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

Striking Their Modern Pose represents the first in-depth exploration of how attention to the representation of fashion and fashionable dress helps us to understand the thinking of Benito Pérez Galdós, Emilia Pardo Bazán, and Jacinto Octavio Picón about the role played by changing gender norms in Spanish modernity. Those interested in the portrayal of the intricate details of fashion in late nineteenth-century Spain will not be surprised that Heneghan has dedicated a chapter to Picón's Dulce y sabrosa (1891), a novel in which fashionable dress plays a crucial role in the plot. Specialists in Galdós or Pardo Bazán may be pleasantly surprised to find that Heneghan has chosen to examine less obvious texts by these authors, or less obvious aspects of the texts she chooses. We find a chapter dedicated to Galdós's La de Bringas (1884), as we would expect to do; but, unexpectedly, the object of the study is not Rosalía de Bringas herself, but rather the insipid quasi-dandy who becomes her lover, Manuel Pez. Likewise, Heneghan intriguingly passes over an examination of the significance of Mauro Pareja's little white boots or of Feíta Neira's scuffed shoes in Pardo Bazán's Memorias de un solterón, for example, choosing instead to turn her attention to the signaling of attitudes toward gender brought about by Pardo Bazán's portrayals of both Asís de Taboada and Diego Pacheco in Insolación (1889).

The analyses begin with an examination of the close thematic connection between fashion and modernity in Galdós's La desheredada (1881). Chapter 1 is followed by the analysis of La de Bringas, after which Heneghan dedicates a chapter each to the characters of Asís and of Pacheco. Before concluding her study, she offers a new interpretation of Picón's portrayal of Cristeta Moreruela as an exemplar of the "New Woman." The chapters are thus arranged in chronological order according to the work studied, and focus on a span of just one decade, 1881–91.

Throughout the book, Heneghan provides sound textual evidence for her thesis that "these novelists implicated fashion in accentuating the need to reformulate the dominant ideals of gender as a necessary step toward Spain's full integration into modernity" (2). Thus, for example, she understands Isidora Rufete's rebellious consumerism in light of Galdós's critical portrayal of Spain's incomplete modernity and the failures of the Revolution of 1868. Manuel Pez, on the other hand, is shown to be one of Galdós's most biting portrayals of the vacuity of Spanish modernity, in that his leanings towards dandismo are purely superficial, lacking the crucial element of defiance of social conventions that characterized the original dandy, Beau Brummel.

In her study of Asís de Taboada's relationship to dress and grooming (chapter 3), Heneghan lends new depth to earlier studies of the centrality of ambivalence in the novel: Asís's ambivalence about her desire for Pacheco is reflected in her varying choices of dress and grooming; likewise, while she asserts her sexual subjectivity, she also fashions herself into an object of visual pleasure for the masculine gaze. In this way, suggests Heneghan, Pardo Bazán uses her portrayal of Asís's relationship with dress and grooming to make a statement about Spanish ambivalence toward modern concepts of feminine sexual desire. Similarly, as Heneghan explains in chapter 4, Diego Pacheco's sartorial choices position him as a modern alternative to the traditional Spanish male.

Heneghan's analysis of Jacinto Octavio Picón's Dulce y sabrosa (chapter 5) successfully draws on criticism of visual arts, such as Dijkstra's Idols of Perversity (New York: Oxford UP, 1986), as well as on careful textual analysis, in order to shed new light...