Quixotic Modernists: Reading Gender in Tristana, Trigo, and Martínez Sierra (review)

Louise Ciallella's monograph Quixotic Modernists is an important participant in current academic conversations about the nature of modernity and modernism in Spanish letters. For those involved or interested in these debates, there are some basic questions that need to be answered about the nature of the modern in the Iberian Peninsula: how different is Spain's modernity from that of the rest of Europe?; how does one make generalizations about modernity while taking into account the concepts of gender, race and class?; how are the representational techniques of fin de siglo Spanish authors consistent with or different from those of their contemporaries in other parts of the world?; what is the relationship between material modernization and cultural modernism?; and last but not least, how does one teach and research a radically new idea of a Spanish modernism at the turn of the nineteenth century that does not rely on the old categories of Realism, Naturalism, and the Generation of 98? Quixotic Modernists does not shy away from any of these key concepts that are currently being worked out by Hispanists who will be indebted to the author (whether they agree with her or not) for a fresh look at the poetics of a handful of key Spanish authors whose work has received scant attention.

Quixotic Modernists offers the reader close and expert approaches of four texts by three different authors: Benito Pérez Galdós's canonical realist novel Tristana (1892), Felipe Trigo's controversial modernist novel Las ingenuas (1901), and María Martínez Sierra's written account accompanying Ricardo Marín's illustrations of La tristeza del Quijote (1905) and Martínez Sierra's first novel, Tú eres la paz (1906). Ciallella applies the term modernist to any dissenting textual voice. Her concept of dissent is two-fold in that it accounts both for the text's capacity for social and political protest as well as a protest that manifests itself through innovation in novelistic language. In other words, this study assumes that modernist writing requires a rebellious style of writing and a disconformity from established norms. This can be a difficult route to take for a researcher because it requires a way of linking the material to the symbolic that can be hard to maneuver. Ciallella is at an advantage here because she can point to the enthusiastic readership of the novels she analyzes as an indication of their wide appeal and the capacity for readers to react in different and complex ways to the different narrative voices therein. Quixotic Modernists does an exceptionally good job of talking about what the author calls the "linking of past, present and future through their readers' imaging of renewed spaces for women" (23). Drawing on the feminist theory of Martha Banta and Teresa de Lauretis as well as Bakhtin's theories of dialogism, Ciallella argues convincingly that the authors of the narrative voices of the texts she analyzes foreground their own function in the revision of gender constructs. Instead of mere modernist aesthetic distancing or metatextuality, Ciallella argues that the authors in question show the process of imaging and therefore acknowledge their readers as an active part in the changes that the novels propose. It is in the conclusion of Quixotic Modernists that Ciallella states her case most elegantly and directly:

In the end, both women and men must obliquely modify the ángel and niña's metaphorical space of the home through a change in affective spaces and economies. The three novels studied show the poetic and proverbial work of tactically changing the register of middle-class spaces in order to break down the psychological defenses that limit the ángel. In other words, the three texts posit that change in gender constructs cannot come about through an objective or individualized process. Only through subjective and mutual agreement among men, women, and women and men, can domestic space be transformed, so that collective and individual psyches can in turn achieve a proposed modernist fusion...