Cultivating Madrid: Public Space and Middle-Class Culture in the Spanish Capital, 1833–1890 (review)

Reading Daniel Frost’s Cultivating Madrid is like taking a walk in a carefully tended garden. The approach and the topic are refreshing. The overall project is well planned and cared for in a way that reveals the originality of the author’s particular vision. Most notably, it is full of simultaneously elegant and precise phrases that make the putting together of ideas and arguments in the reader’s head a truly engaging and enjoyable experience. More substantially, this book raises some interesting and important questions about the ability of literary scholars to interpret the representation of urban space. Assumptions about words, images, land, and geography change in the nineteenth century, and there follow accompanying changes in urban space and its relationship to nature. One of the most important contributions of Cultivating Madrid is its discussion of the role of language in the understanding of the connections between landscape and human perception. As Frost makes clear in the introduction, “Much of the history of landscape and literature suggests that writing about nature is rooted in the idea of perceiving the land from a subjective standpoint, not only etymologically, but also epistemologically” (15). Specifically, the study offers some compelling ideas about how representations of public parks and landscapes play a reciprocal role in attempts to think of Madrid as a modern capital. During the nineteenth century, Madrid was looking for a way to create something that in effect does not exist: a stable middle-class culture to serve as a model for the nation as a whole. The book begins with a complex but convincing reading of how both the costumbrista writing and urban design treatises of Ramón de Mesonero Romanos provide a vision of Madrid during a time of rapid change (specifically, in the years following the death of the absolute monarch Fernando VII). Paradoxically, Mesonero’s costumbrismo looked to the past to conserve local spaces and traditions that were being lost or overshadowed, while his design treatises looked toward the future and outside of Spain for inspiration. A focus on landscape brings a new understanding to this apparent contradiction. Complementing this reading, a subsequent chapter uses the work of Mariano José de Larra during the period 1833–1836 to examine the imposition of behaviors in the spaces of middle-class social life that before the death of the monarch had been strictly defined but were quickly shifting. Frost argues that Larra sees parks as a way of imposing a liberal civility on a newly emerging middle-class in Madrid.

After theoretically and historically positioning Cultivating Madrid on the foundation of these first two chapters based on careful readings of the work of Mesonero and Larra from the 1830s, the book could have taken any number of directions. Frost takes his definition of public space, modern capitalist urban development, and language from the first part of the book into a subsequent discussion of a selection of urban novels of the 1880s and early 1890s. The main focus is the treatment of gardens and cultivated public spaces in novels by Benito Galdós, Emilia Pardo Bazán, and Armando Palacio Valdés, in which the green spaces of the city hold an illusory promise of escape from the newly defined “laws” of civilized middle-class society. Frost concludes that, in Spanish realism, garden settings where romantic encounters take place challenge the perception that the urban sphere may be kept separate from the rural, and that “proper” relationships can be kept separate from “improper” affairs. According to Frost, the canonical novels of the period tell the story of a complex bourgeois society that wants to define and preserve class distinctions but cannot, in the last analysis, control them. This has implications for our understanding of the use of public spaces in and...