In this essay the metaphorical linkage of femininity with national decay in Cartas marruecas is examined as a reaction to women's unprecedented involvement in contemporary Spanish public life and as a precursor to their consignment in the next century to the private arena as a result of the ideology of separate spheres. The study shows that Cadalso shared the ambivalence of his peers among Spain's reformist elite towards women's public role in Enlightenment Spain. The narrative of Cartas marruecas conveys this sense, on the one hand, by shutting women out of its construction of contemporary Spanish society and, thus, effacing their agency in national life, and, on the other, by representing women and the broader conceptual category of femininity through metaphors that equate women with an uncivilized Other and imply that their public activities imperil national progress. ' All nationalisms are gendered; all are invented; and all are dangerous' (McClintock 1997: 89) -Anne McClintock's compelling observation provides a fitting entree into an analysis of Jose de Cadalso's Cartas marruecas (1774). The invented nature of this epistolary novel and, by extension, its subject -'el caracter nacional, cual lo es en el dia y cual lo ha sido' (148) -is on display from the very BHS 92.2 (2015)
This article examines the motif of confinement in Galdós's La desheredada (1881) as an anxious commentary on socio-political structures in Restoration Spain and on the writer's literary form in this novel. The objective of the study is to show that Galdós's appraisal of successive levels of confinement in La desheredada constituted a crucial stage in his development as a writer that would lead him to innovations in both his literary content and form after the publication of this work. The narrative of La desheredada reveals that nineteenth-century psychiatric therapies such as the moral treatment and medical interrogation were indebted to the pastoral practices of consolation and confession. This melding of disparate discourses establishes a troubling continuity between the cultural systems of the Old Regime and modernity that is expressed in the text through the motif of enclosure. The notion of confinement is shown to pervade the novel at the formal level of narrative technique through the fusion of medico-religious discourse with narrative modes of representing consciousness. And the physical particulars of the publication history of La desheredada are shown to extend the motif of confinement beyond the pages of the novel. The first chapter of La desheredada was serially excerpted in the medical journal El Diario Médico , thereby enclosing the narrative in the same medical discourse that the novel is engaged in critiquing.
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