Striking Their Modern Pose: Fashion, Gender, and Modernity in Galdós, Pardo Bazán, and Picón by Dorota Heneghan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Striking Their Modern Pose: Fashion, Gender, and Modernity in Galdós, Pardo Bazán, and Picón by Dorota Heneghan Jeffrey Oxford (bio) Heneghan, Dorota. Striking Their Modern Pose: Fashion, Gender, and Modernity in Galdós, Pardo Bazán, and Picón. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2015. 155pp. $45.00 (paper). The “Introduction” to Striking Their Modern Pose states that the work’s objective is “to reveal how [Galdós, Pardo Bazán, and Picón] implicated fashion in accentuating the need to reformulate the dominant ideals of gender as a necessary step toward Spain’s full integration into modernity” (2). In the “Conclusion,” however, the objective is modified somewhat and described as: “to provide contemporary readers with a broader perspective on ways in which Spanish bourgeois women and men negotiated their places in society and on these authors’ positions on Spain’s integration into modernity” (117). While both are accurate, this reviewer much prefers the second, which more fully explains that this work is not solely about the three aforementioned authors nor are their positions on Spain’s integration into modernity exactly the same. The second also clarifies the importance of the bourgeoisie to the critic’s examination of the emerging modernity in late nineteenth-century Spain. With that in mind, Heneghan’s excellent critical volume often takes as a point of departure previous research on Benito Pérez Galdós, Emilia Pardo Bazán and Jacinto Octavio Picón and applies that research to her study of the novelists’ views of gender issues as demonstrated through their narrative use of fashion. Two novels by Galdós are the topic of study in the first two chapters: “Fashioning Womanhood and Making Modernity in Galdós’s La desheredada,” and “What is a Man of Fashion? Manuel Pez and the Dandy in Galdós’s La de Bringas,” respectively. Importantly, Heneghan views “urban spectacle, economic activity, and the superficial notion of progress” (113) as the most important elements of the descriptions of the main characters in the two novels, and she concludes that an examination of these, and their relationship to fashion, reveals Galdós’s hope for the future of Spain, albeit with a dissatisfaction with Spain’s growth into modernity at the time. That dissatisfaction is more overtly exposed when, as Henneghan asserts, “[t]hrough the image of a passive, mannequin-like Pez, Galdós also exposed the lack of vitality and initiative of Spanish middle-class men” (55). Insolación, a novel by Pardo Bazán, is the focus of chapters three and four. While only one of the Galician’s novels is analyzed, the critic parallels the studies of Galdós with an initial chapter examining women’s fashion and the second focusing on men’s fashion. More specifically, Chapter Three, “Fashion and Femininity in Pardo Bazán’s Insolación,” argues that “[b]y manipulating the sartorial images to affirm Asís’s sexual desire, [. . .] the writer explored a new model of feminine behavior and experimented (beneath the protective [End Page 144] coverage of irony and ambivalence) with the traditional limits of femininity” (75). Additionally, Heneghan argues that “[i]f changes to a woman’s place in society were to occur in order for Spain to gain full entry into modernity, such a goal was reachable only through the reconfiguration of the existing paradigms of the masculine role” (75). This is more fully examined in Chapter Four, “The Sartorial Charm of the Modern Man in Pardo Bazán’s Insolación,” in which the critic argues that “by choosing to describe the gallant precisely in an outfit that combines the traditional Spanish garment with the avant-garde, foreign clothing item, the narrator provides his audience with an image of a man who is at ease with blending and blurring the conventional and the modern” (90). Chapter Five is the sole chapter dedicated to the study of fashion in Picón and is entitled “Dressing the New Woman in Picón’s Dulce y sabrosa.” Including Picón in the study is an interesting way to incorporate the portrayal of fashion by a more conservative author in the analysis while showing that...