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(2014) Gender and modernity in Spanish literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Despite the strict gender codes of behavior in the nineteenth century, women writers such as Fernán Caballero (Cecilia Francisca Josefa Böhl de Faber) are able to attain a certain freedom of expression and authenticity in their work. Such liberation is not easily achievable, since women are confined to ideals of representation concurrent with the developing discourse of positivism. While Caballero's Simón Verde testifies to the woman's and the religious male's vestiges of power despite the effects of inchoate positivism, Galdós's Marianela 1 attests to society's enslavement to impossible ideals after the tenets of positivism consume it. Marianela shows the depths to which the effects of positivism can descend in its denigration of women like Marianela who inhabit neither the domestic realm nor the convent as well as men of non-European descent who are exploited. Caballero's Simón Verde exemplifies various literary genres, women's sites of power, and the success of the eponymous Simón Verde as a Catholic hero despite the growing influence of positivism. Both Caballero and Galdós express their disillusion about positivism's negative effects on women and people of lower social class, but Caballero achieves an air of sanguinity in Simón Verde that Galdós does not reach in Marianela.
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Smith Rousselle, E. (2014). Religion, race, class, and gender in the age of positivism, in Gender and modernity in Spanish literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 85-99.
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