sentimiento de la Virgen,” which contrasts Ana’s affection for the
Virgin with that of Serge Mouret. The criticism of La Regenta has proposed a
number of other models for Clarín’s worldly priest. Extrapolating from the
similarities between Hugo’s and Clarín’s cathedral towers, Noël Valis suggests a
parallelism between Fermín and Claude Frollo in Notre Dame de Paris and
contrasts the former’s “baser ambitions and sexuality” with the latter’s “austere
and intellectual nature” (41). As Gonzalo Sobejano observes, however, Fermín’s
love for Ana is more complex than Frollo’s, and he is carried away by his
passion only when he feels the pangs of jealousy (“La Regenta: de su final a su
finalidad” 708). Sobejano proposes two additional models: Zola’s La conquête de
Plassans (1875) and Eça de Queirós’s O crime do padre Amaro (1875). Neither
Faujas nor Amaro, however, exhibits the sentimental depth of Clarín’s hero:
Faujas merely uses Marthe Rougon (Clarín en su obra ejemplar 137), and Amaro
lacks “that ideal of an integral and redemptive love that makes Ana’s adorer
suffer so” (138; my translations). As Stephen Gilman points out, however, the
portrayal of the town of Plassans did have a considerable influence on
La Regenta: it is “a far more exact prefiguration of Vetusta than Galdós’s
Orbajosa, Balzac’s Tours, or Flaubert’s Yonville” (177). Less convincing, however,
is Gilman’s attempt to connect Fermín with Balzac’s Vautrin, who at the end of
Les illusions perdues and in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes takes on the guise
of a Spanish Jesuit. Although Herrera engages in illicit practices, he lacks
Fermín’s spirituality and never suffers the same repression and frustrations.
254 NOTES
9. Although the parallelisms between Santos-Pompeyo, Sebastião-Julião, and

Dussardier-Sénécal have gone unobserved, several critics have recognized the
importance of L’éducation sentimentale for understanding La Regenta. Gonzalo
Sobejano has observed that Clarín’s project might be considered a fusion of
Flaubert’s in Madame Bovary (the examination of a conscience) and in
L’éducation sentimentale (the study of society of a given time) (Clarín en su obra
ejemplar 125). In a number of publications, moreover, Sobejano has identified
Clarín’s novel as the first work to introduce in Spain the “romanticism of
disillusionment” that Lukács associates with L’éducation sentimentale, a point
developed as well by Gemma Roberts. On thematic similarities between the
two novels, see Sobejano, “De Flaubert a Clarín,” 26–28.
10. The classic study of the structure of La Regenta is Emilio Alarcos Llorach’s
“Notas a La Regenta.” In what follows, I will add to his insights the suggestion
that the novel doubles back on itself beginning in Chapter 23.
11. The scenes in which Fermín reproaches Ana in the two segments resemble one
another in their ending. After Fermín speaks to Ana in the garden in Chapter
17, Petra (on her own prompting) lies to Frígilis to hide the fact that Fermín and
Ana have met alone at so late an hour. In Chapter 23, Petra’s religious counter-
part, Petronila (note the similarity between their names), adopts a similar role:
to hide the heroine’s relationship with Fermín, she lies to his fellow priests and
tells them that he is alone in her bedroom (he is actually with Ana).
12. In his edition of La Regenta, Gonzalo Sobejano observes a similarity in the de-
scription of the two funerals (II, 265, fn. 39) as does Helmut Hatzfeld in his
“La imitación estilística de Madame Bovary (1857) en La Regenta (1884),” 45.
Not only is the funeral similar but so is the vigil over the heroine’s corpse. Just
as the liberal pharmacist Homais and the priest Bournisien neglect the de-
ceased in their sparring, so the Vetustans enact the battle between Science and
Religion outside Santos’s chamber and disregard the suffering individual
within. With both Homais and Pompeyo, moreover, the theological and
scientific discourses are continually confused. In Madame Bovary, Homais’s
article about Charles’s operation incorporates Biblical diction. (“Now indeed
we can proclaim that the blind shall see, the deaf shall hear and the lame shall
walk!” 209.) Pompeyo, similarly, cannot avoid the images and concepts of
Christianity: “[H]e believed that ‘he who is upright in spirit—for want of a
better word—should also be upright in body’” (442). His constant lecturing
is described as “theologizing” (446), and one of his supporters appeals to
“Science—which is, in short, my religion” (504). On their deathbed, both
Santos and Emma are neglected, eclipsed by the circular discourses of the writ-
ing machine.
13. As Sergio Beser observes, Clarín considered this the principal failing of all of
the Spanish uprisings of the nineteenth century: “For him, the weakness of
Spanish radicalism lies in the incommunication between the masses and the
liberal minorities” (407; my translation).
14. Commenting on the similarity between the two maidservants, Gonzalo
Sobejano has observed that whereas Eça is more concerned than Clarín by the
inhuman conditions of the working class and the problem of the proletariat,
NOTES 255
the Spanish author gives us a completer sense of “what [Petra] might have
been” had circumstances been otherwise (“Semblantes” 528–529). I will
expand upon these observations in this section by studying the maidservants’
placement in the structure of the two novels.
15. As Valis points out, Petra introduces the threat of “a world turned upside
down, of hierarchical values ready to crash apart at any moment—at least from
the point of view of the Spanish bourgeoisie, already fearful of lower-class en-
croachments” (“Order and Meaning” 253).
16. For a different perspective on this bodily economy, see Labanyi, Gender
225–238. Labanyi diagnoses both Mesía’s excessive expenditure and Fermín’s
containment as pathological conditions—unhealthy states discouraged by
nineteenth-century medical wisdom. It is important, however, to recognize
the symbolic function of the portrayal of the two men, which is informed by
literary as well as medical conventions.
17. The connection between Petra and the feuilletonesque has been observed in
passing by a number of critics. Gonzalo Sobejano, for example, observes “the
frequency with which Petra appears at the end of the chapter expressing
disquieting suspicions or planning maneuvers that leave the reader in suspense”
(“Semblantes” 527). In her study of melodrama in La Regenta, Laura Rivkin
argues that the feuilleton, as wielded by Petra, ultimately “undoes the reader of
Calderón’s high art and suggests to us that in the struggle of the literary fittest
in Clarín’s Vetusta, the debased fiction survives” (196). As I will suggest, the
implications of this victory are not only aesthetic but also political.
18. Stephanie Sieburth describes this shift in the novel as “the triumph of the
folletín. The narrator no longer records Ana’s thoughts. He now focuses on
the surface, on the visible, and the audible. Paragraphs are extremely short, as
in the folletín” (“La Regenta as Quixotic Novel” 325).
19. In Rutherford’s translation, Frígilis appears as “Frillity.”
20. The figure of Frígilis has generated considerable debate within Clarín criti-
cism. Whereas early critics such as Baquero Goyanes and Alarcos Llorach
tended to regard him as an embodiment of “the moral” of the story (in the
words of the former, he is “the thesis or moral made flesh” 211; my transla-
tion), Rutherford attacks him for a “purity” that is “egotistical and hurtful to
others” (“Fortunato y Frígilis” 252).
21. These hints about Frígilis’s sexuality suggest that he is not (as early critics such
as Baquero Goyanes or Alarcos Llorach regarded him) an emblem of authen-
ticity, truth, purity, and vitality.
22. Modernist fiction, for example, often relates the sexual ambivalence of the bach-
elor with the stylistic ambiguities of the work in which he appears. As Eve
Sedgwick has shown in “The Beast in the Closet,” a study of Henry James’s story
“The Beast in the Jungle,” the bachelor is an elusive figure around whom “male
homosexual panic was acted out” (188). For Sedgwick, it is this panic that
underlies the elliptical style and seemingly empty language with which James
Marcher is described. The modernism of Henry James’s text—its elusiveness, the
nothingness to which it seems to point—is inseparable from the predicament of
the urban bachelor who must remain in the closet.
256 NOTES
23. Riffaterre identifies syllepsis with the pun (629).

24. As Dale Pratt astutely observes, grafting contrasts with sexual union in that it
does not blur the traits of two beings in its offspring but rather maintains their
differences within the conjunction: “To graft a cutting of one plant onto
another is to retain the essential characteristics of both plants; it does not
result in hybrid fruit and seeds. A graft of a pear tree onto an apple tree makes
an interesting sight—pears and apples growing on the same tree (but not the
same branch)—but the fruits are still apples and pears.” (137)
25. In this reading, my argument coincides with that of Dale Pratt in considering
Frígilis the model not of a “moral” or of nature but as the figuration of a type
of language use. Pratt suggests that “Frígilis is the artistic image of scientific
language in a heteroglot world” (140). I view Frígilis as illustrating not a
specific discourse but rather the coexistence of discourses.
EPILOGUE
1. Sartre’s view of Flaubert echoed that of Edmund White, who as early as 1933,
observed how Flaubert, in his later work (his cataloguing of clichés), ceased to
attack the bourgeoisie and “[shifted] his complaint to the incompetence of
humanity” (87).
2. Reflecting on Flaubert’s historical fiction, Fredric Jameson makes a similar
point when he urges us to consider not the artist’s representation of history but
rather his “libidinal investment in the past” (“Flaubert’s Libidinal Historicism”
76).
3. In The Order of Mimesis, Christopher Prendergast similarly defends the “literal
interpretation of Flaubert’s most banal phrases and sentences,” a reading “in
which the sceptical and ironic positions are usurped” (207).
4. Examples of this tendency include the discussions of Madame Bovary in
Tanner, Overton, and Judith Armstrong.
5. On the relation between the realist novel and sentimental fiction, see Chapter
2 of Cohen’s The Sentimental Education of the Novel.
6. On the social function of domestic fiction, see Chapter 1 of Armstrong’s
Desire and Domestic Fiction.
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Index
Adorno, Theodor W., 241n2 Ana’s childhood, 57, 103–4,

adultery plot, 2–5, 9–10, 12–13, 107, 108, 114, 127, 134,
15, 33, 96, 175–6, 224, 136–49, 159, 189, 212; Ana’s
236, 241n3, 242n5, 243n10, confession, 113–14, 165; Ana’s
243n13 diary, 145–46; Ana’s
Agudiez, Juan Ventura, 249n2 examination of conscience
Agulhon, Maurice, 20 (Chapter 3), 105–112,133,
Alarcos Llorach, Emilio, 254n10, 134; Ana’s tears, 59, 114–15,
255nn20–21 134, 137, 140, 159, 161,
Alas, Leopoldo (Clarín) 248n3, 249n6, 250n10; Ana’s
La Regenta, 2, 3, 7–9, 10–11, 12–13, writing, 142–47, 148, 155,
33–6, 38–64, 66, 103–23, 159, 160, 166, 250n11;
125–34, 136–53, 155–73, Boulevard scene, 59, 114–15,
175–204, 207–13, 220, 222, 142, 161, 249n6; cathedral
224–5, 238; Álvaro Mesía, 34, tour, 123, 125–30, 132–4, 146,
35, 36, 44–51, 53–5, 58, 62–3, 147, 149, 152, 155, 164, 173;
97, 103, 105, 106–13, 117, cathedral tower, 125–7, 130,
119–21, 122, 131–2, 133, 145, 132, 134, 138, 173, 244n10;
146, 147, 148, 149, 152, Celedonio, 63–64, 246n18;
155–8, 159, 160–3, 169, 181, dramatic arc, 177, 180–81,
191, 199, 200–2, 208, 211, 195; Fermín de Pas, 34–6,
220, 238, 244n7, 248n3, 38–43, 50–2, 53–5, 58–9, 103,
255n16, 251n18, 251n20, 105, 111, 115, 117–18, 119,
253n6; Amadeo Bedoya, 121–3, 125–7, 131, 137, 141,
108–9; Ana Ozores, 34–6, 145, 146, 163, 176–9, 181–90,
47–8, 53, 57–64, 103–15, 191–7, 200–1, 210–12, 238,
117–19, 121–3, 131, 133, 244n10, 249n5, 253n6;
136–50, 152–3, 155–69, 172, Fermín’s balcony scene
175–7, 179, 181–5, 191–7, (Chapter 15), 35, 36, 38–44,
198–204, 207–12, 222, 238; 50, 110, 159, 168, 176, 187,
Ana’s balcony scene (Chapter 189, 193; Fortunato Camoirán,
16), 36, 110–113, 133, 155, 51–2, 53, 163, 170; Frígilis
162, 168, 172, 176, 248n4; (Frillity), 148, 183, 184–5,
268 INDEX
203–4, 207–13, 254n11, allegory, 3, 26, 66, 67, 73, 78, 82,
255n19–21, 256n25; Germán, 119, 177, 243n13, 246n3
57, 62, 107, 108, 111, 114, Allen, Woody
138, 139, 140, 141, 167, 189, “The Kugelmass Episode”, 1–2,
248n3; marchioness de 6–7, 13
Vegallana’s pun, 104–5, 112, Amadeus of Savoy, 107, 108–9
130, 211; Nazarene procession, Amann, Elizabeth, 245n15
35, 57–63, 103, 131, 137, 146, Anderson, Benedict, 77
158, 173, 181, 182, 189, 192, anticlericalism, 43, 195–7
193, 194, 195, 200, 211, Archer, Robert, 250n13, 251n19
245n15, 245n15; Obdulia Arcipreste de Hita
Fandiño, 34, 104, 123, 126, Libro de buen amor, 121
131, 134, 173, 249n4; Paco Armstrong, Judith, 241n2, 256n4
Vegallana, 35, 36, 44–50, 78, Armstrong, Nancy, 226–7, 256n6
131, 149, 157, 191; Paula’s life Arroyo de López-Rey, Justa, 249n2
story, 119–121; Petra, 175, Augustine, see St. Augustine
177, 182–3, 190, 198–9,
202–4, 254n11, 255nn14–15, bachelor, representation of, 204–10,
255n17, 255n15; Petronila, 213, 255n22
182, 192, 254n11; Pompeyo baciyelmo, 90–1
Guimarán, 120, 177, 190–6, Bakhtin, Mikhail, 242n8
198, 254n12; Ramona, Balzac, Honoré de, 66, 227, 232, 235,
119–121; Santos Barinaga, 236, 253n5, 253n8
35–6, 39–43, 50, 58, 60–1, 78, La comèdie humaine, 78
131, 141, 146, 159, 177, Eugenie Grandet, 66
190–5, 198, 254n12; Santos’s Les illusions perdues, 227, 253n8
funeral, 60–61, 192, 193, 195, Père Goriot, 236
196, 254n12; Saturnino Splendeurs et misères des courtisans,
Bermúdez, 126, 128, 130, 253n5, 253n8
132–4, 146, 151, 222, 249n5; La vieille fille, 55
scenes with children, 59, Baquero Goyanes, Mariano,
114–19, 161; seduction scene, 255nn20–21
36, 41, 54, 110, 133; Sor Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules, 244n8
Teresa, 179, 181, 193; Teresina, Barthes, Roland, 8, 9, 10, 19, 22, 215,
181, 199; theater scene, 39–40, 216, 218, 228
127, 150–3, 156–65, 167, 168, Bastiat, Frédéric, 27
194; tree and plant imagery, Basto, Claudio, 66, 241n1
138, 139, 140, 148, 184–86, Baudelaire, Charles, 5, 168
194, 201, 204, 206, 208, 209, Bécarud, Jean, 244n11
210, 211, 212; Víctor Belot, Adolphe
Quintanar, 62, 151, 155, 161, Mademoiselle Giraud, ma femme, 74
183, 207, 208–9; Visita Olías Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jacques
de Cuervo, 34, 104 Henri
Su único hijo, 251n21 Paul et Virginie, 135
INDEX 269
Bernheimer, Charles, 56 Chaves, Castelo Branco, 246n2

Beser, Sergio, 254n13 Ciplijauskaité, Biruté, 241n2
bêtise, 90, 92, 133–4, 165, 216, Clarín. See Alas, Leopoldo
218–19, 221, 222, 223, 246n18 class tourism, 20–21, 28, 46, 62, 81,
bildungsroman, 7, 176, 187, 223–4, 109, 160
227, 229–32, 234–8 Clavería, Carlos, 242n7,
Bonafoux y Quintero, Luis, 150, 248(Chap. 4)n2
241n1, 251n15 clichés, 5, 8, 18, 34, 44, 49, 76, 82,
Bonaparte, Louis-Napoléon (Napoléon 89, 92, 97, 99, 102, 113, 123,
III), 11, 12, 30, 53–6, 63–4, 83, 137, 146, 147, 151, 152, 155,
87, 89, 94, 100–1, 109, 191, 165–9, 171, 173, 196–7, 210,
197, 199–200, 217, 237 213, 216–17, 218–25, 233, 237,
Bonaparte, Princess Mathilde, 54 252n24. See also genres versus
Bonapartism, 12, 54–55, 94, 100, clichés
101, 103, 162, 163, 169, 170, Cohen, Margaret, 176, 202, 224, 229,
172, 198, 200, 202, 237, 235, 256n5
244n11, 245n13 coincidence, 43, 159, 164, 244n5
Bovaryism, 6, 31, 32, 47, 60, 134, Coleman, Alexander, 246n2
148 commonplaces. See clichés
bras de fer, 219, 223 Correa, Gustavo, 249n2
Brooks, Peter, 40, 184 courtesan. See prostitute
Brummell, Beau, 244n9 Culler, Jonathan, 7, 216, 217, 218,
247n13
Cabral, António, 246n1
camellias, 22, 23, 24, 26, 40 dame aux camèlias, La (Dumas fils), 7,
Cañete, Manuel and José Casares 10, 12, 13 16–35, 37, 41, 43–5,
Beltrán y la marquesa de Pompadour, 47, 49–50, 51–2, 54–5, 57, 61,
62, 109 63, 68, 78, 83, 148, 157, 171–3,
Cánovas del Castillo, Antonio, 224
244n11 dandy, 48–9, 53, 244n8
Castilho, António Feliciano de, 27 Darwinism, 184, 185, 204, 210
Cenceño, 129–30, 133, 158, 222 de Grandpré, Chantal, 86, 247n11
Cervantes, Miguel de Deleuze, Gilles, 50
Don Quixote de la Mancha, 15–16, de Man, Paul, 41, 42
90, 148, 250n14 de Musset, Alfred, 27
Chambers, Ross, 167, 168, 216, Denommé, Robert T., 247n11
217–18, 221, 247n13 Derrida, Jacques, 17, 52
Champfleury, 216 dialogue, 7–9, 11–13, 66, 69,
character systems, 67, 75–6, 82–5 86, 127, 131, 160, 168,
charivari, 90–3, 173 224, 225, 235, 242n9,
Charnon-Deutsch, Lou, 245n14 243n13
Chateaubriand, François-René de, 76, divorce, illegality of, 3
135, 140, 145, 149, 154, 217, Donizetti, Gaetano
222 Lucia di Lammermoor, 150–52
270 INDEX
Dumas fils, Alexandre 67–8, 81, 83–5, 87–9, 172,

La dame aux camèlias, 7, 10, 12, 13 190, 197, 204, 206–9, 210;
16–35, 37, 41, 43–5, 47, seduction scene, 36–7, 40–1,
49–50, 51–2, 54–5, 57, 61, 70–1, 74; slavery, 80–1, 247n8
63, 68, 78, 83, 148, 157, El Cid, 59
171–3, 224; viewing at the Eliot, George
auction, 20–22, 26, 29, 33, Middlemarch, 250n9
46, 49, 160, 172 embodiment. See incarnation
Duplessis, Marie, 20 Eoff, Sherman, 248(Chap. 4)n2
epanadiplosis, 128
Eagleton, Terry, 101 eroticism, 10, 62, 65, 103, 104–5,
Eça de Queirós, José Maria 136, 140, 194, 201–2, 207
O crime do padre Amaro, 253n8 exhuming, 23–4, 33, 42, 45, 48, 50,
O primo Basílio, 2, 3, 7–9, 10–11, 54
12–13, 15–16, 26–41, 55–6,
65–90, 92–4, 102–3, 113, Faust legend, 38, 39–41, 43–4, 159,
171–2, 175–7, 190, 197–200, 201
204, 206–10, 238: Acácio, Fernández Cifuentes, Luis, 161
76–8, 80, 82, 102, 210, Feuillet, Octave, 48, 160
247n8; Basílio, 27–8, 31, 37, feuilleton, 202–3, 255nn17–18
38, 65, 68, 69, 70–1, 73–5, Féval, Paul, 28, 79
80, 113; black-and-white February Days, 20, 21, 30, 52, 135,
imagery, 80–1; blackmail, 243n2. See also Revolution of
28–29, 79, 83, 175, 176, 200, 1848
206; Castro, 28–29, 56, 83, Figuier, Louis, 27
200, 204; colonial subtext, fille de joie. See prostitute
80–1, 88, 93; death scene, 68, Flaubert, Gustave
89–90, 92–3; Jorge, 27, 38, Dictionnaire des idées reçues, 165,
67–8, 72, 77, 75, 82–5; 218, 219, 220
Juliana, 28–9, 30–1, 38, 68, L’éducation sentimentale, 7, 10, 13,
77–81, 88, 102, 175–7, 20, 21, 56, 67, 85–9, 190–1,
198–9, 201, 206, 209–10, 195, 197–8, 223, 235–6,
247n6, 247n8; Julião, 73, 243n2, 254n9: Dussardier, 67,
77–8, 82, 85, 87–9, 102, 190, 85–9, 190–1, 195, 197,
197, 210, 247n6, 247n8, 247n11; Frédéric Moreau, 56,
247n10; Leopoldina, 27, 29, 86, 87, 197, 236; Sénécal,
36–37, 67–8, 72–4, 83, 84–5; 86–9, 190–1, 195, 197,
Luísa Mendonça, 10, 15–16, 247nn11–12
26–40, 65, 67–85, 89–90, Madame Bovary, 1–11, 13, 15–16,
92–4, 102, 113, 172, 175–6, 29, 31–3, 56, 66, 67, 68–77,
197–8, 199–200, 206, 208, 79–80, 89–93, 95–103,
244n3, 247n6, 247n8; Luísa 126–32, 134–40, 143–4,
versus Emma, 32–33, 67–73, 145–56, 163–73, 175–7, 190,
244n3; Sebastião, 30–31, 38, 204–7, 213, 215–38: beggar or
INDEX 271
blind man, 91–92, 165, 173; Franklin, Benjamin, 76

Binet, 127, 155, 164, 204–7, free indirect style, 71, 72, 157, 159,
213; cathedral tour, 12, 102, 166–8, 172, 216, 217–18, 234,
126–30, 134, 164, 173, 222; 252n22
Charles Bovary, 72, 75, 90–91, French Revolution, 11, 13, 38, 43,
150–1, 176, 205, 216; Charles 109, 186, 196–7, 201, 235–8,
Bovary’s hat, 90–2, 165, 173, 243n12
247n13; Comices, 74, 95,
97–100, 101, 102, 103, 104, Gaillard, Françoise, 219–20, 223
105, 112, 113, 225–26, 230, Galdós. See Pérez Galdós, Benito
234; death scene, 68, 89–90, García Álvarez, María Teresa Cristina,
91–3, 173; cracked cauldron, 252n1
231, 237; Emma Bovary, 1–2, García, Carlos Javier, 251n16
15–16, 29, 31–3, 47–8, 69–77, Garelick, Rhonda, 244n9
79–80, 89–93, 95, 102, 122, gender roles, 72–3
126–8, 134–40, 143–4, 145–8, genre, 23–4, 202, 223, 224, 225–6,
150, 152–6, 163–9, 175–6, 235, 238; dialectical approach to,
205–6, 220–2, 225–38; 224
Emma’s childhood, 134–40, genres vs. clichés, 223, 224, 225
143–4, 145–7, 152–53; Geyer-Ryan, Helga, 241n2, 241n3
Emma’s debts, 29–30, 176, Gilman, Stephen, 9, 242n9, 250n14,
228; Emma’s desire, 220, 221, 253n5, 253n8
223, 226, 230, 234, 236–37; Girodon, Jean, 89–90, 242n7, 246n2
forest seduction, 69–71, 231, Glorious Revolution, 11, 13, 56, 108,
232, 234; historicizing 196
approaches to, 215–220; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
historical referents, omission of, Die Wahlverwandtschaften, 5
215, 235; Homais, 75–7, Faust, 37, 38, 187–90, 224
254n12; Léon, 56, 80, 102, Wilhelm Meister, 227
126–7, 150, 153–4, 156, 163, Gold, Hazel, 243nn10–11, 249n3
225–37; Lestiboudois, 176, Goldmann, Lucien, 242n4
204; Lieuvain, 97–100, 102; gothic novel, 177, 182–3, 186, 223,
opera scene, 150–5, 158–59, 224, 252n4
164; provinces, treatment of, Gounod, Charles
99–100; Rodolphe, 70–1, Faust, 35, 36, 37–40, 43, 187, 189
73–4, 75, 80, 95–6, 97–100, grafting, 148, 208, 210–13, 256n24
102, 112, 113, 133, 150, 170, Greimas, A. J., 84, 247n9
225–37; rolling machine, 237; Guillory, John, 96, 101
Rodolphe vs. Léon, 225–37; guillotine, 182, 203
taxi cab, 102, 155, 164, 231; Gullón, Germán, 246n18, 249n5
temporality in, 32–33, 228–29;
urban spaces 139, 143, 231 Handelman, Susan, 211
Fontane, Theodor Hatzfeld, Helmut, 248(Chap. 4)n2,
Effi Briest, 3 252n22, 254n12
272 INDEX
Hawthorne, Nathaniel Kierkegaard, Søren, 15

Scarlet Letter, The, 3 King Amadeus, 108–9
Hegel, Georg Wilhem Friedrich, 77 King Sebastian, 85
hermeneutic versus proairetic codes, Kipnis, Laura, 241n3
202, 228–9 kitsch, 90, 92, 136, 139, 149
Hernández, Nicolas, Jr., 249n2 Kristeva, Julia, 8, 9–10
homology, 4, 10, 101, 242n4 Kronik, John, 246n18
homosocial relationships, 83–85, Kundera, Milan, 136
207–9 Labanyi, Jo, 57, 241n2, 243n10,
Hugo, Victor, 217 243n11, 243n1, 247n1, 248n3,
1793, 100, 123, 130 249n8, 252n24, 253n6, 255n16
Notre Dame de Paris, 129–30,
253n8 LaCapra, Dominick, 8, 165, 217–18,
Husserl, Edmund, 223 235
Laffitte, G., 248(Chap. 4)n2
identification, 58, 135–38, 140–43, Lamartine, 16, 76
154, 157–8, 159–60, 164, Leckie, Barbara, 243n13
166–8, 221 lesbianism, 74, 85
incarnation, 52–3, 55, 163, 170–2, Levin, Harry, 148
177, 193, 197, 198, 211, Lewis, Matthew
244–45n12 The Monk, 120–1, 177–90, 194,
indifferentiation, 23–4, 46, 48–9, 51, 196, 201, 224, 252n3
55, 64, 82, 92–6, 102–3, 118, liberal triennium of 1820–1823 in
119, 122, 127, 130, 131, 132–4, Spain, 243n12
142, 149–50, 164, 169, 173, Liberty, allegorical figure of, 20, 21,
200, 210, 222, 233, 234, 26, 59
244–45n12, 245n4 lieux communs. See clichés
influence, 6–7, 8, 31, 221, 222 López, Ignacio, 249n5, 251n16,
intertextuality, 8–9, 12–13, 60, 89, 251n18, 252n1
211, 221, 215–17, 224 Louis-Napoléon, see Bonaparte,
Louis-Napoléon
Jackson, Robert H., 244n11 Luhmann, Baz, 19
James, Henry Lukács, Georg, 10, 67, 212, 245n16,
“The Beast in the Jungle”, 255n22 254n9
Jameson, Fredric, 55, 67, 223, 224,
247n9, 256n2 Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria,
Jarnaes, Johan, 246n3 65–7, 207, 209, 241n1, 246n2,
John of the Cross, see St. John of the 246n4
Cross Madame Bovary, 1–11, 13, 15–16, 29,
Johnson, Barbara, 216 31–3, 56, 66, 67, 68–77, 79–80,
July Monarchy, 235–6, 238 89–93, 95–103, 126–32, 134–40,
July Revolution of 1830, 100 143–4, 145–56, 163–73, 175–7,
June Days, 10, 17, 20, 52, 197. See 190, 204–7, 213, 215–38. See
also Revolution of 1848 also Flaubert, Gustave
INDEX 273
magic lantern, 248n9 natura naturata, natura naturans,

Mandrell, James, 250n11, 131–2, 145
251nn16–18, 251n20 Neoplatonism, 152
Marianne, 20 Nerval, Gérard de, 168
marital laws, 3, 96 newspaper reading, 76–7
Martí-López, Elisa, 242n8 Nimetz, Michael, 245n17, 249nn4–5
Martínez Cachero, José María, 241n1, Núñez, Carmen, 249n2
251n15 Núñez Rey, Concepción, 252n1
Martos, Cristino, 243n12
Marx, Karl, 17–18, 25, 53–4, 100–1, Oleza, Juan, 244n11
198, 236, 244n11 Overton, Bill, 3, 241n2, 242n2,
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis 242n5, 252n2, 256n4
Bonaparte, 17–18, 25, 53–4,
100, 244n11 Pardo Bazán, Emilia, 8–9, 66, 241n1
Mary Magdalene, 51–2, 62, 92, 137 Paris Commune, 52
Matlock, Jann, 5, 19–20, 241n2, 244n6 passing, 81–82
Mehlman, Jeffrey, 12, 54–5, 100–1, Paulson, Ronald, 109, 186, 187
122, 128, 130 Pérez de Ayala, Ramón, 251n17
melodrama, 40, 78, 82, 136, 150, Pérez Firmat, Gustavo, 157
152, 203, 244n5 Pérez Galdós, Benito, 8–9, 66, 99,
metaphor, 211, 212, 232–33, 137 242n9, 250n14
metonymy, 211, 212, 232–33, 235 Doña Perfecta, 99, 250n14
Meyerbeer, Giacomo Fortunata y Jacinta, 250n14
L’Africaine, 81 performative versus representational
mimesis, 7, 12, 171 language, 162, 189, 190, 237
Molière, 155 petite bourgeoisie, 19
Montesinos, José, 6, 252n3 plagiarism, accusations of, 2, 10, 66–7,
Mora, Magdalena, 248(Chap. 4)n2 241n1, 246n1, 251n21
Moreto, Agustín Plato, 9
El desdén con el desdén, 152 Porter, Dennis, 247n13
Moretti, Franco, 224, 227 Pratt, Dale J., 256nn24–25
Mourão, Cleonice P. B., 246n2 Prendergast, Christopher, 223, 256n3
Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban, 129–31, primo Basílio, O, 2, 3, 7–9, 10–11,
133, 158, 166, 222 12–13, 15–16, 26–41, 55–6,
Musset, Alfred de, 27 65–90, 92–4, 102–3, 113,
171–2, 175–7, 190, 197–200,
Napoleon I, 56, 109 204, 206–10, 238. See also Eça
Napoleon III, see Bonaparte, Louis- de Queirós, José Maria
Napoléon Princess Mathilde, see Bonaparte,
naturalism, 138, 144, 171, 182, 210, Princess Mathilde
212, 242n6 projection, 39, 43, 48, 56, 128–31,
nature, 85, 136–37, 138, 142, 143–5, 143, 144, 134, 146–47, 153,
148, 184–85, 204, 209, 230, 157–58, 159, 160, 163, 166,
233, 245n17 167, 172, 193
274 INDEX
prosopopoeia or personification, 41–3, Liberty, 20–21, 26, 33, 59, 105,

50, 123, 141, 146–7 171, 200, 202; Tuileries, storming
prostitute, prostitution, 10, 18–28, of the, 20, 21, 26, 29, 30
29–30, 32, 33, 35, 38, 44–6, Revolution of 1868 (Glorious
48–9, 52, 55, 57, 60–1, 63, 78, Revolution), 11, 13, 56, 108,
79, 103, 105, 107, 108, 160, 196, 243n12
169, 171–2, 180, 192–3, 195, revolution of 1968, student, 9, 13
200, 202, 224, 231–32, 237 Riffaterre, Michael, 211, 216–17,
243n2, 244n4, 244n6 256n23
Pylades and Orestes, 207–8 Rivkin, Laura, 244n5, 255n17
Roberts, Gemma, 245n16, 254n9
Quental, Antero de, 73 Robinson, Paul, 110
quixotism, 15–16, 32, 38, 45, 90, 148, rococó, 132–3
236, 248(Chap. 4)n2, 250n14 Rogers, Edith, 246n18, 249n5
romanticism of disillusionment,
race, 80–2 145n16, 254n9
realist novel, 3, 7–8, 11–12, 66, 143, Rossini, Giacomo
176, 202, 216, 229, 232, 235–6 Il barbiere di Siviglia, 109, 110,
reflectionism, 3, 4, 7, 11, 96, 97, 216, 107, 123
217, 241n1 Stabat Mater, 58–60, 114, 131
Regenta, La, 2, 3, 7–9, 10–11, 12–13, Rothfield, Lawrence, 216–17
33–6, 38–64, 66, 103–23, Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 234
125–34, 136–53, 155–73, La Nouvelle Héloïse, 4–5
175–204, 207–13, 220, 222, Rutherford, John, 167, 248n8,
224–5, 238. See also Alas, 252n22, 255nn19–20
Leopoldo
Reis, Carlos, 246n2 Sade, marquis de, 186
repetition, 2–3, 33, 37, 38, 39, 41, 43, Sainz, Carmen, 249n2
60, 62, 130, 133,152, 153, 158, Samblancat, Neus, 249n2
164, 166, 169, 173, 210, 219, Sánchez, Elizabeth, 243n11,
221–3, 231, 235, 245n15 248(Chap. 4)n2
representation, 4, 7, 9, 11–13, 22, 35, Sánchez-Eppler, Benigno, 248n3
51, 52, 54–5, 61, 66, 90, 96, Sánchez, Roberto, 251n16
100–1, 118, 119, 163, 170–1, sans-culottes, 104–5
173, 198–9, 205, 210, 211, Santiago, Silviano, 246n2, 246n5
212–13, 216, 217, 244–45n12 Sartre, Jean Paul, 216, 218, 236,
Resina, Joan Ramón, 245n17, 256n1
246n18, 249n6, 253n4 Schor, Naomi, 76
Revolution of 1848, 10–11, 12–13, Scott, Sir Walter, 15, 33, 76, 157, 222
17, 19–22, 25–26, 29, 30–1, 32, The Bride of Lammermoor, 10, 152,
33, 37, 44, 51, 52, 55, 56, 86, 153
88, 93, 94, 100, 101, 171, 172, Sedgwick, Eve, 255n22
177, 195–6, 198, 200, 219, 223, sedimentation, 223–4, 225
235–8, 243n2; fille de joie as Segal, Naomi, 242n5
INDEX 275
semiotic rectangle, 84–5, 247n9 Sue, Eugène

sentimental novel, 23, 27, 32, 35, 47, Les mystères de Paris, 242n8
176, 191, 198, 202, 224, 226–7, syllepsis, 211–12
229, 230, 232, 234–36, 238
Sérgio, António, 67, 72–3 tableau vivant, 59–61, 200, 245n17
Sieburth, Stephanie, 243n1, 244n12, Tanner, Tony, 3, 4–5, 9–10, 90–1, 96,
245n15, 246n18, 248n2, 101, 127–8, 170, 216, 217,
248nn6–7, 249n5, 255n18 241n2, 242n5, 243n13, 253n6,
simulacrum, 12, 22, 50, 61, 109, 112, 256n4
115, 118, 121, 148, 209, 210, Terdiman, Richard, 217–18, 219
233, 237 Theresa of Avila, see St. Theresa of
Sinclair, Alison, 242n5 Avila
slumming, 28–29, 34–35, 50, 56, 62, Thibaudet, Albert, 215
79–80, 109, 140, 160, 200, 222, Tintoré, María José, 241n1
230, 232 Toledano García, María Cruz, 249n7
Sobejano, Gonzalo, 133, 245n16, Tolstoy, Leo
246n18, 248n4, 248n7, Anna Karenina, 3, 15
248(Chap. 4)nn1–2, tour, 127–8, 131, 134, 149, 155, 164,
250nn11–13, 252n23, 253n8, 170–1, 205, 206, 210, 213, 220
254n9, 254n12, 254n14, 255n17 translation and translating back, 17–19,
social climbing, 21–22, 28, 75, 78–80, 22–25, 28, 31, 32, 40–1, 47, 49,
81, 120, 199 51, 54, 61, 170, 195–7, 198
social contract, 4 trompe l’œil, 45, 48, 51, 55, 108, 131,
Sollors, Werner, 81 133, 149, 160, 163, 244n7
Stabat Mater, 114, 131, 137, 192, turno político, 169, 171, 173, 244n11
194, 220
St. Augustine, 131, 140, 141, 142, Urey, Diane, 245n14, 248n5, 249n8,
146, 147, 159, 160, 164, 167, 250n10
169, 172, 189, 193, 249n8, utopian elements, 33, 172–3, 220,
250n9, 251n18 222–3, 225, 236–8, 244n12
Steegmuller, Francis, 244n3
Stendhal, 235 Valis, Noël, 242n6, 243n1, 244n4,
Le rouge et le noir, 227 245n17, 246n18, 248n7, 250n9,
Stevens, James R., 89, 246n2 252n21, 252n4, 253nn7–8,
St. John of the Cross, 143–44, 155, 255n15
166, 167, 222 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 2
Spanish rendering of the Song of Vendée, 100–1
Songs, 143–44 Venus de Medici, 180
St. Sebastian, 85 Verdi, Giuseppe
St. Theresa of Avila, 16, 115, 118, La Traviata, 19, 22, 27, 31, 35–6,
121, 131, 133, 138, 141–2, 146, 37–9, 40, 41, 42, 43, 54, 57
164, 167, 169, 172, 189, 192, Vinche, Préneron, 249n2
193, 245n17, 248nn6–7, Virgil
250n9, 251n18 Aeneid, 91, 173
276 INDEX
Virgin Mary, 53, 60, 61, 133, 137, 163, 164, 168–71, 173, 199,
140, 142, 144, 145, 170, 181, 200, 202, 205, 210, 211, 220–2,
211 224, 233–5, 238
Voltaire, 76
Zola, Emile, 56, 185–7, 212, 242n6,
White, Edmund, 256n1 245n13, 253n8
Williams, D. A., 241nn2–3 La conquête de Plassans, 253n8
Williams, Raymond, 242n4 La faute de l’abbé Mouret, 185–7,
wordplay, 96, 103–5, 115–18, 127, 245n13, 253n8
131–32, 211, 215 La fortune des Rougon, 245n13
worldly priest, figure of, 120–21, 183, Rougon-Macquart series, 56
185–87, 196 Zorrilla, José
Wordsworth, William Don Juan Tenorio, 151–2, 153,
Essay upon Epitaphs, 42 155–62, 166, 167, 168, 169,
writing machine, 122, 128–34, 135, 170, 187, 189–90, 201, 224,
142, 146, 149, 151, 155–6, 158, 251nn17–20

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Importing Madame Bovary

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First published in 2006 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan

ISBN-10: 1-4039-7606-6 hardcover

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Design by Macmillan India Ltd.

Printed in the United States of America.

Once again, Kugelmass resorts to Persky’s help and magically transports

and uncomfortably close repetitions, the rewritings of Madame Bovary

The Politics of Adultery

The Scarlet Letter, Madame Bovary, O primo Basílio, Anna Karenina, La

As an explanation of its appeal or popularity, of the almost obsessive recur-

Imitation and Intertextuality

Whereas accounts of the genre as a whole (usually produced by compara-

traditions. This insistence on national difference has had an impact on

[Female readers’] souls contaminated by literary passion, which affected

For Montesinos, to be open to foreign influences is to be (like Madame

Pardo Bazán (1851–1921)—knew and corresponded with one another. As

yokes that bound them to husbands and referents respectively.

1848 and the Problem of Historical Alignment

The political commentary of the rewritings is elaborated through a pointed

a turning point in nineteenth-century history and a watershed in European

At first, this approach to social commentary might seem needlessly indi-

Exhuming Marguerite Gautier

“It is remarkable,” wrote Kierkegaard in 1842, “that the whole of

Dumas and the Translation of the Courtesan

We may begin to answer these questions by opening Luísa’s book:

It is my considered view that no one can invent fictional characters

Both Marx’s immature revolutionary and Dumas’s naïve narrator stumble

(from Verdi’s La Traviata to Baz Luhmann’s Moulin Rouge), Dumas’s novel

The viewing in the apartment is a jarring spectacle, at once a scene of prof-

Luísa Mendonça and La dame aux camélias

as an attempt to experience the romance of Marguerite’s life. More than

Alto [a red-light district]” (258). Later, Castro looks forward to living

Through the intervention of Jorge’s friend, Luísa is translated back into

quickly attained this ideal of ethereal langour, inaccessible to mediocre

From Margaret to Marguerite

In La Regenta (1884–1885), Leopoldo Alas (Clarín) takes up Eça’s ex-

this descent that is an uprising, to inspire a revolution of sorts. His attitude

and an alcoholic, Santos has renounced the church and is dependent on

above. Reminded of her earlier reading of Dumas, Luísa feels tempted by

By juxtaposing Luísa’s fall with the conversation about La Traviata, Eça

conversation with Leopoldina. The attraction is not the lover so much as

dangerous sensual pleasure—but that violin expressed so well the strange

comfortably bourgeois terms. The episode in La Regenta, in contrast,

For de Pas, Santos’s prosopopoeia creates a troubling ambiguity. Fermín

Clarín’s presentation of Paco’s views plays off French socialist discourse of

translation neutralizes the ideological significance of the prostitute and

As Clarín continues to sketch Paco’s character, however, this opposition

[Mesía] deceived [Paco] in the same way as he often deceived certain

This passage places Paco in the position of the Bovaresque adulteress: he is

Paco’s appreciation of Mesía is entirely aesthetic: he admires the matching

Clarín sameness underlies a projected difference. La dame aux camélias

upper-class Vetustans abandon Fortunato, the popular and the prostitute

In general, he managed without the Christian epopee in his sermons [No

Whereas the legislators represented the national “spirit” abstractly, Louis-

of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. In Marx’s metaphor, it behaved like a

the figure of Castro. The appearance of Louis-Napoleonic characters in

Ana’s Tableau Vivant