In this summer of very long books, I have re-read with great pleasure Benito Pérez Galdós’s masterpiece Fortunata y Jacinta: dos historias de casadas (1887), a novel certainly far superior to Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina, but still not hailed as the universal classic it should be. Blame for this a certain prejudice against Spanish literature and the difficulties to faithfully translate Galdós’s luscious prose.
Galdós, an admirer of Dickens, is, arguably, closer in his fiction to Balzac, having built his own human comedy: a very dense network of interconnected characters and novels along 80 published works, 46 of them the famous series of the Episodios Nacionales. His realism, which is not as close to naturalism as that of his close friend and lover Emilia Pardo Bazán, is unashamedly costumbrista, reflecting all social classes. This made the 1898 proto-Modernist Spanish generation of younger writers dislike Galdós’s oeuvre, which they unfairly panned. His castizo style, intended to reflect as closely as possible the mentality of his characters has, nonetheless, aged very well and is one of the main features of the novel I comment on here today.
Fortunata y Jacinta was published in four volumes between January and June 1887 and is part of the cycle of 21 novels set in Madrid that Galdós himself called Novelas españolas contemporáneas (1881-1889). This novel is set between December 1869 and April 1876, which corresponds historically to the period between the Glorious Revolution (1868) by which Queen Isabel II exiled herself after the coup by generals Prim, Serrano y Topete, and 1874, when the monarchy was restored in the person of her son Alfonso XII (after the failed reign of Amadeo de Saboya, 1870-73 and the brief first Spanish Republic). In 1876 a new Constitution was established, under a bipartisan system, with the new chambers of the Congreso de los Diputados and the Senate. Galdós alludes to all these events, but his focus is the triangle formed by posh Juanito Santa Cruz, his low-class lover Fortunata and his wife Jacinta.
I have chosen to write on Emilia Pardo Bazan’s Los pazos de Ulloa and La madre naturaleza for my book on secondary characters, wishing to make room for a woman author. I’m therefore using my post to discuss the secondary character I would have focused on if I had selected Galdós instead. Fortunata y Jacinta, like most 19th-century novels has a very large cast of secondary characters, not all of them strictly necessary for the plot, whose backstories and personality quirks Galdós loves to discuss through his unnamed narrator (a direct acquaintance of most, if not all, of them). Upper-class idler Juanito Santa Cruz is absolutely essential for the plot, for his seduction of strikingly beautiful Fortunata sets the ball rolling. Yet, at the same time, he receives far less attention than other minor characters, to the point that Galdós robs readers of the final scene in which his wife Jacinta announces to him, after discovering Fortunata’s sad fate, that sex between them is over. Oddly, Galdós offers a report rather than the full dialogue.
I assumed that many Spanish scholars had already looked into Juanito’s condition as a rather blurred, or stereotyped, character compared with the rest of the cast and I found that Galdós’s seducer is usually read as a late 19th-century descendant of Don Juan. Funnily, this hadn’t occurred to me because Juanito soon becomes a husband in the novel, and I don’t connect Don Juan to marriage (at least, not to his own.) Josefina Acosta de Hess and Alicia G. Andreu (see the reference list) have explored most directly this association between Juanito and Don Juan, but I’m citing here mainly José Luis Eugercios Arriero’s comparative essay “Cortesanos del Amor Pretérito: Otra Vuelta sobre el ‘Donjuanismo’ de Álvaro Mesía y Juanito Santa Cruz,” which connects Clarín’s La Regenta (1884-5) and Fortunata y Jacinta. A comment by Eugercios led me to Vernon A. Chamberlain’s gossipy article, which claims that Juanito is based on Juan Valera, a fellow Spanish author Galdós disliked very much and who was known for his reckless womanizing.
Eugercios’s thesis is that Clarín and Galdós had difficulties to turn their respective Don Juan into substantial characters because the passage from drama to the novel, from verse to prose, and the need for a “very specific social contextualization” (100) hinder their characterization. Juanito is the only son and heir of a wealthy bourgeois family, so rich that he can afford to live in complete idleness in his parents’ home, which he does not leave even when he marries his cousin Jacinta, thanks to a match made by his mother. According to Eugercios, and I do agree, Juanito is, in view of this situation, almost anachronistic. Galdós cannot explain what Juanito does once he graduates in Law, and so he says nothing, making his readers believe that his wife and his parents never ask how he spends his days away from home, which is partying hard and having bought and stolen sex. Acosta de Hess defined him as a flat character (1988: 77), and I agree that there is no progression in his personality; his narrative arc deals basically with his sexuality, which he starts exploring in his early youth with Paris classy prostitutes and that he is still enjoying at the end of the novel with yet another mistress, with whom he cheats both on Jacinta and on Fortunata.
Eugercio argues that Juanito combines in his characterization Galdós’s penchant for “dramatismo folletinesco” (or, sensationalism) and his interest in exposing the damage done by the bourgeoise, yet Juanito is in any case “an archetype about to be superseded” (104). Eugercio finds fault, above all, with Juanito’s inability to understand Fortunata’s and Jacinta’s growth as persons, once both open their eyes to his mistreatment. He, in contrast, is reduced from “Don Juan to donjuanito, a totally minor character overcome by history” (104). The gossipy article by Chamberlain I have mentioned explains why Juanito, no doubt the main villain among Galdós’s mostly vile men, does not get his come-uppance, arguing that actually he is punished. According to Chamberlain (27), Galdós may have copied Juan Valera’s fate. After five years of marriage, Valera was also expelled from his wife’s bedroom, as all of Madrid knew. In a letter of 1885, only two years before the publication of Fortunata y Jacinta (Valera’s scandalous letters were freely circulated all over Madrid), Valera bemoaned the lack of a willing sexual partner in the years to come, when his sex appeal would necessarily wane and “it will be ridiculous and impossible to love outside home” (Cartas íntimas 266). Chamberlain’s argument is quite good, but I still wished that Juanito would have been cast out of society and driven to exile, if possible to a place with no women.
Instead, Galdós chose to punish Fortunata, in a predictable but conservative turn of events which may have pleased his original readers but left me fuming, even though I already knew how the novel ends. Galdós spends 1400 pages (in the Castalia edition I have read) asking us to sympathize with Fortunata, who is rejected three times by Juanito and has two babies by him, only to satisfy Jacinta’s wish to finally have a child by her husband, even if this is not hers but her rival’s. Fortunata, we must believe, never loses her sexual passion for Juanito, despite his appalling ill-treatment, or her having to become a prostitute when he first deserts her. Jacinta is, likewise, in thrall to her husband’s sexual prowess, despite knowing that he is a serial cheater. Only Fortunata’s baby breaks that her enslavement, and this is why she is empowered to close her bedroom’s door in Juanito’s face.
The problem in this triangular scheme is that we need to accept with no textual evidence, in the absence of any sex scenes, that Juanito’s bedroom skills are so good that these two intelligent women lose their heads over him. Fortunata may be forgiven, for she is illiterate and a daft romantic, but Jacinta knows Juanito (her cousin) very well since childhood. Instead of fine words, we get a collection of moments characterizing Juanito as a total cad. He seduces Fortunata by falsely promising her marriage, and silences Jacinta’s complaints cynically with the same caresses he offers to other women, as she knows. Galdós often repeats that Juanito is guided by self-love rather than the conscience he lacks, but he totally stretches our suspension of disbelief when he has Fortunata surrender to Juanito so easily again and again, as soon as she sees him. For the novel to function, in short, we need to accept without question Juanito’s bad boy personality, and assume Fortunata and Jacinta’s absurd view that his mistresses rather than him must be blamed for his waywardness. I am willing to accept that a woman may feel deep sexual passion for a man, but Juanito, really? How come Galdós could not do any better? Or was that the whole point of his novel: that no man in all of Madrid deserves Fortunata and Jacinta?
I’ll finish with a doubt: would Fortunata and Jacinta work in the present? As I wrote two posts ago, 19th-century fiction depends mostly for its plots on the legal issues that prevent women from behaving freely. Anna Karenina cannot divorce her husband, and nor can Jacinta divorce Juanito; Fortunata tries but fails to convince anyone that, since she has had two children by him, she’s Juanito’s ‘legal’ wife. My query has to do, rather, with class. I wonder if there is in Spain a novelist who could narrate with as much talent as Galdós possessed how sexuality crosses class barriers. Are there still posh seducers from Madrid’s rich neighbourhoods lying their way into the beds of Fortunata’s current equivalents? Are there still Jacintas putting up with their handsome husbands’ serial philandering? Would a 2025 retelling of Fortunata y Jacinta soar high above soap opera? Is Juanito still very much alive? So many questions…
Please, read Galdós. Any of his novels is worth a thousand we have in our current best-selling fiction lists. I’m begging you for your own good.
References
Josefina Acosta de Hess, Galdós y la novela de adulterio. Madrid: Pliegos, 1988.
Alicia G. Andreu, “Juanito Santa Cruz en diálogo con el mito de don Juan.” Revista Hispánica Moderna 42 (1989): 3–18. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30203199
Vernon A. Chamberlain, “Juan Valera y la caracterización de Juanito Santa Cruz en Fortunata y Jacinta.” Actas del IX Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas, Berlín, Frankfurt am Main, Vervuert: 1989: 1237–1242. https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra/juan-valera-y-la-caracterizacion-de-juanito-santa-cruz-en-fortunata-y-jacinta/
José Luis Eugercios Arriero, “Cortesanos del Amor Pretérito: Otra Vuelta sobre el «Donjuanismo» de Álvaro Mesía y Juanito Santa Cruz.” Beoiberístika 2.1 (2018): 99-112, https://beoiberistica.fil.bg.ac.rs/index.php/beoiberistica/article/view/37