Framing Women: Frame, Perspective and Interpretation in Fortunata y Jacinta, Grand Bal, and Madeleine

Despite the nineteenth century’s quest to know and represent the world “just as it truly is,’’ many philosophers, writers, and artists questioned whether such an enterprise was even possible. For them, human knowledge is imperfect: we only “know’’ the world and our fellow human beings through interpretation. Numerous contemporaneous Spanish artists seem to have shared a particular interest in how women of different social classes are ‘‘framed’’ by and ‘‘understood’’ through social expectations and codes. This article probes how setting, clothing, and cultural background shape the ways in which the protagonist of Benito Pérez Galdós’s 1886–1887 novel Fortunata y Jacinta is seen by the people in her life, as well as how the Catalan modernista artists Santiago Rusiñol and Ramón Casas explore, in their respective paintings Grand Bal (1891) and Madeleine (1892), the ways in which women from the ‘‘popular’’ classes are framed by attire, social spaces, and iconography.