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Anales galdosianos [Publicaciones periódicas]. Año XII, 1977
The Ghostly Lover: The Portrayal of the Animus in Tristana
Kay Engler
When Benito Pérez Galdós' Tristana first appeared in 1892, his fellow novelist and critic Emilia
Pardo Bazán proclaimed Galdós' pathetic tale of a young girl's seduction and enslavement at the
hands of a decadent don Juan and the ultimate failure of all her attempts at self-liberation and self-
realization as the promise of a great novel never written. She chided Galdós for abandoning his theme
(the moral slavery of women), for leading the reader astray through extraneous adventures (the affair
with Horacio), and for failing to fulfill the promise of his central characters (a strong-willed, self-
aware Tristana; an authentically evil, monstrous Don Lope). But Pardo Bazán correctly perceived that
the essence of the novel was not Don Lope's seduction of Tristana, nor the love affair with Horacio,
nor her incapacitating illness, nor her final marriage to Don Lope, but rather a woman's struggle
for self-awareness and self-realization. In Doña Emilia's words: « El asunto interno de Tristana,
asunto nuevo y muy humano, pero imperfectamente desarrollado, es el despertar del entendimiento
y la conciencia de una mujer sublevada contra una sociedad que la condena a perpetua infamia y no
le abre ningún camino honroso para ganarse la vida... » 157
As an ardent feminist and a champion of the rights of women in her own society, Pardo Bazán
saw Tristana's struggle for self-awareness, liberation and self-realization in sociological terms. The
«awakening of consciousness» she speaks of is what contemporary feminists call «the raising of
consciousness» to the realities of woman's position in society. Society and its institutions are to blame
for Tristana's initial predicament and, it is implied, for her own personal failure at self-liberation. It
seems clear that Pardo Bazán, in criticizing Galdós for abandoning his original intent and for not
allowing Tristana to become an independent woman, is not really judging the novel on its own terms
but is, in fact, criticizing Galdós for not having written the novel she herself would like to have written.
Clarín disagreed profoundly with Doña Emilia about the novel's value and purpose. He saw the novel,
not as an account of a woman's frustrated attempt to free herself from moral slavery, but rather as «
la representación bella de un destino gris atormentando un alma noble, bella, pero débil, de verdadera
fuerza sólo para imaginar, para soñar, de muchas actitudes embrionarias, un alma como hay muchas
en nuestro tiempo de medianías llenas de ideal y sin energía ni vocación seria, constante, definida »
157 Emilia Pardo Bazán, « Tristana » in Obras completas , vol. 3 (Madrid: Aguilar, 1973), p. 1120.
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