Petrified

Abstract

Set in a rural mining town in nineteenth-century Spain, Benito Pérez Galdós’s novel Marianela enfolds a complex mediation on the relationship between humans ( bios ) and stones ( geos ) in the wake of industrial modernization. At the heart of this natural world are Marianela, an unsightly lumpen-proletariat, her blind bourgeois companion Pablo, and Celipín, a child miner, all raised in proximity to a zinc sulfate mine and all compared to the geological matter of the earth. Working at the intersection of disability studies, ecocriticism, and theories of biopolitics, the article examines the relationship between disability and rurality. The novel’s unconventional treatment of disabled and socially marginalized characters as human stone sheds light on a process the article terms petrification: the mutual debilitation of the bodies of nature and human bodies, exploited by capitalism and ableism alike.