Mapping the Social Body

by Mckinney, Collin

• ISBN13: 9780807892985
• ISBN10: 080789298X
• Edition: Bilingual
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-08-01
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

Influenced by trends in medicine, town planning and social etiquette, Madrid's middle class viewed urban growth with apprehension in the second half of the nineteenth century. InMapping the Social Body, Collin McKinney examines manifestations and critiques of that reaction in the work of Benito Perez Galdos, Spain's greatest modern novelist. Drawing on a wide range of recent cultural theory as well as contemporary non-literary texts, this book provides modern readers with a metatextual map of Galdos's Madrid and Spanish society as they experienced urbanisation. In a century obsessed with all things visual, the map became a useful model with which the recently formed middle class hoped to reform a social body ravaged by disease, crime, prostitution, and class conflict. This study finds that Galdos's attitude toward the middle class and its mapping enterprise changes over time. Whereas his early novels depict dividing practices as reliable and perhaps necessary, his later works show Spain's social maps to be subjective and discriminatory. InLa desheredada,Tormento, andLa de Bringasthe social body is mapped according to class, genealogy, gender and physical difference. Physically and morally ambiguous, the characters inFortunata y Jacinta,Nazarin, andMisericordiaare unmappable and thus resistant to the bourgeois categorising gaze.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 9
Mapping the City	p. 15
The power of maps	p. 16
Urban cartography	p. 17
Discourse as cartographic enterprise	p. 26
The fear of contamination	p. 28
The criminal element	p. 34
Mapping Class in La Desheredada	p. 47
Madrid as spectacle	p. 48
Isidora's quest for distinction	p. 51
The strength of blood	p. 61
Prostitution and flow	p. 65
A portrait of desire	p. 71
Mapping Gender in Tormento and La De Bringas	p. 76
Fashioning gender	p. 77
Fallen angels	p. 86
Models of masculinity	p. 95
Masculinity intact	p. 107
Mapping the Family in Fortunata y Jacinta	p. 109
Setting roots	p. 110
Pruning and grafting	p. 115
Corrupt lines	p. 124
Bearing fruit	p. 128
Mapping the Body in Nazarín	p. 136
Reading with an ethnographer's eye	p. 137
Ambiguous bodies	p. 139
Female offender?	p. 144
Hysteria/mysticism as feminine rebellion	p. 148
Carnival and the undecidability of identity	p. 153
Mapping the Soul in Misericordia	p. 158
Seeing the soul	p. 59
On the surface	p. 162
Beyond the surface	p. 166
Opening our eyes	p. 172
Conclusion	p. 174
Bibliography	p. 177
Index	p. 187
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.