Suicide as Marketing Technique in Galdós's La desheredada

SUICIDE AS MARKETING TECHNIQUE IN GALDÓS’S LA DESHEREDADA by Michael A. Schnepf University of Alabama FOR some still unexplained reason Spaniards suddenly began to kill themselves at an alarming rate in the late 1870s and early 1880s. According to Jorge Jimeno Agius in El suicidio en España, there were only 211 recorded self-inflicted deaths in Spain in 1862. Less than twenty years later the suicide rate had changed drastically. By 1880, when no fewer than 593 Spaniards – an upturn of more than 180% – took their own lives the entire nation was taking serious notice of the trend. When Pérez Galdós published his groundbreaking novel, La desheredada, in 1881 he too appears to have been aware that a perplexing new problem had caught the attention of his reading public. This essay contains three basic points of departure. In part one we will provide evidence of how this concern over suicide manifested itself in Spanish culture. The focus of the second section will shift to the surprising and clever methods that Galdós uses to incorporate this issue into the pages of La desheredada. In part three we will explain the reasons and the benefits behind the novelist’s decision to bring this component into play. By the late 1870s people from a broad cross section of Spanish society were beginning to take heed of the growing problem with suicide. It is important to note in this regard that Galdós was not the only writer to perceive this fatal act as a viable literary theme. In 1879 the respected dramatist, Francisco Flores García, published a play entitled Receta contra el suicidio in which the protagonist sees death as his only solution: Ya la desdicha me agovia Y todo triste lo miro. 41 El estanque del Retiro ó el viaducto de Segovia son el único remedio á esta crisis financiera que tanto me desespera. (Act I scene iii)1 A few years later in 1882, Eduardo Jackson Cortés debuted ¡Adiós mundo amargo!, a play that underscores how commonplace suicide had become in Spain: Hoy el suicidarse Como usted lo ve, Tiene la importancia De tomar un café. Hoy el suicidarse Tan en modo está Que a nadie le sorprende Ni causa novedad. (Act IV, 41-2)2 It was not long before newspapers also came to the realization that the growing number of suicides had become a selling point. In late 1880, José Fernández Bremon penned a curious essay that ponders how certain aspects related to suicide have changed and points to a possible literary cause for the sudden wave of deaths: No sé si alguien hace en España, ni siquiera en Madrid, la estadística de los suicidios: supongo que la dirección de Sanidad se ocupará de ese trabajo, anotando, además de las circunstancias morales que concurren en los que se quitan la vida, los meses en que el hecho es más frecuente y hasta el estado de la atmósfera. . . . El suicidio tenía algo de manía ó una moda aristocrática, es decir, antes era menos frecuente: se necesitaba cierta perversión culta para darse este último escándalo; ahora se ha vulgarizado, poniéndose al alcance de todas las imaginaciones. Parecía el resultado de un sentimentalismo morboso adquirido en lecturas melancólicas y escépticas , ese aliento de espíritu. Y a medida que esa enfermedad intelectual se ha ido transmitiendo á cerebros menos cultivados, se ha hecho más peligroso, porque la mayor defensa contra el hastío de la vida está en la fuerza del espíritu. (11 April 1880: 1) The journalist goes on to add in rather emphatic terms that by 1880 the preferred method of suicide in Madrid was a dramatic plunge from the newly constructed viaduct. So many people were taking their own life that a small controversy developed around the topic of what to do with the bodies. Bremon, in the same pro42 Michael A. Schnepf gressive-minded essay, argues that the bodies of those that committed suicide should be donated to medical schools to help offset a serious shortage of cadavers during the years 1879-1881. Also, the...