Los cuadernos de un amante ocioso (Spanish Edition)

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The letter was written by hand. We went on foot. I bought it from John. I'll see him if he doesn't come too late. Quiero ver a Nueva York [ Am ]. I want to see New York. I bet you can't guess where I was last night! Don't drive so fast downhill. The lower floors are very dark. He examined it from top to bottom. From below, the house seemed very tall. When you cross the bridge, don't look down. The trousers were worn at the bottom. He's very sloppy in his dress. He left his wife. He frequently neglects his work.

As it was warm, she was fanning herself. The news depressed him very much. The opening in this sweater's small and my head won't go through. The windows are open. The asphalt was softened by the heat. The fender was badly dented. We'll pay the difference. This is the best time to fertilize the fields. I'm going to subscribe to these chamber-music concerts. These blankets are very warm. The wall protected me from the rain. Wrap up well before you go out. Please open the door. When was the box opened? Unlock the cabinet with this key. If you back out the deal won't go through. He was making his way through the crowd.

Buckle the child's belt. I have to button my jacket. The governor abused his authority. He betrayed my confidence. I hope we'll be seeing you around here soon. This piece of furniture has a fine finish. The finish of the table was perfect. Finish your work quickly. Let's put an end to this discussion. They exhausted all the resources of the country. They wiped out the enemy. I'll end up by going crazy. I ran out of money. The patient's feverish this afternoon. The argument became heated. I got overheated playing baseball.

Maybe he'll come tomorrow. Do you have it by any chance? Take some money just in case you need it. Those troops are going into action. The plot develops rapidly. This word's stressed on the last syllable. He has a good accent. I don't know anything about that. Bring up a chair for me, please. He approached the door.

Whoever guesses the number wins. He couldn't find the house. He hit the bull's-eye. These oranges are very sour. That suit you bought's a good choice. He was elected by acclamation. This matter must be clarified. It seems to be clearing up. It's a well-to-do family.

Put the suitcases carefully on the rack. She adapts herself to circumstances. Make yourselves comfortable, for we have plenty of time. They agreed to it unanimously. Do you remember this? Would you please shorten the jacket. It's time to put the children to bed. He became sick and they laid him on a bench. He goes to bed early but it takes him a long time to get to sleep. He was lying on the couch.

He's an accredited representative of the French government. He's a doctor of good reputation. It's a solvent firm. His creditors are after him.

There's been a lot of activity around the office this morning. In addition to his regular job, he has a lot of other activities. It was an act of courage. The ceremony took place in the afternoon. The third act is about to begin. He did it right away. Present circumstances are unfavorable.

Nowadays coffee is scarce. At the present time he's in Chicago. They rushed to his aid. He didn't keep his appointment. They came to an agreement. We're of the same opinion. I did it according to your instructions. They accused him of manslaughter. We acknowledge receipt of your letter.

You have to pay in advance in that hotel. This boy surpasses the rest of the class. They went ahead of all the others. They were doing eighty kilometers and they passed us. Your watch gains time. Put your watch ahead; it's slow. My watch is five minutes fast. His Spanish is improving little by little. I wanted to invite you, but your friend beat me to it. From now on we'll do it this way. You'll understand it later on.

Farther on we came upon a house. This house has all the latest improvements. I don't want to go, and besides it's too late. Besides fruit we're going to have ice cream. I'll bet you can't guess what happened to me today. I'm amazed at his nerve. He admired his friend's work. They were amazed at his courage. He was admitted to the engineering school.

He doesn't allow interruptions. You can't go where I'm going. Where are you going? They adopted a little girl. They've adopted a new plan. He assumed an air of great importance. The room's nicely fixed up for the party. The dress was trimmed with lace. They paid customs duties. I noticed some mistakes in his report. I'm warning you not to do it again. I told you so. He has regard for all his office companions. I'm a great baseball fan. This is an amateur company. He's very fond of reading.

Account Options

He's become fond of sports. He's one of my in-laws. The loss of their mother grieved them very much. They grieved over their friend's misfortune. Loosen the bandage a little. Don't slacken in your work in war time. The storm let up. They live in the suburbs. Bend down; the ceiling's very low. Hold the rope tight. I caught an awful cold. She caught hold of my arm so she wouldn't fall. He's agent for a big insurance company. The company's sent several representatives to discuss the matter. Ask the policeman where St. He's quick in his movements.

She has a very quick mind. Shake well before using. The politician stirred up the workers. When she heard it she got very excited. They ran through the inheritance. He's wearing himself out working so much. The edition went out of print quickly. The provisions gave out in a short time. I appreciate your kindness. I thanked him very much for his help. They're going to enlarge their store. This makes the situation worse. The patient got worse. We saw the military attache of the American Embassy. You have to add more details to the report. He wants a glass of cold water. We're having a rainy spell.

You're right, that's as clear as crystal. Last night's storm washed out the road.

Don't be a wet blanket. It's amazing how much he can stand. You have to take it. We expect him tomorrow at ten o'clock. I've been waiting for you for hours.

Acknowledgements

The knife had a very sharp point. He's a very clever boy. She has a very high-pitched voice. He's always making such witty remarks! The two streets form an acute angle. What would you like after dinner — coffee, tea, or mint water? Do you have a needle to sew on these buttons? One of the hands has fallen off my watch. The train's passed the switch. Sharpen the end of the stick a little.

He pricked up his ears. What have you got there in your pocket? Your hat's somewhere around here. Hello there, what's new? He tried to choke him. Many animals were drowned in the flood. This room's so small and hot that I'm suffocating. I'm going home now. Now, what do you think? Now then, let's get this problem cleared up. Do it right away. We'll do it this way from now on. Up to now we've never had this problem. We have enough food for the present.

They hanged him the same day. We're going to see him right now. How much have we saved this month? The air in this room's very stuffy. There's a very strong wind blowing. He looks like a millionaire. He looked very tired. We spent three hours in the open air. Se da aires de persona importante. He puts on airs. Don't meddle in other people's affairs. You have to tighten those screws.

This cover doesn't fit. They met to decide peace terms. He lifted the trunk to show off his strength. The sleeves of this coat have to be lengthened. Would you hand me the suitcase, please? The children are making a lot of noise. He's always short of money. They caught up with us quickly. I can't reach that can of tomatoes. He reached the rank of general. From here I can't see it. The flowers will brighten up the table. I'm very glad to see you. Why are you so happy today? They're very cheerful people. What a bright-colored suit that is!

He's a little tipsy. He showed great joy when he saw him. He was ill, but today he's all right. She needs a little cheering up. Encourage him to do it. Have you something to tell me? It seems rather expensive to me. Have you got some money? You must have a reason for telling me. I don't know whether this'll be of any use to you. Somebody's knocking at the door. I hope you'll come again some day. I want to ask you some questions. Do you want to ask me any questions? Do you need anything else? He visits us now and then.

Some people have no patience. He was out of breath when he got here. Es una persona de muchos alientos. He's a very energetic person. We have to lighten the load. Hurry up, it's late. This food's not nourishing enough. He enlisted in the Foreign Legion. We'd better get ready early because the train won't wait. He's up there waiting for you. Your friends are in there. Let's go that way. The village is beyond those trees. I saw 'em over there a while ago. Put it over there. His house is there on the right. She lives far from there. From there one could see perfectly.

He says we should go that way. It's a town of people. Lo siento en el alma. Lo voy a consultar con la almohada. I'm going to sleep on it i. They rented a house. They were sitting around the table. It cost about thirty pesos. We have to make some changes in our plans.

He showed signs of great emotion. There were disorders all over the country. His coming changed our lives completely. Don't get excited; it's nothing. What's that very tall building? He talked to a high official of the Treasury Department. Prices are very high in this store. Don't talk so loud. He returned very late at night. They live in the upper story of that house. The house is on top of the hill. We've overlooked many important facts. We stopped along the way to have lunch.

The soldiers halted at the entrance to the town. I don't feel well at such a high altitude. The lighting's poor in this part of the city. The street lamps don't give enough light. Can you light the way? He didn't raise his eyes from the book. They revolted against the government.

He stole the money. In the summer it dawns earlier than in the winter. That guy's very embittered. He makes life miserable for everyone around him. He couldn't stand the bitterness of the coffee. His misfortunes caused him great bitterness. They soon became friends. He made friends with John. He got acquainted there in a short time. We talked with the owner of the house. Don't tell the boss. He likes to talk of love. He's found a new love. He has too much pride. He was peeved by what you said. I want an enlargement of this photograph.

They furnished the house very luxuriously. Do you think the road's wide enough for cars? This suit's too big for me. What's the width of the material? We took a long hike up to the summit. You're a great gadabout, my boy. It's too far to walk. The train began to move. Is that clock going? I've been chasing around all day.

He didn't win the prize, but he came close to it. The child's going on seven. The jockey fell right by the rail. The liveliness of the gathering surprised me. Don't be a jackass! Let's encourage the players. His arrival pepped up the party. I'm urging him to come with us. He was in good spirits. She cheered him up because he was depressed. It gets dark at five now. I'm anxious to meet her. The year before last we went to Europe. I told you that before. This street used to have another name. Let's eat before we go. They left before we arrived. Above all, don't forget to write me. He lent me 30 pesos.

They advanced the date of the party. They arrived half an hour early. He got ahead of me. She likes to dress in an old-fashioned way. She does whatever comes into her mind. Lo hago porque se me antoja. I do it because I take a notion to. I'm twenty years old.

Put out the light. The lights went out. He was surprised by the sudden appearance of his friend. That's a separate question. Put this package aside. Don't get off while the vehicle's in motion. They were grieved by the illness of their aunt. We were worried because we weren't getting any news. He can hardly walk. Let me know as soon as he comes. He got very depressed after his failure. They crushed all resistance. They flattened his nose. They flattened themselves against the wall. They put a coat of paint on the chair. How much do you bet? I bet I get there before you.

Rest your foot on that step. No one supported his motion. I second the motion. He's leaning on a cane. I have great respect for him. Don't walk so fast; we'll get there on time. Please hurry; we're late already. This collar's too tight. He pressed down on the suitcase to close it. He gripped my hand. The runner sprinted on the last lap.

There was such a crowd that nobody saw anything. He does everything very quickly. I don't approve of his conduct. Did you pass your math exam? The boss had to advance him some money. She made use of all the left-overs. Don't let him take advantage of you. Don't go too near the fire. You're aiming too low to hit the target.

Jot it down in your notebook. They drained their glasses. The situation worries me very much. I bought that scarf we looked at yesterday. I like this book better than that one. I'll wait for you in here. From now on we'll have to spend less money. Wet firewood doesn't burn well. I was burned up by what he said.

His arguments don't convince me. I didn't like the plot of the movie. They armed the people. The machine has to be assembled. They made a big racket last night. The mules balked halfway there. He armed himself with a pistol. He built up a good business in a short time. He's always making a mess of things. He's always broke at the end of the month. Three pages have been torn out. We saw the car start. On a sudden impulse I returned to my home town.

This car has a self-starter. He gets everything because he's a bootlicker. He was dragged along by the current. Be careful, your coat's dragging. They crawled out of the cave. Is everything arranged for the trip? I think they'll fix the radio this afternoon. Tidy up a bit and we'll go to the movies. How can I manage to finish on time?

We did it according to your instructions. Do you want to rent your house? I want to rent a room. You'll be sorry for this. They live two flights up. The bedrooms are upstairs. It's past the square. He looked him up and down. From above one could see the river. The car was going up. The hat was dirty around the top. He doesn't mind risking his life. If we don't take risks we'll never get anything done.

Don't put the table so close to the wall. Give me a hand! Don't throw things out the window. That rope has to be coiled. They were trampled by the crowd. That man ruined them completely. He was ruined by that business. Are you interested in art? He presents his arguments with great skill. Read the article on page two. They sell sporting goods. Let's roast the chestnuts. It's roasting in this room. The balloon went up slowly. He was promoted three times in one year. The bill amounted to pesos. He refused the food with disgust. Those things disgust me. Don't come near me; you're filthy.

He turns up his nose at everything. He fastened the horse's pack with a rope. I assure you everything will be ready on time. He maintains it's true. The baggage is insured. First make sure the information's correct. He took out accident insurance. That's the way it is. You must do it this way. And so they decided to act immediately. I don't say it without reason. I'll let you know as soon as I get there.

Your attendance isn't necessary. I took care of him during his illness. Were you present at the meeting? The wash'll have to be put in the sun to dry. They were taking a sun bath on the beach.

Ambiguous Angels

He put his head out of the window. It's forbidden to lean out of windows. He amazes everybody by his cleverness. I'm amazed that you say that. He assumed full responsibility. What's the subject of that play? Don't meddle in my affairs. Your screams frightened me. She's frightened by loud noises. If we go this way we'll catch up with 'em. He cut him short by saying no. Lace your shoes up tight.

When I heard that I put two and two together. I've danced so much that I'm dizzy. The announcer called for attention. I'll never forget your kindness. She likes to attract attention. I reprimanded him for his insolence. The clerk waited on them immediately. Please pay attention to what I'm saying. He takes very good care of his guests.

I don't know what to depend on. There was an attempt on the life of the president. Su atento seguro servidor. He guessed the amount of money I had in my pocket. He didn't succeed in explaining what he wanted. I can't find the keyhole. I've never seen such a scatterbrain. What an attractive woman! She's very pretty but she has no appeal.

She's back there with some friends. Don't back up; there's a tree behind you. She stayed behind with some friends. This'll delay my trip a long time. I have to set my watch back; it's very fast. My watch loses ten minutes a day. I think we're getting behind in this work. The backwardness of that country's well known. The bullet pierced his arm. I've crossed the Atlantic several times. A truck stopped crosswise in the middle of the road. She was expected to be clean, frugal, hardworking, cheerful, and contented: These now symbolized the private, nonprofessional, domestic role that middle-class women were called upon to fulfil.

In the process he disembodied her entirely:. Es menos visible y luminosa, pero no menos grande. Es el domi mansit, lanam fecit guarda la casa, hila la lana de los romanos. She is less visible and luminous, but no less great. She is the domi mansit, lanam fecit she who keeps house and spins wool of the Romans. She is simply a woman, in the most beautiful meaning of the word. Pure, modest, and serene like the lamp in her oratory, she is humble and resigned and takes life as Providence dictates.

As the preceding commentary shows, the power for good exercised by the angel was supposed to work in silent, oblique, invisible ways. The angel was passive, obedient, humble, silent, and submissive, never rebellious or strident.

The sentimentalized rhetoric of the time frequently compared her to nonhuman essences—typically to light or scent, a sunbeam, a rainbow, or the perfume of a flower. This idealization of female invisibility was reflected in the custom of the middle-class. The injunction to women to be asexual angels in the house, magically redeeming corrupt society through their purity and abnegation, coincided with the midcentury wave of Catholic evangelism and the increased power granted to the Spanish church by the papal concordat of and reinforced by the Restoration of The ideology of separate spheres also drew on and perhaps contributed to a resurgence of the Marian cult, for it enlisted the Virgin Mary in the service of the new gender ideology.

As Mary Perry observes, representations of the Virgin had evolved historically to meet social constructions of ideal femininity and had been moving in the direction of purity, innocence, and nonphysicality for some time. The belief in woman's special role as redeemer of society also enjoyed growing popularity, to the extent that, in , Pope Leo XIII finally brought official dogma into line with devotional belief by announcing Mary Co-Redemptrix of humanity, Jesus' collaborator in the salvation of the human race.

The reasons for this promotion were rooted in the feminine virtues peculiar to the period: Mary's obedient acquiescence to divine purpose in the use of her body to carry the male saviour, and her miraculous virginity. During the revolutionary period, a Spanish essayist enumerated the qualities which women should emulate in Mary: The rapid rise to dominance of the angelic ideal stemmed in part from its adaptability to a wide range of political agendas, for women. It was also attractive to antidemocratic writers, who represented feminine purity and piety as bastions against a rising tide of immorality in the masculine public sphere.

The following description, from an anthology of articles published during the revolutionary period, illustrates the way in which the angel woman could be enlisted to serve the interests of the forces of reaction:. La primera influencia que la mujer murciana ejerce sobre su marido, es la influencia religiosa. In this time of gross irreligiosity there are unfortunately few young people free from the infection of impiety with which certain hateful liberties have poisoned the educational system and public mores; but the woman of Murcia, piously brought up by her mother in the sacred and eternal principles of the true religion, holds back in this whole region of Spain the destruction which an atheistic education and atheistic books and an atheistic press have wrought in the fragile intelligence of the youth of today, who go to the universities or spend their lives in the casinos.

The primary area of influence that the Murcian woman has over her husband is religious. As the century drew on, belief in the timeless and preordained differences between individuals of different classes, races, and sexes hardened into dogma, reinforced by science, in response to the gathering restiveness among women, the working classes, and the colonies.

Many writers invoked the angel as a counter to the threat of socialism and feminism. Proponents of the ideology of domesticity consciously counterpoised the image of the angel in virtuous opposition to the emancipated female. These early demands disappeared in the s as the vision of woman posited by domestic ideology came to dominate mainstream thought. Even though no official feminist organizations existed in nineteenth-century Spain, as they did in North America and Europe, we nevertheless find that in the s male and female writers alike began to present feminism as a pressing social threat.

She symbolized a life-style which they believed was the only natural source of contentment for their readers. The ideologues of domesticity succeeded in displacing all the traditional Christian virtues of chastity, humility, abnegation, obedience, patience, love, and piety onto the figure of the domestic woman, who fulfilled her natural instincts and desires in the home and for the family. These qualities were presented as woman's "nature," but there was nevertheless a tacit recognition of the importance of nurture in the concurrent stress on good upbringing and the perusal of the conduct manuals.

The bourgeois feminine ideal was so successful in permeating the national psyche that it came to seem the only natural and univer-. Ocupaba esta mujer las horas en labores manuales, reposando, calcetando, aplanchando, bordando al bastidor o haciendo dulce de conserva. This woman spent her time in fine handiwork, resting, doing crochet, ironing, embroidering her frame, or making jams.

While she attacked this model of femininity as a "mujer emparedada" walled-up woman , Pardo simultaneously evinced a certain nostalgia for what she referred to variously as the embodiment of "genuine," castiza truly Spanish female virtue, which, intriguingly, she portrayed as something lost, belonging to the past, which modern society would do well to recuperate. Women writers occupied a contested and intriguing role in relation to the domestic ideal.

Since nineteenth-century theories of artistic creation envisioned it as a function of the male libido, there was logically no possibility of the asexual angel woman being an artist. This exclusion was reinforced by the typecasting of women as helpmates. The "proper lady," Mary Poovey tells us, merely aided masculine processes of creation either by serving as a source of inspiration to a man or by helping and nurturing the creator.

As Virginia Woolf complained, the angel in the house was not supposed to be a writer. Despite the prohibition on intellectual activity, women wrote more during the nineteenth century than in any preceding one. For the generation of women writers who came of age or were beginning their careers during the s, paying tribute to domestic womanhood became the avowed reason for publishing. The explicit message they directed to their female readers was the necessity of being submissive and subservient domestic angels, totally identified with home and family, although the ironic fact that the authors were themselves highly visible professional women and entrepreneurs cannot have escaped their readers.

Alda Blanco shows how the female proponents of domesticity used their works to argue that education and literacy were essential to the training of young girls as domestic angels and would not, as had always been inferred, lead to sexual misconduct: Seemingly constructing an image of womanhood which neatly and unproblematically fit the needs of a bourgeois society—the passive sacrificial woman—they also inscribe within it an oppositional element. Recent studies of the Spanish periodical press in the nineteenth century show a rapid expansion of the number of feminine periodicals in the second half of the century.

Alicia Andreu states that these women published novels, poetry, drama, essays, and conduct manuals which were enormously popular and were awarded prestigious literary prizes. In and she also directed Flores y Perlas , which described itself as a "literary, recreational, and moral journal dedicated to the fair sex.

She was editor of La Violeta from —, La Mujer in. Angela Grassi — was well known as a romantic poet at a very early age. In the s she added to her reputation by becoming a successful novelist and conduct manual writer. She became the director of the women's magazine El Correo de la Moda in , a post she held until her death in Patrocinio de Biedma —?

These female promoters of the angel image in Spain did not publish in women's magazines alone. They also wrote about women's role for political and literary journals aimed at a primarily masculine.

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The angel in the house, constructed entirely in opposition to man, embodied even for nineteenth-century observers a series of aporia. As we have seen, she was both an absence—invisible, silent—and a ubiquitous spiritual presence. A tension between woman's ascribed power and powerlessness is variously inscribed in bourgeois domestic ideology.

Reverence for the angel was stimulated by comparison to figures of authority, both social and spiritual, including the priestess, saint, Madonna, and queen. A commonplace of domestic ideology was that, as angelic mother, and wife, woman was entitled to wield power, provided she did so only in the private sphere: An old strain of misogyny seems to have coexisted quite comfortably with lip service to the new chivalric attitude to women, to judge by the popularity in Spain of Balzac's dictum that "woman is a slave that one has to know how to put on a throne.

The "daughter, wife, and mother" formula for the angel neatly expressed this other side of the ideal: For one English writer, maids epitomized the feminine destiny, for they "are attached to others and are connected with other existences, which they embellish, facilitate, and serve. In a word, they fulfil both essentials of a woman's being: The attempt to dissociate women from material power emerges in the rhetoric of the time. While it was frequently claimed that bourgeois Christian society had improved women's lot, there were concerted attempts to redefine as "influence" the domestic power attributed to them as angels of the house.

Influence was covert power, which was supposed to act discreetly, obliquely; that is, its status as power was ambiguous. The angel could suggest or contrive but never demand. Fernando de Castro told his female listeners in a famous lecture in that "vuestro destino es influir, de ninguna manera imperar" your destiny is to influence, by no means to command.

As the new conception of women's different nature came to be the norm, it was extrapolated to determine her social function, which was then prescriptively inscribed into the legal practices of the nineteenth century. The chivalrous rhetoric about the angel's moral superiority and queenly power found in the nineteenth-century texts we have been discussing did not lead to progressive improvement in women's legal rights; in fact, the liberal legislation of the nineteenth century, where it did not limit itself to restating women's traditional legal subordination to men, actually eroded what few rights women had over property and codified the new double standard of morality, a process which culminated in the Restoration Civil Code of , modelled on the Napoleonic Code's postrevolutionary retrenchment on women's rights.

Wives who disobeyed their husbands could receive civil reprimands Penal Code of ,. Women's invisibility in the public sphere was made concrete by laws which abrogated married women's rights to own and dispose of property Civil Code Draft Proposal of , and Civil Code of , to engage in business, or to discharge official functions.

They could prosecute for rape only if great violence had accompanied the act Penal Code of , arts. In adultery became for the first time a civil offence as opposed to a domestic one punished by the husband , punishable by a jail sentence. However, the new legal definition considered only women capable of committing adultery Penal Code, art. The fact that women were increasingly subordinated and not glorified in legal discourse is balanced by the growing misogyny of scientific discourse over the century, which drew parallels between women and children and also between women and the so-called savage races.

Anatomists believed that women's skeletons were more childlike than men's. Phrenologists and craniologists stressed women's lesser intelligence by measuring their smaller brains. In the wake of Darwin's theory of evolution, women came to be seen as the more primitive examples of the species. In the words of a contributor to the Anthropological Review in , women shared the prognathous jaw—"the most palpable mark of an inferior organisation"—with "the lowest races of man.

Scientific discourse of the late nineteenth century is marked by a struggle between the models of incommensurable sexual difference and veneration of the female seen in bourgeois ideology and the older one of patriarchal hierarchy woman as an inferior copy of man. While overtly stressing the polar oppositions between male and female organisms, scientists frequently lapsed into the language of hierarchy: The highest examples of physical, mental, and moral excellence are found in man. The contradictory nature of the new feminine ideal is highlighted by the very metaphor it borrowed from religious iconography: The distinguishing sign of the angel in visual representation is the possession of wings like a bird's, denoting the power to fly.

Although in theory angels had neither body nor sex, Christian artists from the fourth century on began to represent. They were associated with upward spiritual movement—redemption and resurrection—and with victory, for they were typically portrayed flanking God on high or escorting souls heavenwards. In traditional western iconography, the angel's wings signified spirituality, participation in the divine, speed, power, and dazzling mobility.

They had ultimate powers to transcend distance and material boundaries. However, when the gender of the angel was displaced by the bourgeois discourse of the nineteenth century onto woman, a central change took place. The new feminine angel was not mobile or martial but was imaginatively immobilized in the bourgeois home. Her virtue did not enable her to transcend boundaries but instead found its definition in her observance of them. In fact, she was constituted precisely by her joyful acceptance of enclosure.

Florence Nightingale's essay Cassandra , in which the author bitterly denounces the cult of domesticity, envisages contemporary Victorian womanhood as being "like the Archangel Michael as he stands upon Saint Angelo at Rome. She has an immense provision of wings, which seem as if they would bear her over earth and heaven; but when she tries to use them, she is petrified into stone, her feet are grown into the earth, chained to the bronze pedestal.

Even though women were now credited with spiritual powers, confinement, rather than free flight, remained the central paradigm of middle-class female experience in the nineteenth century. It was an image frequently used by both of Spain's most noted feminists in the late nineteenth century. She contrasted the traditional mobile.

And indeed this fact created a curious paradox. The boundaries of the middle-and upper-class home became more porous than ever before for Spanish women during the last thirty years of the century, as entertaining, shopping, theatre-going, promenading, riding in open carriages, and home visiting became increasingly the norm in high society, even though during those same years domesticity and invisibility were glorified as never before. Yet by this point, the notion of decorum had been naturalized. Any deviation from feminine modesty would now be an aberration from nature, not just from duty.

One manifestation of the curious contradictions inscribed on the feminine during this period lies in the clothing worn by middle-class women in the mid-nineteenth century, which, instead of evolving towards a more comfortable style in line with women's apparent new freedoms, became rather, according to Kathryn Weibel, "the most garish and least comfortable in recent history. Female fashions shed the simplicity of the turn-of-the-century Napoleonic styles, as the corsets and crinolines of the s and s and the narrow skirts, bustles, and trains of the s and s turned the middle-class woman into the "bell-shaped angel" discussed by Duncan Crow, an angel whose dress expressed the paradigm of demure restraint in an inescapably palpable way.

Oliphant in her book Dress ca. Yet, despite the cramping restrictions that must have attended the real lives of nineteenth-century women, the angel in the house is paradoxically a happy prisoner. Contentment with one's lot in life is one of the conduct manuals' particular themes: Her job is to keep people happy, comfortable, and entertained by always seeming to be so herself. Promoters of the cult of domesticity never posed the problem of a woman dissatisfied or discontented with her role in the home, except as an example of "unnatural" or "unwomanly" behaviour.

The contradictions of Victorian gender ideology can be seen also in the notions of class on which it rested, for although its promoters adopted a language which posited woman and the eternal feminine as a universal, timeless, classless entity, they attributed the fundamental quality of the angel, namely her asexual purity, only to the middle class. Prostitution of women of the lower classes was considered a necessary evil, because it ensured the continued purity of well-to-do women, who might otherwise become the targets of male lust. The pure middle-class angel depends on her sullied lower class counterpart, who was simultaneously used and abused.

Fraser Harrison, discussing the contradictions in nineteenth-century sexual mores, writes that "the class from whom prostitutes were recruited was credited by the class that kept them in business with a fundamentally sinful nature. By the same token, the exploiting class be-. The 'better classes' preserved intact their privilege of simultaneously purchasing wholesale sex from the lower classes and condemning them for their promiscuity.

The high-flown and sentimental language used to construct the ideal of the angel in the house created a figure who was supposedly powerful yet materially powerless; imaginatively invested with wings yet imprisoned; supposedly busy yet enforcedly idle; supposedly sexless yet at the same time devoted wife and mother; always content even though a prisoner; supposedly frugal yet in reality expected to purchase and display finery; at once the accessory to male creation and intellect and yet herself the author of a reformed society.

The nineteenth-century construction of femininity was thoroughly and fundamentally contradictory. The discourse of woman as angel reveals so many contradictions in part because of the hidden agendas of the people who subscribed to it. While male writers, reacting to the spectre of feminism unleashed by the French Revolution, used it to justify women's exclusion from public life, women writers used it to stress women's different nature and special provinces of authority. Ellis wrote, "women's politics must be the politics of morality"; they were specially equipped to confront issues "such as extinction of slavery, the abolition of war in general, cruelty to animals, the punishment of death, temperance, and many more.

Thus, the final paradox associated with the ideal of the angel is an historical one: The contradictions inherent in the ideal of the angel in the house allowed women to question and deconstruct that ideal. In the s certain middle-class women began to exercise the supposedly angelic feminine qualities of love, emotional understanding, moral purity, and humanitarian service in a wider sphere than the home by undertaking philanthropical work in charitable organizations and antislavery leagues or by becoming teachers, writers, social reformers, and, by the turn of the century, gynaecologists and pediatricians.

He used the realist novel to explore, among other contradictions, the tension between the conflicting imperatives that constituted the bourgeoisie's ideal of womanhood. Indeed, such evidence as we have about the writer's conscious ideological orientation points in a very different direction. He published articles and novels in two women's magazines which were specifically devoted to promoting the cult of the angel wife-mother: It has become fashionable recently to talk of what is called women's emancipation, as if man had ever ceased to be your slave.

As its title suggests, it idealized maternity and the notion of separate spheres.

Ambiguous Angels

Intellectually, it was a relatively progressive journal but was nevertheless careful to present a social agenda that was moderate to conservative. Such absurd claims could not have been further from my mind! Subscribing to the notion that women's reproductive function barred them from intellectual work, the author asserted that "no produce la mujer ideas. Debiera tenerse siempre presente la frase de Michelet: One should always bear in mind Michelet's phrase: Finally, in case there should be any doubt about his position, Serrano stigmatized feminists as promiscuous: If she must be educated, she must know her condition.

It is the so-called social question which figures more prominently on his personal horizon, the fragility of bourgeois order in the face of the growth of working class militancy; he states in that he feels society to be on the edge of a volcano. He gives the impression of inhabiting an all-male world, rarely mentioning feminine figures.

These massive omissions are themselves significant, in light of the ferment of discussion going on at the time. Entitled "La rosa y la camelia," it is an allegory of two types of woman: He reworks a motif common to nineteenth-century bourgeois writers in his attack on the women of the upper class as living a life of lax morals and frenetic sociability; he bends history to his argument by suggesting that society women who took lovers were the artificial and unhealthy innovation of the nineteenth century. The rose, in contrast, is healthy, warm, open to the approach of its natural partner in reproduction, the bee, and maternally prolific:.

Sencilla, pero siempre bella, nace y abre al sol su corazon y permite a la abela penetrar en su seno. No hay duda de que la rosa es la flor mas bella de la creacion. Simple, but always beautiful, she is born and opens her heart to the sun and allows the bee to penetrate into her bosom. The rose is without a doubt the most beautiful flower in creation. In contrast, the camellia, which the narrator terms "the aristocratic flower," and "the prostituted flower, the shameless flower; the flower without a family" —3 is overeroticized, dangerously beautiful, languid, consumptive: He taxes the society flower with pride, arrogance, and habits of self-display.

The contest between the merits of the two flowers that the narrator invites us to witness is a transparent opportunity for him to glorify the virtues of mothers of modest households and to revile their vitiated antitheses, associated with the mores of high society. The rose has thorns to protect her virtue, while the camellia, who lacks such protection and was raised in a hothouse, is easily picked by anyone. The camellia, as an artificial creation, is sterile: Crucially, the camellia, for all its superior beauty, has no perfume, whereas the rose has the sweet odour of sanctity: He describes the heroine:.

Llevado este tipo al teatro por un esplotador de la grosera realidad, puede set muy pernicioso a la joven de su sexo. This type, which has been brought to the stage by a writer who exploits the ugliness of reality, could be very harmful to young women. A Woman's Torture is anti-family. It appears that the famous French journalist enjoys attacking the holiest of institutions. By prostituting the mother and wife, Girardin has destroyed the family through her and the noblest attributes of woman herself.

This early insistence that representations of. He characterizes the women's movement as an absurdity thankfully absent from Spain: It is true that recently a deformed growth has appeared, an aberration called the socialist woman. The narrative conjures up a dry scientist, poring night and day over his books and causing his wife to endure the "terrible privation" of childlessness Constitutionally incapable, like all her sex, of dealing constructively with boredom 43 , the neglected wife is faced with only two choices: She opts for the latter.

On her husband's death, however, her unctuous professions of religiosity fade. She remarries and proceeds to bear a child every. Efectivamente, parece natural que la frivolidad femenina se encuentre fuera de su centro en reuniones de tal especie. Our readers will be surprised to learn that the fair sex was admitted to a political meeting, against the laws of custom, which have always elected woman from any place designed for dealing with serious matters.

Indeed, it seems natural that feminine frivolity would be out of place in such meetings. Women are life's delight; they stimulate great and small ambitions; they are the source and fountainhead from whence all virtues flow. The most glorious triumphs of good are women's work; private miseries and public catastrophes are our fault. It is their ineluctable destiny to love man; and he should devote to them all his intelligence and his whole heart; a sovereign cult from which we should only excuse those women who, deformed by false pietism, become shrewish, dried up, and disagreeable.

Significantly, he used women to illustrate his point: The day will come when young ladies with diplomas will be sculpting busts of their papas and composing the polkas they will dance with their beaux. By the s he favoured broadening women's education, and began to seem troubled by his realization that there was a sexual double standard of morality; [15] yet he opposed feminist demands for equal education and conceded the need for wider opportunities for paid employment for women only as a lesser evil than prostitution.

His praise for the notoriously progressive School for Governesses is double-edged: It contains copies of key works by some of the most influential proponents of the domestic ideal: Most telling is his possession of an edition of The Select Works of Mrs. Ellis — was one of the mostly widely read writers of feminine conduct literature in the English-speaking world.

She produced the famous series Women of England , Daughters of England , Wives of England , and Mothers of England , in which she defined the angelic ideal to middle-class women readers. The more conventional works on femininity far outnumber the emancipationist ones: In its way this is as much a political manoeuvre as his friend Leopoldo Alas's subsequent vituperative attack on women writers.

The work of most of the women who write well suffers from the intellectual conditions and the modesty peculiar to their sex. It is the class which administers, which teaches, which debates,. At the same time that the essay confidently proclaims the bourgeoisie as monolithic, however, it betrays moments of uncertainty.

The domestic life of the middle class is a constant source of concern: Female infidelity is a major social evil, threatening to dissolve the structure of the bourgeois family: To lend form to all these things must be the chief aspiration of contemporary literature []. He represents the novelist as both neutral observer and mirror, impartially reproducing the chaos of life through the transparent medium of language: As Terry Eagleton points out, "the ideology of the text is not an 'expression' of authorial ideology.

Terry Lovell contends that as the bourgeoisie came to terms politically and socially with the older landed sections of society, the novel, in order to establish itself as literature, began to distance itself from capitalism and to undertake a critique of bourgeois values. Nor, despite the narrower range and more explicitly political focus of his early novels, can we consider them to be as monolithically univocal as has been supposed. Making gender the central category of analysis reveals uncharted levels of complexity in the deceptively simple thesis novels and highlights the fact that literary texts are always ineluctably complicit in the production and reproduction of multiple ideologies, often in ways unintended by the author.

Yet the way in which the texts invite this allegorical feminization of Spain itself begs for a further reading, one which calls attention to their relation to the system of sex and gender character-. Focusing on this occluded ideological level in the texts allows us to perceive the diverse and polyphonic nature of these early narratives. In an emblematic moment of anagnorisis, we learn that questions of class and gender have been the prime movers of a social drama ostensibly centered on religious behaviour.

These novels follow what Nancy Miller terms a "dysphoric" rather than "euphoric" plot structure. The texts' construction of their religio-political allegories is successful thanks to the mobilization of a whole set of assumed values and conventions of gender. If heroines such as Rosario and Clara act as allegories of liberal "Spain in captivity," as Stephen Gilman suggests, they are successful in arousing the readers' indignation because their conventionally feminine innocence and purity make them blameless victims.

They are presented as being more easily destroyed, more vulnerable in their physical and mental integrity, than their male counterparts. Through love, unwittingly they become entangled in politics, about which they remain ignorant until the end. Their role is to suffer and wait, confined within the household, while the hero, outside, struggles with their adversaries and agitates for their release. The feminine antithesis of the impressionable, docile heroines of the early novels is the type of perverted womanhood represented by.

Wooed by the impetuous liberal Pepe Rey, the angelic Rosario is a hapless pawn imprisoned by her evil mother in a struggle between the forces of reaction and progress. It is the flawed angel who comes to dominate his narratives, rather than the perfect one: Marianela, a fragile, self-abnegating child-woman, is, despite her moral beauty, poor and physically ugly.

Gloria has an independent and intellectual nature. In the revised version the heroine Clara's story concludes in marriage and rural domesticity, whereas in the earlier version her lover is assassinated and she herself dies of grief. The treatment of the heroines obeys a different code. Both texts stage a subliminal debate about true womanhood that centers on a dialectic between the social and the private, reputation versus individual moral worth. Each novel broadly upholds the premises of conventional gender ideology but advances the potentially revolutionary notion that purity of soul overrides breaches of feminine decorum, and even in the case of Gloria the loss of chastity itself.

In these novels, the cause of female suffering has shifted at least partly beyond that of the evil machinations of some depraved antithesis to that of oppression at the hands of a system: The bourgeois feminine role appears in these novels both as an ideal and as a cause of female dissatisfaction, and the redemptive value of female suffering is no longer always clear. In Gloria this dual dynamic is particularly clear.

The text itself has an early alter ego, the manuscript of a lost novel recently rediscovered. The ambiguity that fuels this change is a central feature of the published novel. The first few pages of Gloria set up a dialectic of presence and absence, affirmation and denial, which is to characterize the novel. There is a play between various different and more or less ostensibly reliable levels of narrative voice. To begin with, the narrator pretends to be physically accompanying the reader as an interpreter and guide, as we walk towards the town where the events of the novel are to unfold.

The capacity to fluctuate between different levels of personal and impersonal narrative presentation takes an important role in the work's first part, since it enables the narrative both to mount and to undercut a potentially polemical critique of middle-class culture's view of woman's place. She is young, pallid, and beautiful, comes from a respectable middle-class household, and is "buena, piadosa y honesta" kind, pious, and virtuous []. She has domestic instincts, rising at the crack of dawn to attend to her household duties She exercises self-denial and exhibits charity to the poor.

Tender-hearted, maternal, and deeply sensitive , she is identified with love from the outset, when we first see her at her window. Her life before Daniel Morton's arrival consists of needlework, household duties, and hopes of love. Yet aspects of the nineteenth-century feminist discourse which represented women as painfully confined by domesticity are also insistently present in the first part of the novel.

In the opening pages, the narrator introduces two images which are to be central to the first half of the work: Significantly, our first introduction to the Lantigua household is an ironic reference to the joys of living in what is termed a prison ; the narrative links the heroine through a series of metaphors to a bird prevented from flying: The reason for this becomes clear as Gloria's characterization is developed: The narrator frequently directs the reader's attention to the conflict between the heroine's desire for mental freedom and exercise, represented in the text as the desire to use her "wings," and the familial injunction to be an immobile and enclosed angel in the house.

As the novel progresses, the ideal feminine role for which Gloria is being trained is increasingly associated with an image of constraint and mutilation that had a long history as a political metaphor: The bird imagery in Gloria frequently evokes the romantic tradition of symbolizing the untrammelled natural liberties and power of the individual via winged creatures, a tradition which women writers in Spain had used to suggest that conventional femininity was coercive and restrictive. The names of Gloria's relatives suggest their intimate involvement with the process of making an angel out of her, for example, her uncle Angel and her aunt and Serafinita little seraph.

The diminutive form used for Serafina and don Angel's characterization as a child contribute to the association between an angelic nature and infantilism or stunted growth. All three of the heroine's relatives take part in the process of containing, confining, and intervening with her that goes on throughout the novel. The relationship portrayed between the heroine and her father is a particularly clear example of the intertwining of feminist and liberal humanist discourse in part 1.

Lantigua's general philosophy is coercive: The link between his neo-Catholicism and his espousal of patriarchal sexual politics is laid out for the reader in part 1. The suitor he has chosen for Gloria is metaphorically linked to a tomb. The narrator points out that Lantigua's main criterion in the education of his daughter is containment rather than growth: Lantigua tells her that she must rein in her thoughts and bow her neck to the yoke of authority While he lectures her on the marriage he is planning for her, Gloria remains silent, incapable of words, but with the point of her parasol she draws in the sand.

As her future is dictated, the thing that she is drawing is gradually revealed, without comment, by the narrator. It provides a visual metaphor for the sensation of imprisonment which Gloria is presumably experiencing in her mutism, for it is an enrejado iron grid []. Having symbolically completed her picture with arrows, like the gate of a castle keep, Gloria announces her acquiescence: Later, Gloria envisages this consent as a voluntary self-mutilation: Vengan, pues, las tijeras" My father has often told me that if I don't clip the wings of my mind I'm going to be very unhappy.

So let's have the scissors []. Chapters 5 and 6 of part 1 deal with Gloria's reading and the markedly heterodox development of her intellect. She displays a startling capacity for independent thought. Indeed, the representation of Gloria in part 1 apparently caused him to class the novel among the most "heterodox" of Spanish literary productions. Each time she is either dismissed or else severely reprimanded by her father: Vete a tocar el piano" What do you know about that?

Go off and play the piano []. Lantigua limits his daughter's mental travels by barring her access to the novels in his library, citing the still popular notion that novels were dangerous for women's virtue: Lantigua has his daughter read aloud to him from religious and moral works. At one point, Gloria embarrasses her father by voicing in male company her opinion that the society and literature of the Golden Age are not the pinnacles of achievement her father believes them to be.

Lantigua, who holds that religion, politics, and history are male preserves upon which Gloria has no right to comment, qualifies her independence of mind as mad and sinful. His self-congratulatory report of this lecture is, however, prefaced by some words in the narrator's own voice, so heavily loaded with sarcasm that we cannot safely conflate the two:. Later, when the learned personages had deprived the household of their august presence, don Juan de Lantigua, who had been somewhat put out by his daughter's absurd opinions, shut himself up with her and rebuked her affably, ordering her in future to be more careful in her interpretation of History and Literature.

He declared that a woman's brain was incapable of comprehending such a weighty matter, and that extensive reading did not equip one to understand it, not even if one were a wise man with a training in criticism. He also told her that everything that has been written by famous gentlemen on various points of Religion, Politics, and History forms a respected code of opinion before which we must bow; and he ended with a parodic repetition of the idiotic and abominable things Gloria had said, which, if she did not restrain herself, would obviously lead to error, heresy, and perhaps sin.

Montesinos, puzzled by this chapter, which clearly disturbs the traditional notion of Gloria as dealing only with religious issues, pronounces it superfluous. From our perspective, however, it shows the author explicitly bringing to the reader's attention the fact that "correct" ways of reading texts were defined by men, and that women's potential for creative thought and free exposure to different kinds of writing was severely limited by the gender roles of a patriarchal society which prescribed the ideals of submissiveness and chastity for the female sex.

Lantigua invokes a patriarchal canon, the "respected code of opinion to which we must bow," produced by "famous gentlemen" who define the correct ways to interpret history and literature. Gloria assents to this curtailing of her mental horizons. Crucially, she vows henceforth to read only material suitable for an angel in the house: In trying to limit her mind to the pattern set for the angelic woman, Gloria begins to incorporate the patriarchal notion of female creative powers as monstrous: But her vow of obedience is short-lived.

After the introduction of Daniel Morton into the household, Gloria begins to question her father's ideas about religion, falling as she does so into a sin whose textual name reveals her longing for space and freedom: Again, the heroine's desires are figured in terms of flying: Images of flight as revolt against the feminine role occur repeatedly in chapter In this chapter, appropriately entitled "The Rebellious Angel," Gloria's Satanic or Promethean revolt against her father's religious creed is also a rebellion against the special requirements for the female angel.

The use of interior monologue constructs a heroine tormented by contending impulses, on the one hand to obedience and immobility and on the other to self-assertiveness, power, and flight. The description of her struggle is presented in such a way as to thwart moral condemnation, for the hubristic inner voice urging Gloria to rebellion speaks not as the devil but as an echo of Christ: Tu entendimiento es grande y poderoso.

Your mind is great and powerful. Cast off that stupefying submissiveness, cast off the cowardice which has oppressed you. You are capable of many things. You are great; don't insist on being small. You can fly to the stars; don't drag along the ground []. Gloria imagines her hidden strength to be such that, released, it would destroy the myths of male authority around her: Les oigo hablar, hablar.

I listen to them talk and talk. Her fantasies of power and destructive revolt are accompanied by a clear intuition that she has acquiesced to the mutilation of her own wings:. I have been hypocritical; I allowed my wings to be clipped, and when they grew back I acted as if I didn't have any.

I have pretended to submit my thoughts to those of others and to shrink my soul, shutting it up in a cramped space. But it can't be done. The sky isn't the same size as the glasses through which we look at it! I will get out of this cocoon I'm trapped in, because my time has come, and God says to me: This same chapter compares Gloria, in a curiously double-layered imaged, to an angel with a halo and to a sleeping bird: Although in this particular instance the bird and the angel can almost be conflated—the bird is sweet, innocent, sentimentalized, and not wild, soaring, or free—normally the two images are counterpoised in the novel.

At one point, the connection between domesticity and imprisonment is made explicit:. Her soul was fluttering about in the midst of the purest ether, bathed in celestial light, like the winged angels around the throne of the Lord of creation. The contrast was a strange one indeed; while her soul, in the words of the Psalm, fled like a bird to the hills , her body remained in that humblest of places: Rolling up the sleeves on her pretty arms and donning a white apron, she began lightly to beat a big bowl of yolks and whites of eggs.

Even though the narrator's avuncular tone and his prettifying vision of Gloria here somewhat efface the power of the contrast, the tropes of winged creatures are so persistent that they overwhelm the narrative's efforts to dilute and coopt them. We are continually furnished with instances of the heroine's compulsion to gender rebellion.

She wishes to be like the masculine principle of the sun, an independent source of light, rather than the feminine principle of reflection. The choice that Gloria faces, besides being a choice between religious orthodoxy and heterodoxy, is also one of conformity to or rebellion against the model of femininity. In part 1, then, intertwined with the critique of neo-Catholicism, we can read a critique of patriarchal sexual politics and their effect upon the heroine. The novel does not, however, consistently maintain the feminist critique of gender roles which it undertakes at the outset.

It consists of two parts, which were published separately, and in which we can trace fundamentally opposing ideologies of woman's place. Part 1 details the rise but also the end of Gloria's rebellious stance. Halfway through the novel, with Gloria's fall, there is a radical shift in the characterization of the heroine. In the early descriptions of Gloria, before the appearance of Daniel, and up until her union with him, the tragedy we are invited to consider is the destruction of Gloria's free mind because of the requirements placed on women by a society whose central icon is that of a confined, domestic angel.

This theme is not pursued further, for the subject of Gloria's struggle to use her mental powers is abandoned once she loses her chastity to Daniel Morton, at the end of part 1. The results of this fall are so catastrophic that she no longer fights to use her mind for. The choice she faced earlier of whether to rebel against femininity or resign herself to it is translated into the emblematic feminine dilemma of love for a man versus duty to family. The sexual union between Gloria and Daniel is staged in a storm and flood of gothic proportions, signalling the disturbance and disorder of the entire cosmos.

Even though, like Tess of the D'Urbervilles, the heroine is passively propelled by circumstance and her lover into succumbing, her loss of chastity is still symbolically invested with earthshaking implications: The storm indeed presages dire consequences for the heroine, for after consummating their love, Daniel reveals that he is not, as Gloria had assumed, a Protestant, but a Jew.

Gloria's sexual initiation is, furthermore, figured as striking at the very heart of the patriarchal order, for upon discovering the lovers in Gloria's bedroom, her father falls dead instantly of a heart attack. Gloria's disobedience has rendered her nothing less than a parricide. At this central point of the novel, the metaphor of breaking wings is employed for the heroine's loss of chastity. In context the metaphor bears an important second meaning, which is that Gloria's powerful, independent thought processes are now destroyed.

From this point on her path is one of submission and obedience, not free flight.

Dictionary of spoken Spanish

She uses all her energy to conform to the angelic mould which, in the eyes of contemporary society, has been irreparably shattered by her extramarital sexual initiation. Ironically, it is at the point when Gloria becomes, in conventional terms, a fallen woman, that she comes to seem most conventionally angelic.

The latter half of the novel traces Gloria's decline, during which she demonstrates two main characteristics of the angel figure: Thus the narrative foregrounds the image of woman as angel rather than as caged bird, and the latter image is largely left behind. Hence the domestic ideology of the middle classes, which was subverted in the opening pages of the novel, is at. The angelic values of purity, piety, submissiveness, martyrdom, and motherhood displace the earlier transgressive, intellectual, rebellious stance of the heroine.

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