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Anales galdosianos [Publicaciones periódicas]. Año XII, 1977
sangre y médula de mujer la estopa de la muñeca, iba cobrando aborrecimiento y repugnancia a la
miserable vida que llevaba bajo el poder de don Lope Garrido... » (p. 1549) Don Lope's despicable
act has made her aware not only of her own ego (I exist), but of the limits on the ego (The Other
exists). She begins to chafe under - the limits placed on her freedom, and to plan with Saturna the
afternoon excursions to escape from Don Lope's watchful eye which eventually lead to her encounter
with Horacio Díaz.
Ironically, if Don Lope's seduction of Tristana and subsequent enslavement of her make her aware of
her own ego and the limitations on it, he also provides her with the impetus and the means to transcend
those limitations. As he ravishes her physically, he also plants deep within her psyche the desire for
freedom and the seeds which eventually flower as her «sacred conviction». The narrator explains: «
Era que don Lope, sin que ninguno de los dos se diera cuenta de ello, habíala hecho su discípula, y
algunas ideas de las que con toda lozanía florecieron en la mente de la joven procedían del semillero de
su amante y por fatalidad maestro ». (p. 1549) Tristana's abhorrence of matrimony seems patterned
after Don Lope's doctrine of social anarchy (every man, and woman, for himself). But, in fact, what
in Don Lope is merely an excuse to satisfy his monumental ego whenever and wherever he pleases,
becomes, in Tristana, an authentic: demand for self-realization and a protest against individuals and
social institutions which prevent that. It is the protest against marriage which provides the ideological
framework for her subsequent struggle for self-liberation and self-realization.
As Anne Ulanov explains,
In the third stage of feminine development, the masculine assumes an individual and personal
form, represented archetypally by a hero who, frees the daughter from bondage to her father and then
establishes an equal relationship with her... The hero can be an outer man or an inner animus figure...
and most often he is both, because women usually project masculine qualities of consciousness
onto actual men. Thus either a 'real' man and partner assumes the freeing role of consciousness and
dissolves the old form of encompassment in the unconscious, or else it can be an 'inner' man, a power
of consciousness in the woman herself which accomplishes the freeing. 173
It is at this point in the novel, after Tristana has experienced the first vague stirrings of self-awareness,
has shaped them into an ideology of sorts, and has made the first tentative attempts to escape the
tyranny of Don Lope, that Horacio appears. He has all the markings of the archetypal saviour. As he
173 Ibid. , p. 255.
130