Shamed Women in the Novels of Juan Valera: Enslaved to the Other

YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY SHAMED WOMEN IN THE NOVELS OF JUAN VALERA: ENSLAVED TO THE OTHER CARLOS VALENCIA JUAN Valera is a nineteenth-century Spanish novelist known for his unique style, sometimes called “internal realism,” which focuses on characters ’ complex psychological states and does not fit nicely into the popular literary movements of his time – romanticism, realism and naturalism. Part of what separates Valera from these movements is his treatment of desire and rejection of determinism. Desire is the motivating force behind action in Valera’s novels, but it does not emanate spontaneously from his characters; their desire is profoundly imitative. This mimesis traps some characters in a downward spiral to catastrophe, yet others thrive. This study analyzes the aspirations and outcomes of the three female protagonists in Juanita la Larga, Doña Luz and Genio y figura. All three are illegitimate children and thus feel burdened with a sense of social shame throughout their lives. As adults they are obsessed with their social standing and reputations. Their sense of identity is wholly dependent on an Other, which inspires in them coquettishness, vanity, and a profound ambivalence of behavior toward other characters and groups: feelings of love mixed with hate, attraction with repulsion, and admiration with resentment. In searching for a frame of reference that would help me understand this ambivalence, I found René Girard’s theories of human behavior, especially his theory of mimetic desire, to be immensely helpful. Girard explains that human desire always depends on someone else and is intrinsically ambivalent because the subject both admires the mediator of her desire (the “model”) and at the same time could resent her as a rival. Though Valera obviously could not be acquainted with Girard’s theories , the mimetic quality of human desire is an ever-present force in his YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY 77 novels, for good and for bad. The strikingly different outcomes of the three characters at hand here are testament to the fact that Valera, while intuiting that human desire is necessarily mimetic, also believed in a person’s free will to choose her model, and thus in the ability to avoid the negative effects of misguided desire. Juanita la Larga takes place in a fictitious Andalusian town called Villalegre. It narrates the love story of don Paco, a widowed man in his fifties who enjoys a prominent social position in town, and Juanita, a striking seventeen-year-old girl whose mother is Juana, a woman of humble origins renowned with Villalegre’s elite class because of her work ethic and manual skills. As its very name denotes, Villalegre is in many respects an idyllic place. Surrounded by a beautiful and tranquil landscape, this small community appears to be enclosed in an “atmósfera arcádica” (Caudet 16). Yet behind this idyllic facade, Villalegre is also a very traditional, hierarchical and closed community controlled by a small secular and religious oligarchy: the “cacique” Andrés Rubio; his right hand man don Paco; Paco’s daughter Inés, who attained her status by marrying a wealthy landowner; and Father Anselmo. The rest of the community lives as subdued, devoted followers of the elite group’s will (Juanita 74). Of course, for this rigid hierarchical order to exist peacefully , its members must respect the social structure that it imposes on them. Any transgression could jeopardize the harmony of the community , in fact its very foundation, and so must be swiftly punished. In Villalegre and communities like it, people live in a perpetual state of anxiety, obsessed by and ever vigilant of what others are saying, doing, and thinking. The narrator comically explains that in Villalegre “…apenas había persona … que pudiera hacer o decir cosa alguna que no se supiese. Hasta los mismos pensamientos se adivinaban allí, se divulgaban y se comentaban, como el pensador no pensase con mucho disimulo y muy para adentro” (91). The townspeople are so obsessed by the Other that existentially they are unable to chart their own courses in life; they simply borrow, or mimic, the desires of others. Ruth El Saffar describes this state of mimesis as “one[’s] … always looking over one’s shoulder at another, doing what the other is doing, wanting to assimilate the...