SOURCE: "Fantasy, Seduction, and the Woman Reader: Rosalía de Castro's Novels," in Culture and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Spain, edited by Lou Charnon-Deutsch and Jo Labanyi, Clarendon Press, 1995, pp. 74-95.

[In the following essay, Kirkpatrick investigates the relationship of Castro's novels El caballero de las botas azules and La hija del mar to the tradition of seduction fantasy.]

Do you think a thriving virgin imagination can gorge itself with impunity on Martin, the Orphan Boy, A Doctor's Memoirs, and The Man of the Three Pantaloons? … Devouring The Three Musketeers, [the young girl learns of] Milady's evil deeds, the adulterous love of Madame Bonacieux, and the scandalous passion of Mlle. Lavalliere for the king, a passion that infiltrates young and naïve hearts the more easily when dressed in a sweetly poetic and sentimental form….[T]ender female readers, when they reach thirteen, follow as best they can in the footsteps of the heroines of their novels.

(Sinués de Marco, 1859)

Nineteenth-century Spaniards defined women's relation to reading and writing as a matter of morality. Debates about women's education—that is, their access to the printed word as either consumers or producers—centred on the question of whether reading/writing would lead women astray, as the traditionalists argued, or would refine their moral sensibility, as reform-minded liberals claimed. At the heart of this debate lay the question of fantasy, of women's desire, for-that was the crucial link between the printed word and feminine behaviour. In particular, the reading of novels was seen as dangerous. By the mid-nineteenth century, when the serial novel began to prove itself an effective means of expanding the market of print consumers, concerns with the genre's impact on women, a growing sector of that market, became widespread. The fear that the novelesque might contaminate the daily lives of women was exacerbated by the seductive strategies through which the serial novel secured buyers for its proliferating instalments: exalted romantic passions, melodramatic dilemmas, sensational plots played upon the erotic fantasies of its readers.

Interestingly enough, the women who now entered the expanding field of print culture as producers seized on the issue of fiction's contaminating influence as a means of justifying their own writing projects. Thus, Cecilia Böhl de Faber (Fern án Caballero), defensive about putting herself forward in public as an author, claimed in 1853 that 'la tendencia de mis obritas es combatir lo novelesco, sutil veneno en la buena y liana senda de la vida real' [the tendency of my little works is to combat the novelesque, a subtle poison in the good, plain path of real life].¹ The strategy of offering one's own writing as an antidote to the poisonous effects of competing fiction became prevalent among women writers of the 1850s. It was central to the influential work cited in the epigraph, El ángel del hogar [The Angel in the House], Pilar Sinués's amalgam of fiction and conduct book for women. Already in a second, expanded edition in 1859, this book was re-edited many times in the nineteenth century. While admitting that reading the wrong kind of fiction (the works of Alexandre Dumas peýe are singled out as an example) can contaminate girls' hearts with scandalous passions and overheat their imaginations (180), Sinués insists that reading works written by women committed to the domestic ideal of womanhood plays an important part in feminine moral education. She counsels mothers accordingly: 'La mujer que siente, es buena hija, buena esposa y buena madre: y para desarrollar la sensibilidad de vuestras hijas no tenéis que hacer más que enseñarlas a leer, y dirigir con tino sus lecturas' [The woman of feeling is a good daughter, a good wife, and a good mother: and to develop the sensibility of your daughters you need only teach them to read and direct their reading with judgement] (64). Sinués thus deftly transforms the concern about fiction infecting women's imagination into an argument for the positive effects of reading on feminine subjectivity. Women's imaginations can be nurtured and channelled in ways that protect them from the corrupting seductions of melodramatic fiction, her argument goes, if they are absorbed by 'historias dulces, llenas de sentimiento y de verdad' [agreeable stories full of feeling and truth] (188). Truth, El ángel del hogar makes clear, consists of women's biological mission as domestic angels, a mission significantly enhanced by certain kinds of reading and writing, that is, those capable of shaping desirable feminine subjectivity.² Thus, in accepting the premise of female susceptibility to reading, Sinués makes a case justifying the moral effects of a controlled female exercise of literacy.

Sinués's adept manipulation of the ideological debate on women and literature, however, does not resolve the argument about feminine fantasy and narrative seduction. It merely proposes the replacement of one kind of fiction by another, leaving in place the restrictions on women's activity and their subordination to men. To find an intervention in nineteenth-century Spanish discourse about women's reading that confronts the subordinating effects of all types of fiction on women, we must turn to the fiction of Sinués's contemporary Rosalía de Castro. Boldly identifying herself in her epigraphs and citations as a reader of Soulié, Sand, and Dumas, novelists habitually denounced as pernicious to women, Castro sidesteps the question of morality and explores in her novels the connected issues of fiction, female fantasy, and women's oppression. What Jessica Benjamin has termed 'the intricate relationship between woman's desire and women's submission' (80) becomes the implicit problem posed in the narratives that Castro situates within or in relation to the genre of romance fiction, or popular Romantic melodrama. In this essay I will discuss at length Rosalía de Castro's engagement with this problem in her fourth novel, El caballero de las botas azules [The Knight of the Blue Boots], but first I want briefly to consider her treatment of seduction in her first novel, La hija del mar [Daughter of the Sea].

In both novels Castro was concerned with the seductive and powerful male figures that dominated popular fiction because the desire they produced had a subjugating effect on the female psyche. Moral response was not the issue: her texts suggest that, whether the woman protagonist—or reader—gives in or remains virtuous, she remains in a subordinate and disadvantaged position in this kind of narrative since her desire must be passive rather than active—the desire to be desired. Consequently, these novels can be read as attempts not only to represent but also to critique the structures that determine feminine identity in modern Western culture. One of the most basic of these structures is the one that inclines women to choose a father-figure as their love object. In featuring female characters' relationships with powerful male figures, Castro's narratives highlight the seduction scenario identified by psychoanalytic theory as the origin of heterosexual desire in the woman: the father's desire for her is perceived by the daughter as the means of her access to sexuality, to desire and power.³ By inducing women to channel their sexuality into the wish to please the father or his substitute at all costs, the seduction fantasy subordinates women's desire to the demands of the patriarchal bourgeois family. James Mandrell has observed that the literary incarnation of this fantasy in avatars of the seducer, Don Juan, 'serves to draw the woman into the passion of patriarchy and serves as the paradigm by which desire is articulated in society, as the subtext for relations between men and women, as a literary and social text in which the latter are seduced by the former into fulfilling a specific role' (127-8). Although Castro wrote before the theoretical model of Oedipalization had been formulated, some of her narratives display the process theorized later by Freud, and at the same time resist it through a critique of the woman/reader's tendency to internalize the seduction narrative as the figure of her desire.

The mid-century folletines that formed a literary context for Castro's novels had two main strategies for manipulating the seduction fantasy. The first was the drama of seduction and abandonment, in which the dark, Romantic hero with semi-diabolic powers occupies the position of the father in relation to the girl child who becomes his victim. The second strategy was to narrate the redemption of the seductive male by the innocent heroine, a story that was crucial to the image of el ángel del hogar promoted by Pilar Sinués and other writers of women's fiction. Following a pattern established by José Zorrilla in his Don Juan Tenorio, in these narratives the fascinating reprobate's desire for a virtuous and innocent girl transforms him into a proper bourgeois mate. For James Mandrell, the conjunction of the two scenarios—seduction and redemption—in Zorrilla's drama initiates the bourgeois domestication of the traditional figure of the seducer in nineteenth-century Spanish fiction, a process that adapts the significance of seduction to the shift in social organization from kinship structures to the nuclear family (Mandrell 265-7). The seduction and redemption fantasies coincide in identifying female sexuality with the capacity to arouse desire in the father-figure, and this feminine 'power' is clearly equated with passivity. As Alicia Andreu has shown, the Spanish fiction that incorporates this scenario insists monotonously that passivity, obedience, humility, patience, are the virtues that will arouse redemptive desire in the man (71-91). Identification with the feminine protagonists of such fiction, no matter whether they appeared in the scandalous folletín or in the sentimental novellas advocated by Sinués, reproduced in the woman reader a mode of sexuality and fantasy that equated femininity with being the passive object of the male desire, perpetuating in psychic life structures that support bourgeois marriage and its sexual division of labour.

Rosalía de Castro's first novel, La hija del mar, responds quite directly to the seduction fantasies incorporated in the popular fiction that Rosalía—only 22 when she wrote the novel—had been reading throughout her adolescence. I have argued elsewhere that while this novel acknowledges the insistent power of the seduction scenarios centred on Byronic male figures like the main male character, Albert Ansot, it also registers the extent to which such fantasies make women victims in the politics of gender relations.⁴ The two female protagonists—Teresa, the passionate and powerful adult woman who finds Ansot irresistible though reprehensible, and Esperanza, the girl whom Ansot twice attempts to seduce, not realizing she is his abandoned daughter—exemplify alternative trajectories for feminine subjectivity in relation to patriarchally inscribed desire. The two women also represent two levels of female subjection—the political and the psychological. Both Teresa and Esperanza, the narrator explains, 'permanecían atadas al victorioso carro de su dueño, la una sujeta por los robustos brazos que la oprimían, la otra … ¡por su corazón!: cadenas que en aquellos instantes supremos no podían romperse a pesar de todas las violencias de la tierra' [were tied to the victorious chariot of their master, the one subjected by the strong arms of the man who oppressed her, the other … by her heart!, a chain that in those supreme moments could not be broken by all the violence on the earth] (117).⁵ Teresa, whose position within the novel duplicates that of the female reader conditioned by the folletín, demonstrates the psychological form of subjection: despite her active resistance to Ansot's sexual power over her, that patriarchal power is continually regenerated within her—and, by implication, within the woman writer and reader—by a fantasy structured around the father's seduction. Esperanza, on the other hand, is subjected to her father only by his physical and social power, not by the psychological chains of desire. Unlike Teresa, her fantasy is not captured by the seduction scene. Staying back from the brink of seduction and sexuality, she consciously sees Ansot only as a tyrant and enslaver and learns at the end of the novel, with the revelation of her origins, that her desire is really for her mother—for the lost mother of her now unremembered earliest infancy. In Esperanza, then, Castro explores the possibility of a pre-Oedipal desire for reunion with the mother as an alternative to subjection to the sexual law of the father.

As a reading and rewriting of the fantasies projected in the popular fiction of nineteenth-century Spain, La hija del mar resists at a number of levels the subjecting effects of the seduction fantasy on women: it treats as tyranny both the political and the psychological power of pulp fiction's seductive father-figures; it debunks the myth of female power to redeem through passivity; and it presents the mother as an alternative object of women's desire. This struggle to transform the meanings of the given narrative materials is very clearly an unresolved process within the text. Esperanza, the 'hope' of an un-Oedipalized feminine subjectivity, can find no place in the social world and throws herself from a cliff into the sea. Her story exposes the painful dilemma of the female reader—and the feminine subject—within modern patriarchal society.

Several years after the publication of her first novel, Rosalía de Castro again addressed the issues of reading, seduction, and desire, but this time in the register of satire and self-reflexive irony rather than that of melodrama. El caballero de las botas azules appeared in 1867, on the eve of a revolutionary crisis of the Spanish state. In a period when the serialized novel reigned supreme, Castro's novel attacked the dominant forms of literature in her society, exposing the manipulation of desire that buttressed structures of economic exploitation and political domination. The question of women's desire is not so thematically predominant in this novel as in La hija del mar, yet, as I will argue, the underlying strategy of self-reflexive consciousness is directed against women's destructive habits of reading and desiring.

El caballero establishes its self-reflexive strategy by immediately implicating and satirizing its own context of production and consumption. It begins with a dialogue titled 'A Man and a Muse', in which a would-be author, only too aware that the contemporary arena of writing is a competitive market-place, seeks inspiration to create a work so original that it will triumph over all others and win him immortal fame (Castro 1977: 561-2). The ironic and unconventional Muse identifies his problem as the chaotic proliferation of print:

¿[Q]ué hacer en medio de ese desbordamiento inconmensurable en donde nadie hace justicia a nadie, y en el cual los más ignorantes y más necios, los más audaces y pequeños quieren ser los primeros? He aquí por qué me llamaste … por qué me buscarás siempre, pues sin mí serás '¡uno de tantos!' y nada más que esto.

What could you do in that measureless deluge in which no one does justice to anyone else, and the most ignorant and foolish, the most audacious and petty want to be number one? That is why you called me … why you will always seek me out, because without me you will be 'one of the crowd' and nothing more. (572-3)

This text self-consciously exposes the desire or objective motivating its own generation, as well as the generation of all works flooding the market in which it will be received, thus calling attention to the need of literature published in this context to create a singular desire in its target audience. The prefatory dialogue identifies the achievement of this aim with novelty, a degraded version of the Romantic ambition toward originality produced by the development of modern market structures as the framework of literary production.⁶ The Muse reveals that her name is Novelty, and this is the key to the success she promises the Man who accepts her inspiration: 'Te haré el más popular de los hombres, y miles de corazones se estremecerân de curiosidad y emoción a tu paso' [I will make you the most popular of men, and thousands of hearts will tremble with curiosity and emotion when you go by] (579). Sired by doubt and birthed by desire (578), Novelty engenders new desires—or desire for the new—in the hearts of consumers, helping create the necessary conditions of a capitalist economy.

The story that follows this dialogue (a 'strange story' according to its own subtitle) is, to put it in the most reductive terms, the story of how the Muse, transforming the Man into the Knight of the Blue Boots, inspires him to carry out a supremely successful marketing strategy to ensure that his book, the Book of Books, is the only one read in Madrid. The incarnation of novelty with his luminescent blue boots and ambiguous cravat, which sometimes looks like a live eagle, the Caballero arouses and focuses on himself the unsatisfied desires of the whole city, then disappears, promising his Book in answer to their expectations. The story closes with the distribution of the Book of Books, whose contents are never revealed. As a satiric commentary on the contemporary situation of the writer, Castro's novel could not be more acerbic: the story of a successful literary inspiration has nothing to do with the textual product, but only with the strategy for marketing it.

Explicit satire on contemporary literature runs throughout the narrative. The indictment probes beneath the question of aesthetic quality in the chaotic proliferation of the printed word, and targets the economic structure of the print industry. Castro characterizes the reigning system of serial publication as exploitative when a poet laments 'la lastimosa popularidad que han llegado a adquirir esas novelas que, para explotar al pobre, se publican por entregas de a dos cuartos' [the unfortunate popularity recently acquired by those novels that, in order to exploit the poor, are published in penny instalments] (647). The exploitation of the female reading public is exposed as a particularly lucrative publishing practice by the parodically self-congratulatory remarks of a publisher commenting on women's fiction:

¡Oh! Es un éxito fabuloso el que estas novelas obtienen. Casi todos los maestros y maestras de primera enseñanza, casi todas las obreras de Madrid, se han suscrito, sin contar los directores del Hospicio, de la Inclusa y de otros colegios particulares que las compran para que las niñas, al mismo tiempo que se entretienen los días de fiesta con su amena lectura, se instruyan y aprendan en ellas a ser virtuosas.

Oh, the success these novels are having is fabulous! Almost all the primary school teachers, almost all the women workers of Madrid have subscribed, not to mention the directors of the Orphanage, of the Home for Foundlings, and of other private schools that buy them so the girls, at the same time as having enjoyable reading for holidays, are taught by them to be virtuous. (799)

The titles Castro invents to characterize this genre provide a succinct ironic summary of the ideological message of the kind of fiction Sinués advocated: La mujer honrada [The Honourable Woman], El amor sacrificado [Self-Sacrificing Love], and La pobreza sin mancilla [Poverty without Stain]. Indeed, the publisher uses some of Sinués's terms when he goes on to say that his novels 'además de estar llenas de escenas tiernas y conmovedoras … encierran al mismo tiempo una moral que la misma Inquisición no hubiera reprobado' [besides being full of tender and moving scenes … contain at the same time a moral the Inquisition itself wouldn't have disapproved of]. The satiric intent of this passage is underlined by the editor's interlocutor, who remarks ironically that while this fiction may observe good morals, it does not observe good grammar, and the editor replies cynically: '¿Qué importa todo eso? ¡Aprensiones! … Las mujeres, que son las que realmente aman y se impresionan con esta clase de libros, no saben gramática en nuestro país' [What does that matter? Idle misgivings! … In our country, women, who are the ones who really love and are impressed by this kind of books, don't know anything about grammar] (799).

The conclusion of El caballero de las botas azules enacts Castro's condemnation of contemporary literary production as being not only aesthetically mediocre, but, even worse, shaped by economic and political interests that aim to reinforce the subordination of women and the working classes. As part of the theatrical grand finale that the Caballero offers to the astonished eyes of Madrid's élite before he disappears, the city's stock of current publications, which his helper has bought from the booksellers and stored in preparation for this moment, is dumped in a deep well and buried forever. With great fanfare, the Caballero shows the guests at his goodbye banquet the pit filled to the brim with modern literature and announces: '¡Señores, la obra está cumplida! La humanidad se ve libre de un peso inútil; … ya no leerá artículos distinguidos, ni historias irispiradas, versos insípidos, ni novelas extravagantes, ni artículos críticos cuya gracia empalagosa trasciende a necio' [Ladies and gentlemen, my mission is fulfilled! Humanity has been freed from a useless burden; … no longer must it read distinguished articles, or inspired stories, or insipid verses, or extravagant novels, or critical articles whose tiresome wit smells of idiocy] (825). Self-reflexive irony is not absent here, for the Caballero continues by observing that the field has now been cleared for his own soon-to-appear work, exposing the possibility that he is no better than the self-promoting editors and authors whose books lie buried, only a more successful strategist.

That this satiric put-down of contemporary literature has a connection with the subordination of women is suggested by another coup de théâtre at the book-burying. At the beginning of the banquet, the Duke of Glory (as the Caballero is known in Madrid) announces that the evening's festivities include the appearance of some slave-women, whom he will with his own hands set free. Indeed, just as the condemned books begin to shoot through the air on their way to the pit, another spectacle greets the eyes of the guests: tunic-clad slave-girls, their bluepainted faces hidden by the long visors of their jockey caps, come tremblingly forward to kiss the Duke's boots. A tumult of indignation arises among those present, who, recognizing the slave-girls as some of Madrid's most wealthy and beautiful noblewomen, ask each other what is going on. That is a question we must ask ourselves, too, at this point. Why is this tableau of feminine subjugation, reminiscent of the image in La hija del mar of the two women tied to the chariot of their master, cropping up in this context? What does the Knight of the Blue Boots, Castro's instrument of satire against bad literature, have in common with the abusive and tyrannical Ansot?

To answer this question, we must go back to the activities through which the blue-booted Duke has brought all Madrid under his sway. What I have somewhat crudely characterized as a marketing strategy is, like any such strategy, a campaign to arouse and channel desires. In her perceptive Lacanian reading of this novel, Lou Charnon-Deutsch argues that the Duke's function is to teach others 'the mechanics of desire', by 'repeatedly display[ing] himself and then withdraw[ing]' (81, 85). At the most explicit level, the Duke aims to pique curiosity—the desire to know—through the novelty of his dress and behaviour; thus, his first victim, the Duke of Albuérniga, who has devoted his life to cultivating a Stoic lack of desire, is hooked when curiosity about the Caballero 's singular appearance overcomes his anger that the other has disturbed his nap (592). What other desires may be veiled beneath Albuérniga's tormented attempts to repress his fascination with the Duke of Glory are never made clear, but in the case of the ladies who find the Duke irresistible, his assumption of a powerfully masculine persona is a central factor, as Charnon-Deutsch argues (85). The Duke's appearance and accoutrements, along with the mystery surrounding his sudden appearance in the capital, are sufficient to arouse the interest of the madrileñas, who endeavour to entice him to their soirées and salons and write secretly to arrange private tête-à-têtes.

In fact, the Caballero's principal technique of seduction is to occupy the role of the tall, dark stranger, the magnetic male figure of the folletín, albeit with a disturbing ironic twist. Here is how he appears to the astonished eyes of the first persons he encounters:

Era el singularísimo y nunca bien ponderado personaje de elevada talla y arrogante apostura, de negra, crespa y un tanto revuelta, si bien perfumada, caballera. Tenía el semblante tan uniformemente bianco como si fuese hecho de un pedazo de mármol, y la expresión irónica de su mirada y de su boca era tal que turbaba al primer golpe el ánimo más sereno.

This singular and never adequately praised character was tall of stature and carried himself with arrogance. His hair was black, curly, and somewhat tousled, though well perfumed. His face was as uniformly white as if it were made of marble, and the expression of his eyes and mouth was so ironic it could instantly trouble the serenest mind. (587)

Picking up the cues concerning the fictional genre to which this character corresponds, two of the city's leading society ladies—Laura, the Countess of Pampa, and the noble Casimira—hide their identity under cloaks like countless heroines of adventure novels and roam the streets at night, hoping to encounter the mystery man. When they finally do see him in person at a ball where he confounds Madrid's assembled élite by mocking its frivolity and walking out, the snub inflames their unsatisfied longings. The next day the Duke receives billets-doux from a representative sample of Madrid's women. Each of the letters, with the exception of the one from the ignorant and innocent Mariquita, which we will take up in a moment, reveals the literary origin of the fantasy that the letter's writer wishes to enact with the Duke. Thus the letter from a Creole poetess refers to the primeval forests of 'la virgen América' [virgin America] and to the 'desgraciado e inmortal Moctezuma' [unfortunate and immortal Montezuma] (668), evoking the Romantic literature that exoticized the New World as a setting for sentimental love stories. The note from the Countess of Pampa requests an interview with the Duke because she wishes to learn from him 'cómo las mujeres de la aristocracia rusa visten de mañana' [about the morning dress of the aristocratic women of Russia] (668), thus identifying the Caballero with the country of Lermontov, whose novel A Hero of our Time obsesses her, as she has earlier confessed to Casimira. In replying to each woman, the Duke uses language corresponding to the fantasy script she has revealed and he raises the stakes by refusing the specific request made, but proposing the rendezvous secretly desired. Yet when the tête-à-tête occurs, he steps out of the role assigned, forcing the woman concerned to acknowledge the unavowed fantasy that has motivated her actions. The Duke's strategy of arousing, then thwarting, feminine desire is most fully elaborated in the subplots involving Laura and Casimira. Two significant features of these subplots—their self-conscious literariness and their sadomasochistic overtones—are connected, in my reading of the novel, and provide a key to the disturbing scene of female subjugation in the novel's finale. Confusion of life and literature occurs at several levels in this subplot. As their venture incognito into the night-time streets suggests, the two women identify themselves with the heroines of the novels they read. The influence of Romantic melodrama is particularly strong in their concept of themselves as 'las independientes', superior to other women, as free and powerful as men (639), very much along the lines of Stendhal's Mathilde. They affect Romantic ennui: 'Sólo sé que el mundo envejece rápidamente y que todo me parece usado y de mal gusto' [I only know that the world is quickly getting old and everything seems worn out and in bad taste] (639), says Laura, turning to her reading of Lermontov to imagine new thrills in the arms of a son of the Caucasus. Her projection of this fantasy on the Knight of the Blue Boots gives a comic cast to the scene of their encounter. All the Duke need do to send her into a delirium of excitement is to smile 'de la manera que se sonreía Petchorín' [in the same way as Petchorin] (742), the disillusioned hero of Lermontov's A Hero of our Time. Nothing will persuade her that the Duke is not the Russian poet in some form (744). Maddened in her desire to receive verification of this fantasy, Laura agrees to kiss the Duke's boots in exchange for learning who he is. Her awakening will occur when the concluding scene demonstrates to what extent her literary fantasies of love have enslaved her.

Casimira seems to seek her thrills in fantasies of domination and surrender. In her note, she offers the Duke a role similar to that of Albert Ansot: '¿Sin duda es [el duque] un tirano que se digna regir a los suyos con mano de hierro? De cualquier modo, yo seré siempre su fiel amiga, seré su sierva, su esclava seré si él lo desea' [Doubtless [the Duke] is a tyrant who deigns to rule his subjects with an iron hand? At any rate, I will always be his faithful friend, I will be his handmaiden, his slave, if he so desires] (677). It is she, then, who has introduced the sadomasochistic script that the Duke develops, both in his reply, which he addresses 'Señora y esclava mía' [My lady and slave] (678), and in his subsequent interview with her. In this encounter, he ironically calls attention to the melodramatic language of her note, letting her know that, far from engaging in the gallant badinage she expects, he intends to play out the metaphor on a more literal level: 'Pero cuando se trata de una sierva … de una esclava … ¡oh! entonces mi severidad no tiene límites: me vuelvo analítico, meticuloso' [But when dealing with a handmaiden … a slave … oh, then my severity has no limits: I become analytical, meticulous] (699-700). Playing on Casimira's wish to emulate audacious novelistic heroines who will stop at nothing, the Duke ultimately induces her to promise to play his slave in the public tableau he is planning.

What Casimira hopes to obtain from accepting the subjugated role becomes clear when she states what she expects in return if she does as the Duke demands:

(ya he dicho que no pretendo ser la amante ni la esposa del señor duque), lo que sí pretendo es que en tal caso me haga su confidenta, la depositaria de sus secretos … la fuerte y fiel guardadora de los misterios que nadie sino yo entienda. Sí, señor duque: quiero saber su historia; quiero saber qué significan esa corbata y esas botas.

(I've already said I don't want to be your lover or wife), what I do want in such a case is for you to make me your confidante, the depository of your secrets … your strong and faithful guardian of the mysteries no one understands but me. Yes, Duke, I want to know your story; I want to know what that cravat and those boots signify. (708)

Castro has here revealingly rewritten the seduction scenario that figured so prominently in her first novel. In La hija del mar the woman's seduction into heterosexual sexuality was linked directly to a power relationship that subjugated her; here the power relationship of master and slave presents more analytically the underlying exchange operating in the sexual economy of gender difference. Casimira is willing to occupy the subordinated position in the belief that thus she will gain access to the secret source of male power, tantalizingly symbolized in the Duke's cravat and boots. If we find that this revised representation of the seduction scene seems to prefigure the terms in which psychoanalytic theory would later theorize the feminine relationship to phallic desire, then it should not surprise us that the Duke seems to behave very much like a psychoanalyst in relation to Casimira and the other women he 'treats'. He attracts upon himself the projection of their repressed or barely conscious desires, then, by refusing to play the role assigned him, forces them both to acknowledge their fantasies and to recognize the impossibility or undesirability of satisfying them. The therapeutic intent of the final tableau now becomes clear. In appearing as slave-girls and kissing the Duke's boots, Casimira and Laura act out on a very different level from the one they anticipated their fantasies of seduction in relation to the Duke;⁷ they take part in the tableau with full awareness that there is no pleasure for them in the scenario, only humiliation. And the knowledge—that is, the possession of the 'secret'—they expected to obtain eludes them. But they have learnt something about themselves. Once they have performed their part of the bargain, the Duke pronounces them free, declaring 'Esas pobres hijas de la esclavitud aman la libertad como el mayor bien de la vida, pero no han comprendido todavá la manera de alcanzarla' [These poor daughters of slavery love freedom as life's greatest good, but they have not yet understood how to achieve it] (823).

In playing a therapeutic role, a consciousness-raising role, in relation to women, the Duke functions like a text that demands a different kind of reading from the one the female characters are used to. Like an enticing novel, he engages their fantasies, insinuating that his story will provide mysterious satisfactions while repeatedly deferring the desired outcomes and disclosures. Yet, unlike the popular fiction that traded on mysteries and revelations (Eugène Sue's The Mysteries of Paris had initiated a whole subgenre of translations and imitations in Spain), the Caballero baffles his readers' desire to know his story. Instead of playing out the expectations his feminine admirers have internalized from their reading, he turns these expectations back on themselves to produce uncomfortable self-consciousness rather than satisfaction. This, then, is what unites the two spectacles with which the blue-booted Duke concludes his sojourn in Madrid. His staging of the liberation of the slave-girls while having modern literature cast into the pit implies a connection between the sexual enslavement of women and the reading habits through which women seek pleasure in fiction. The Duke attempts to teach women to be resistant readers, to read critically the fantasies scripted for them.⁸

The idea of the Duke's function as a text that invites women's fantasy projection and then promotes a critical evaluation of that fantasy casts light on the other important subplot of the novel as well, the story of his interaction with Mariquita, an innocent girl of the lower middle class who lives in a village—satirically named Dog Run—outside Madrid. Mariquita has been kept as ignorant as possible, having been brought up in the way considered exemplary for Spanish girls of her class. Castro's indignation is palpable in the description of the systematic deprivation of any form of self-expression or pleasure to which Mariquita is subject; so deprived is she that solitary strolls through the nearby cemetery constitute her only enjoyment. Unfortunately for the matchmaking plans of her aunt and father, they have kept her so rigorously isolated from images and analogues of sexuality that, when presented with the young man intended to be her husband, Mariquita finds him utterly ridiculous and repellent. Following the pattern Castro is exploring in these novels, her desire is instead awakened by a seductive stand-in for the father, when Mariquita observes the Duke one day in the graveyard (like any Romantic ironist worth his salt, he is conversing with the grave-digger). The experience is analogous to that of reading: not only is everything about the Caballero as distant from her daily life as pulp fiction, but she is also hooked as passionately as if she had picked up a forbidden novel: 'pudo Mariquita contemplarle a su gusto, desde los pies a la cabeza y desde la cabeza a los pies, sin pestañear siquiera y sin tomar apenas aliento. Sucedíale a la niña que cuanto más le miraba mayor placer y encanto le causaba verle' [Mariquita was able to gaze at him as much as she liked, from head to toe and back again, without even blinking and hardly drawing breath. What was happening to the child was that the more she looked at him, the more pleasure and enchantment she felt from seeing him] (621). Desiring more of this enchanting experience, she dreams obsessively of the Caballero and ends up doing exactly what the worldly society ladies do—she writes to him. Unlike the ladies, however, she is direct about her desires: she wishes to be near him again and states that if her father decided to marry her to the Duke, she would be very happy (669). In response to her directness and innocence, the Duke is gentler in teaching her to understand the impossibility of realizing her desire. He makes her see that union with a character like him—powerful and dominating—would bring pain and not pleasure. Essentially, he shows her that a sado-masochistic fantasy is not love, and leaves her grieving for the loss of her dreams, but now emotionally prepared to find another kind of relationship with her intended—an authentic artistic genius whose creations, significantly, have not yet been commercialized.

The gentler treatment accorded to Mariquita and her intended distinguishes them from Madrid's élite, the members of the aristocracy and the urban bourgeoisie relentlessly mocked by the Duke. Castro's critique of women's 'enslavement' does not fail to make it clear that the class structure of society enslaves some women more than others. Indeed, some of the novel's most biting scenes show the aristocratic women's imperious and illogical treatment of their maids, who as feminine subjects also feel the Duke's seductive power but have not their mistresses' freedom to try to enact their fantasies. There is more to be said about the process the Duke sets in motion within the narrative, however. In eliciting seduction fantasies and then subjecting them to critique, he also registers the instability of the gendered positions within them. Castro develops the possibilities of treating gender as a position or a role rather than a stable identity in a number of ways. Let us return for a moment to the episode involving Casimira, whose interaction with the Duke highlights the reversibility of roles in the sadomasochistic schema that structures their relationship. The Duke interprets the text of her note, which ostensibly offers to be his slave, as a subtextual desire to dominate him, to be the seducer rather than the seduced. 'Historia de José' [Joseph's story], he exclaims after reading her letter and gazing at the portrait sent with it, 'ven a mi pensamiento y sé para mis deseos lo que son los diques para las hirvientes olas del mar…. Y tú, Musa o demonio, no te burles de mi flaqueza ni me abandones cuando la serpiente tentadora, atraída por mis botas azules, se me acerca presentándome la dorada manzana para hacerme perder mi paraíso' [come into my thoughts and be to my desires as dykes to the boiling waters of the sea…. And you, Muse or demon, don't mock my weakness nor abandon me when the tempting serpent, attracted by my blue boots, approaches, offering me the golden apple to make me lose my Paradise] (677-8). The Caballero is here projecting a fantasy of his own—the counter-transference, to extend our earlier analogy with psychoanalysis—in which Casimira becomes Potiphar's wife, the agent rather than object of seduction, or, alternatively, occupies the masculine position as Tempter with the Duke playing the feminine part of Eve.⁹ That he does not cast himself as Adam to Casimira's Eve suggests that gender ambiguity is implied in the play with role reversal here. For her part, Casimira clearly seeks the advantageous, active position in her verbal fencing match with the Duke; as we have seen, she is willing to enact servitude only because she believes it will give her access to the secret of the Duke's power.

Just as the narrative shows instability in the positions that the Duke and Casimira occupy in the sado-masochistic fantasy, so too it explores reversals of the active and passive roles related to the textual communication situation. Women, who are generally positioned as readers in this novel—readers of novels and Romantic poetry, readers of the Duke as text—become writers once the Duke has elicited their desires. In a complex and ambiguous passage, Castro introduces the transition from one gendered role to another by the women who write notes to the Duke. Playing on the conservative Spanish assumption that the ability to write leads women into sin, which would be one way of interpreting this episode, the narrator describes this and other hazards women face in writing, not least of which is the danger of revealing their ignorance and lack of education.¹⁰ The narrator then goes on to beg indulgence for real women's imperfections in relation to their literary models, and the critical bite in these comments makes itself felt:

no debe culpárselas a fe porque cumplan debidamente su misión, haciendo hasta la muerte su papel de mujeres. Cosa es esta digna de la mayor alabanza, cuando hay tantos hombres que ejecutan el suyo de la peor manera … puesto que nacieron para vivir modesta y honradamente, haciendo compás, con el martillo el azadón, al huso con que hilan el bianco lino sus buenas esposas.

they should not be blamed, surely, for fulfilling their mission as expected, for playing their part as women until they die. This is something worthy of the highest praise, when there are so many men who play their part in the worst way … given that they were born to live modestly and honourably, keeping time with their hammer or spade to the wheel on which their good wives spin white linen thread. (667)

Aside from the irony with which Castro suggests that women are scorned for an ignorance that is prescribed as necessary to their social function, what I want to emphasize in this passage is the treatment of gender positions, represented here through highly traditional images, as assigned roles. The Spanish term she uses—'papel' meaning both 'part' and 'paper'—intensifies the theatricality implied by the concept of part as something scripted and assigned by society rather than by nature. And although, tragically, those assigned the part of women seem to have little choice but to play it 'until they die', this narrative suggests that the parts are to some degree transferable, interchangeable, for women can imagine writing their own script, as Casimira seems to do, and men can find themselves slipping into the feminine position, as the Duke does momentarily.

Sliding out of his privileged male position is not the only slippage that threatens the Knight of the Blue Boots in a narrative that shifts playfully among frames without confirming any point of origin or fixed reference. In the key episode we have already examined, as the Duke peruses Casimira's note and portrait, he begins to slip into the character of another story, presumably prior to the story he is tracing with the help of the Muse in the main body of the narrative. He has known Casimira in another time and under another identity: '¡El duque conocía demasiado aquel rostro que en otro tiempo había adorado en vano!' [The duke knew only too well that face, which he had once adored in vain!] (677). The Duke's earlier life, mentioned only in scattered references, cannot be read as his 'real' life, however. The vocabulary and punctuation of these references give this other life the status of pulp fiction, suggesting that the Duke played the same part as victim of folletín-inspired fantasies that his female admirers play in the story he is currently developing. The ironic stance he maintains, not without some struggle, is what permits him to free himself from the seductions of fiction and to teach the women of Madrid to do the same, just as the self-reflexivity of Castro's text transcends her earlier novel's reproduction of the seduction fantasy.

The Duke's mysterious power is not, in fact, the power of phallic privilege, which is elusive and precarious in this novel, but of self-knowledge and self-criticism. He eludes both seduction and attack by laughing at himself, indicting himself as he indicts others: 'Lo conozco: yo merecería el primero ser arrojado en el pozo de la moderna ciencia en compañía de las "historias inspiradas", de los malos versos, de las zarzuelas sublimes y de las novelas que se publican entrega de a dos cuartos' [I know it: I deserve to be the first one thrown into the pit of modern knowledge along with the 'inspired stories', the bad verses, the sublime zarzuelas, and the novels sold by penny instalments] (788). Addressing these words to the Muse, the Caballero refers to yet another frame to the main story: the dialogue of the Man and the Muse, the interaction that transformed him into the Duke by teaching him the advantages of irony and ambiguity.

Here the roles, later duplicated in the relation of the Duke and the women, are reversed: the Man seeks from the Muse fulfilment of his 'más ferviente deseo' [most fervent desire] (561), but she does not conform to his expectations, and instead teases and provokes him into jettisoning his fantasies and self-deceptions about writing, fame, and genius. As in the implied story of his previous relations with Casimira, he occupies the position of desirer, but at this level the object is literary glory. The question of gender is foregrounded almost as soon as the Man invokes the Muse: when she refuses to step out of the cloud that veils her, he counters with a misogynist commonplace about women, '¡Hasta las Musas son coquetas!' [Even the Muses are coquettes!], to which she replies, 'Considera que soy Musa pero no dama, y que no debemos perder el tiempo en devaneos' [Bear in mind that I am a Muse but not a lady, and that we shouldn't waste time on idle flirtation] (561).¹¹ In bringing to the surface of the text and then mocking traditional assumptions about the gendered relation of muse to writer, Castro prepares for the destabilizing ambiguity of the Muse's appearance when she does reveal herself visually: 'Su rostro es largo, ovalado y de una expresión ambigua; tiene los ojos pardos, verdes y azules, y parecen igualmente dispuestos a hacer guiños picarescamente o languidecer de amor. Un fino bozo sombrea el labio superior de su boca, algo abultada' [Her face is long, oval, and has an ambiguous expression; her eyes are grey, green, and blue, and seem equally likely to wink roguishly or to languish with love. A fine moustache shadows the upper lip of her rather thick mouth] (577). The Man reacts emphatically to the gender indeterminacy of a being whom he, along with literary tradition, had cast firmly in the feminine part: 'Conque mi Musa era un marimacho, un ser anfibio de esos que debieran quedar para siempre en el vacío? ¡Qué abominación!' [So my Muse was a man-woman, an amphibious being of the sort that should remain forever in the void? What an abomination!] (577). It is this attitude the Muse must change to make the Man into the Knight of the Blue Boots. It is necessary, she tells him, 'que concluyas por apreciarme en lo que valgo' [that you end up appreciating what I'm worth] (577). And when he finally understands the advantage of ironic double vision and can take pleasure in ambiguity, he is ready to sally forth, a new kind of Quijote, to defeat fantasies through critical self-consciousness.¹²

The indeterminacy of meaning in this text, which has been analysed in semiotic terms by Antonio Risco, was noted by the person who was presumably its first reader, Castro's husband Manuel Murguia.¹³ The novel is constructed, he said, in such a way 'que al final se pregunte [el lector], entre dudoso y confiado, si es verdad que lo ha comprendido' [that at the end [the reader] asks himself, hesitating between doubt and confidence, if it is true that he has understood it] (Risco 1982: 193). This uncertainty is intensified by the novel's self-reflexive satire, which uses the technique of mise en abyme to subject its own procedure to ridicule. In the final banquet scene, for instance, a critic mocked by the Duke declares that he is reading a novel called El caballero de las botas azules: 'Solo puede decirse de tal novela que le falta todo para serlo: argumenta, pensamiento, moral … en fin, es una simple monstruosidad, lo peor entre lo peor' [All that can be said about it is that it has nothing that makes a novel a novel—plot, ideas, moral judgement … in short, it's simply a monstrosity, the worst of the worst] (801). The novel's destabilization of even its own ground of narration, I would argue, is closely connected with its treatment of gender categories. Just as the protagonist, in learning to appreciate the Muse's gender ambiguity, frees himself from the literalness of fixed positions, so too the text teaches its readers to break out of an economy of desire that reinforces women's subordination.

Rosalía de Castro's novels situate themselves in a troubled relationship to the fiction of her time, particularly in regard to how the narratives elicited the reading pleasure of women. Mandrell comments that, as a prototype of women reading seductive texts, Ana Ozores's response to Don Juan Tenorio in La Regenta shows how 'reading and interpretation, even if loosely construed in terms of watching a drama, draw women more deeply into the web of patriarchy' (149). To combat the effects of texts that acted the role of seducing fathers, leading women's desire along the path that would subject them to patriarchy, Castro attempted to replay the fantasies in new and liberating ways. In La hija del mar she exposed as violently oppressive the effects of the seduction fantasy and experimented with attaching women's desire to the maternal object. Later, in El caballero de las botas azules, she turned to an attack on the conventional erotics of reading. Peter Brooks has argued that the reader's desire in nineteenth-century narratives follows a pattern of arousal, expectation, and discharge that seems clearly masculine and Oedipal (61, 107-12).¹⁴ Castro's novel certainly does not follow this trajectory. The Duke, functioning as a text within the text, refuses to permit the desire he arouses to follow the phallic pattern described by Brooks, but instead turns his audience's attention to the structure of desire itself. In the same way, this novel, by refusing to resolve its ambiguities into stable meaning, will not allow the reader a satisfactory identification with the subject positions fixed by such resolution. Formally as well as thematically, Castro calls for a new narrative paradigm, and, by implication, a new social organization.¹⁵

The Muse of Novelty who presides over El caballero de las botas azules is the Muse of Mutability, and, as the Muse observes of herself, she has 'su contra y su pro' [her pros and cons] (577). Although Castro seems to symbolize in her the stimulus to capitalism's commodification of culture, this same figure also suggests the possibility of change and transformation. At the end of the novel, on the morning after the Duke's spectacular demonstration of the absurdity of current literature and the oppressiveness of current social forms, Madrid awakes to a sense of agitation and expectacy. ' "¿Hay revolución?" preguntaban algunos con sobresalto' ['Has a revolution started?' asked some with consternation] (829). One passer-by, explaining that no one is sure what is happening, but that all are waiting for the arrival of the Book of Books, adds that he is ready for another kind of fiction: 'Por mi nombre, como ya me canso de tan estupendas mentiras como por ahí se escriben para engañarnos … Dicen que va a aparecer ahora un libro cual no se ha visto otro todavía … Por ese, por ese aguardo yo' [Upon my honour, I'm getting tired of such stupendous lies as the ones they write around here to deceive us … They say that now there's about to appear a book like no other that has yet been seen … That's the one I'm waiting for] (830). In 1868, a year after the novel's publication, the long-expected Glorious Revolution occurred and, in its aftermath, a new national novelistic tradition arose. But neither the revolution nor the realist canon incorporated the radical openness of structure that Castro's Muse sought to inspire.

Receiving more critical attention now than in Castro's own time, her novels elicit the desirous readings of late twentieth-century feminist critics, who can find in their complex ambiguities corroboration of their own interest in understanding gender identity as discursively constructed and inherently unstable. Yet at the same time, the fate of the liberatory project these texts embody offers us a salutary warning about the intractable embeddedness of discursive systems in the material relations of human society: it reminds us that too many individuals did, and still do, play their part as women 'until they die'.

Notes

¹ This defence of Böhl's work was published in La Ilustración (quoted in Montesinos 35).

² Blanco makes a similar point.

³ See Laplanche and Pontalis 5-34. Jane Gallop discusses the treatment of the father-daughter seduction scenario in the psychoanalytic tradition, along with Luce Irigaray's critique of it: Gallop 70-9.

⁴ See Kirkpatrick.

⁵ All translations of Castro's texts are mine.

⁶ Francisco Rodríguez argues that this and other novels by Castro show the influence of Utopian socialism in a subtextual critique of developing capitalist forms (Rodríguez 169-79).

⁷ Casimira alludes to these fantasies early in the novel, when she recognizes that Laura harbours the same hopes as she in relation to the Duke: 'Te veo y te comprendo … Caminamos a un mismo paso y por un mismo sendero; falta ahora saber quién llegará la primera' [I see what you're up to … We're going at the same pace down the same path; we'll see who gets there first] (639).

⁸ The foregoing reading of the Duke's relation to the women characters coincides in many respects with that of Charnon-Deutsch. It differs in so far as I am concerned with women as reading subjects, while Charnon-Deutsch is interested in suggesting that the underlying desire the Duke's shenanigans reveal in women is the desire to be a writing or speaking subject: 'What their impossible demands finally reveal is that beyond sexual desire lies the will to know and understand things, that is, to be in possession of the words that would make the unknown familiar' (88). She argues that the freedom mentioned by the Duke as what women regard as the greatest good 'is clearly related to women imagining themselves as writing subjects' (94).

⁹ It might be noted here that the psychoanalytical account of primal fantasies like the seduction fantasy implies that the subject is not fixed in any one position. Laplanche and Pontalis stress this in their article.

¹⁰ This is Castro's tactic also in other pronouncements on women writing: she focuses on the negative experiences of women who write, leaving the tacit indictment of the injustice of this situation for the reader to infer. Shelley Stevens analyses this rhetorical strategy in her discussion of 'Las literatas' (1866) and the prologue to Follas novas (1880) (Stevens 79-85).

¹¹ Castro plays simultaneously with gender difference and class difference here: the Muse in effect says, 'I'm not a woman and I'm not an aristocrat.' The Muse's democratic tendencies are suggested in a number of ways throughout the dialogue: her citatoin of the popular French poet Béranger, for exmple (573).

¹² Don Quijote comes up once or twice in the dialogue. When the Man asks the Muse if she wants to make a rascal or a Quijote out of him, she replies that he already is a little of each (580). Several critcs have note the Cervantine references and textual strategies in the novel, among them Germán Gullón (490) and Enrique Miralles (459). It should be pointed out that the Caballero, in attacking the fantasies elicited by the serial novel, acts not so much like Don Quijote the character, as like Don Quijote the text.

¹³ See Risco 1982: 184-97. Risco cites Murguía's commentary on the novel. These comments were, according to F. Rodríguez (206), first published in Murguía's essay 'Rosalia de Castro', La Voz de Galicia (La Coruña), 17 July 1885.

¹⁴ Susan Winnett questions the universalization of paradigms of male sexual pleasure to all narratives and representation (505-18).

¹⁵ Many critics consider the demand for a new kind of novel to be a central theme. See articles by Enrique Miralles, Carme Fernández-Pérez Sanjulian, Antonio Risco (1982). Risco (1986), Miralles, and F. Rodríguez (176-9) link Castro's critique of literature with her critique of society.