Confinement, Consolation, and Confession in Galdós's La desheredada

Abstract

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.