"Debajo de la sotana": (Re)Dressing Clerical Masculinity in Alas's La Regenta

This article examines the seemingly contradictory embodiment of nineteenth-century discourses of masculinity by Fermín de Pas, the clerical protagonist of Leopoldo Alas's La Regenta (1884-85). Despite its identifiable rhetoric of anticlericalism and emasculation, I argue that Clarín's novel casts the priesthood as a dynamic metaphor for the paradoxes inherent in nineteenth-century masculinity writ large. What I call Fermín's clerical morphology of masculinity coalesces around two dynamically opposed modes: ostentatious self-display and ascetic self-restraint. Through his opulent liturgical dress and immaculate street-wear, Vetusta's Magistral embodies noble patterns of masculinity that nostalgically gloss Ancien Régime social hierarchies. On the other hand, Fermín's tightly controlled deportment and bodily self-restraint dialogue with discourses and ideals of bourgeois masculinity that also call for men to dress austerely and abstain periodically from sex. This facet of his clerical persona is illustrated throughout the novel in Fermín's internalized struggles with clerical behavioral patterns and dress. Through regular comparisons with contemporaneous cultural products including pan-European conduct manuals and novels, I illustrate how La Regenta's fashioning of Fermín de Pas indexes the priest as one of the dominant myths governing modern fantasies of masculinity.