Modernity, the Search for Meaning, and the Spanish Streetcar Experience in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Madrid: Clarín, Galdós and Pardo Bazán

Abstract

Using three Spanish short stories set in Madrid, Benito Pérez Galdós’s “La novela en el tranvía” (1871), Clarín’s “Doña Berta” (1892), and Emilia Pardo Bazán’s “En tranvía” (1901), this article speaks to the alienating experience of everyday life in the city. Attention is paid to the movement of streetcars in Madrid and how this movement reflects a defining characteristic of modernity, the search for meaning after the industrial revolution. Mixing urban geography and literary analysis, this article complicates the notion of the city as totalizing ideal of progress and instead stresses the messiness of modern urban experience.