Narratives of Desire: Nineteenth-Century Spanish Fiction by Women (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Narratives of Desire: Nineteenth-Century Spanish Fiction by Women Stephanie Sieburth Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Narratives of Desire: Nineteenth-Century Spanish Fiction by Women. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994, 223 pp. Lou Charnon-Deutsch’s study is a treasure-trove of information and insight about women’s writing in nineteenth-century Spain. The book starts from the premise that there are profound differences in the ways male and female writers represent women characters. In male-authored texts, it is too often demonstrated that women cannot really be what men need them to be; women are often represented as monstrous and threatening to the male psyche. Charnon-Deutsch looks to the female-authored novel to explore how women have represented what it means to be a woman under the severely confining patriarchal system of the nineteenth century. The book has five chapters. The first one studies novels by Cecilia Böhl de Faber as precursors to the genre of domestic fiction, and then turns to the work of the most prolific and popular of Spain’s domestic novelists, María del Pilar Sinués de Marco. Charnon-Deutsch shows how, although the domestic novel buttresses rather than challenges the ideal of domesticity incessantly propagated in nineteenth-century mass culture, it also constitutes a testimony to the near-impossibility of realizing the ideal of a happy and loving family life. The second chapter follows this up by noting how the characteristics of masochism in psychoanalytic theory parallel the responses called for in the ideal domestic woman. Deutsch studies Böhl de Faber’s Clemencia, Sinués’ El sol de invierno, Angela Grassi’s El copo de nieve, and Pardo Bazán’s Una cristiana and La prueba. Chapter 3 focuses on the novels of Rosalía de Castro, which are antidomestic, and includes a fascinating analysis of female desire in El caballero de las botas azules. The fourth chapter is a brilliant rereading of Los pazos de Ulloa as a questioning of nineteenth-century clichés about motherhood and about women’s connection to nature. The final chapter explores novels from the turn of the century by Pardo Bazán, Dolores Monserdà i Vidal, and Catalina Albert i Paradís. These novels argue for women’s participation in the working world as a way to benefit family and society in general. Deutsch explores how marriage is redefined in Pardo Bazán’s Memorias de un solterón, and how exceptional women can find no man on earth to measure up to their interrelational maturity in Dulce dueño. [End Page 422] This book is full of crucial insights which are sure to redefine the way nineteenth-century fiction is studied. But it also contains some serious flaws. On the positive side, the textual analysis is invariably incisive and illuminating, written with both compassion and humor. Charnon-Deutsch includes illustrations from the popular press that perfectly complement her textual analyses. One of the most important boons of this book is its juxtaposition of male-authored and female-authored representations of women and men. Here Charnon-Deutsch is truly in her element. She explores how various texts by Pardo Bazán answer Doña Perfecta, Tristana, and La Regenta in a way that incisively illuminates the workings of the male psyche as it represents women. The flaws in this book have to do with Charnon-Deutsch’s use of psychoanalytic theory and the awkward combination of this theory with the historical determinants of women’s condition. Especially in the first two chapters, she brings in the words and ideas of Lacanian and feminist psychoanalysis in an attempt to say something about feminine desire even in the extreme case of the domestic novel in which the desires really seem to be coping mechanisms. The theory is dense and arcane, and ultimately reveals less about the novels studied than do the historical determinants and Deutsch’s own insights. The framework of female desire is completely appropriate for Chapters 3 and 5, but seems forced in relation to the other chapters. I found myself wishing, in the first two chapters, that Charnon-Deutsch had compared women’s responses to the radical deprivations to...