Goethe y Nietzsche en La Marquesa Rosalinda de Valle-Inclán: apoteosis poética de un radicalismo moral

Abstract

This paper examines the social and moral content of Valle-Inclan’s La Marquesa Rosalinda (1912) as influenced by Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities) and Nietszche’s philosophical treaties on marriage and morality in general. The paper argues that this highly stylized play, paradigmatic of the modernista aesthetics prevalent in turn-of-the-century Spain, contains also a subtle and caustic criticism of conventional values and institutions that invite the reader to re-evaluate traditional approaches to Valle-Inclan’s modernismo. One of the ways in which La Marquesa is seen to be preempting the more socially oriented literary creations of Valle’s post-war period is evident in the way the play devalues the familiar co-ordinates of conventional morality. The permanence of marriage that afflicts Rosalinda is seen as paradigmatic of the moral laws and limitations imposed by acceptance of an ordered social existence antithetical to social and cultural changes, whereas marital infidelity is interpreted as a metaphoric solution for the inadequacies of the world Rosalinda has to live in as well as a means for the political and cultural renewal of the society the play criticizes.