University of Illinois

«La novia fiel»¹⁰¹ represents an exploration of the dynamics of socially inscribed attitudes toward sex and toward sexuality, in particular toward feminine sexuality. Sex is posited as a secret, as a mystery, the key to which is withheld from women, who must remain ignorant, childlike and passive, in counterpart to masculine sophistication and activity. A criticism of these restrictive values in this story is encoded linguistically in the narrator's discourse, through the interplay of the active and passive syntactic modes. At the same time, however, the story may be read as upholding the status quo. Pardo Bazán thus manages to expose the «secret» of feminine sexuality without exposing herself to harsh moralistic criticism¹⁰².

In this story, the protagonist, Amelia, becomes engaged to Germán at her social début. The wedding is to take place after Germán finishes his law degree, but he decides to extend his schooling another year, pursuing the doctorate. The wedding is then further postponed until Germán can establish himself professionally. Amelia waits patiently, but finally, in the ninth year of the engagement, she suffers a «nervous illness». In a moment of revelation, she realizes it causes: «deseo, ansia, prisa, necesidad de casarse» (170). Mortified by this recognition, she resolves that no one should know her true psychological state. Later she realizes why, in contrast to herself, Germán has been perfectly tranquil throughout the long engagement: his desire, unlike hers, has found outlets. Amelia thus suddenly ends the engagement, explaining her reasons to no one but her priest. The story is framed by the narrator in terms of the apparently inexplicable nature of the breakup:

The story we read, then, is presented as a short of mystery tale, one in which hermeneutic activity dominates from the very beginning.

The key to the mystery, Amelia's reason for ending the long engagement is, essentially, sexuality: first, the mortifying realization of her own sexual nature, her discovery of the secret too terrible to mention anywhere but in the protected zone of the confession; and, secondly, her realization of Germán's satisfaction of his own sexual desires. The secret which structures the story in terms of plot, that is, the reason for the termination of the long engagement, corresponds thematically to a more basic secret: that of feminine sexual desire.

That the story is framed as a report of Amelia's confession is particularly appropriate, for «it is in the confession that truth and sex are joined, through the obligatory and exhaustive expression of an individual secret. But this time it is truth that serves as a medium for sex and its manifestations» (Foucault, 61).

The framing of the story in terms of the confession thus underlines the hermeneutic nature of «La novia fiel» and in fact serves as an emblem of the importance of the question of knowledge in the text. Foucault's comments on the nature and function of confession as «the general standard governing the production of the true discourse on sex» (65) in the nineteenth century (as well as in our own) seem to apply as well to the activity demanded

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of the individual readers of this text:

The answer to the «enigma» is given only to the priest; and it is this answer, the key to the mysterious rupture, which forms the substance of the story. The priest is the one who receives Amelia's discourse; he is the narratee of that narrative told «originally» by Amelia. The readers are privy to this secret information (although not to the discourse which communicated it). To this degree, we share the position of the priest-narratee, in the sense that the narrative discourse, recounting the mysterious causality of the rupture, is directed to the reader. The priest must weigh the importance of the sins confessed and assign a commensurate penance; he must interpret what he hears, just as individual readers must interpret the discourse of the narrator.

The question of knowledge and ignorance of sexual matters is inextricably tied to the dynamic of activity vs. passivity; specifically, that of feminine sexual ignorance and passivity in counterpart to masculine knowledge and activity. The continuation of the long engagement depends on the continuation of Amelia's lack of knowledge (of when, if ever, the wedding will take place, and of Germán's sexual activities); and of her concomitant passivity, her total lack of autonomy in the face of Germán's active gratification of his own desires.

It is in the syntax of the narrative discourse that this dynamic of masculine activity vs. feminine passivity, the male as subject vs. the female as object, is encoded. While the center of focus in the story is certainly the story of Amelia, and how she came to end her engagement with Germán, a close look at the syntactic constructions of the narrator's discourse about the engagement period reveals a surprising degree of syntactic empathy («the speaker's identification, with varying degrees, ...with a person who participates in the event he describes in a sentence»)¹⁰³ with Germán, and an insistent positing of Amelia as syntactic or logical object. Table One details in graphic form the way in which clauses having Germán (or other phrases, including 0, to refer to the same referent) as syntactic subject far outnumber those which posit Amelia (or other noun phrases referring to her) as subject-up until that point in the text which relates the events leading to Amelia's termination of the long engagement, at which point the balance is reversed. An examination of syntactic empathy in this text will help to elucidate the partnership of activity and knowledge, passivity and ignorance. It will also explicate the orientation of the narrator towards this story, and, ultimately, towards feminine sexual desire.

The engagement between Amelia and Germán consists mainly of Germán's pursuing his desires (both physical and otherwise) while Amelia waits to be married. The narrator's report of how that relationship began, Germán's marriage proposal, already contains the seeds of this dynamic. A close examination of the narrative language in this section seems worthwhile, then.

From the beginning, the engagement between Amelia and Germán is referred to in terms which posit Amelia as object: «Amelia era novia de Germán desde el primer baile a que asistió cuando la pusieron de largo» (166). Although Amelia is the syntactic subject of this sentence, and thus, according to Kuno and Kaburaki, would have the empathy of the narrator, she is defined in terms of her relationship to Germán; the possessive construction defines Amelia as the «possession» of Germán. An engagement is a contract between two people and so it would be just as accurate to say that Germán was the fiancé of Ameba; however, the narrator chooses to state the relationship in the opposite terms.

This objectification of Amelia is confirmed in the construction of the last clause, «cuando la pusieron de largo». «Ponerse de largo» refers to that rite of passage roughly equivalent to the Anglo-American tradition among the upper class of «coming out» at one's débutante ball. Indeed, a form of the passive construction may be the most appropriate way to refer to that institution in general, for it is not the decision of the young woman when to present herself to society; rather the parents decide when they will present her as a marriageable female. The significance of the long dress alluded to here, that of entering the social world as an adult, is undermined, then, by the narrator's

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use of the impersonal construction; an indeterminate «they» dress her, as if she were a child or a doll.

Although syntactically, the narrator continues to empathize with Amelia when describing her appearance at her first dance, since she constitutes a syntactic subject, the verbs of which Amelia is the subject are copulatives: estar and ser, used not to relay any sort of action on Amelia's part, but rather to indicate how she appeared to others. She is still looked upon; her perspective is not presented (with one curious exception):

The detailed description of the cut and fabric of Amelia's dress and the style of her hair is reminiscent of society-page journalism; and indeed the description turns out to have been framed originally in those terms by the elderly ladies who comment on her appearance. The comparison between Amelia and an illustration in a popular magazine further underlines her passivity. Not only is she there merely to be observed, but she is even described in two-dimensional terms, frozen in the camera's lens. The description of Amelia's shoulders as «virginales» further underlines, in a rather remarkable way, the young girl's lack of knowledge of sexual matters.

The curious exception to this perspective is the reference to Amelia's bosom, which was beating with excitement and pleasure («latía de emoción y placer»). This phrase describes both an observable aspect of Amelia's appearance, her bosom rising and falling with her heartbeat, and at the same time, Amelia's inner sensation («emoción y placer»). This fleeting switch to internal focalization -the description by the narrator of that which only the character could experience from within¹⁰⁴- describes, however, the emotions which one would prototypically expect a young girl to experience at her first dance, and could in fact represent only the assumptions about Amelia's emotions of an observer at the dance.¹⁰⁵

The moment when Amelia accepts an offer of marriage is not narrated from the point of view of Amelia; rather the focus is Germán:

Amelia does not accept an invitation from Germán; rather Germán takes her out to the dance floor¹⁰⁶. The narrator then relates the reaction of Germán to dancing with Amelia: he puts his arm around her bending waist; he notes the freshness of her childlike breath. The maximally distant demonstrative aquel used to modify «talle» and «hálito» seems to further objectify the female character, while the adjective «infantil», like the construction «la pusieron de largo» and the use of the adjective «virginales» to describe her shoulders, clearly defines Amelia as childlike, less than an autonomous adult.

Germán's proposal is not due to any consideration of the relative merits of spending his life with Amelia, but, rather, to purely sensual considerations. He loses control of his own autonomy when he embraces Amelia's waist and feels her childlike breath. It is only Amelia's girlish body, then, which prompts the proposal, further establishing her position as object.

The phrase «perdió la chaveta» is marked as a colloquial expression; this use of slang serves to personalize the voice responsible for this utterance. The speaker here might be identified as the semi-personalized narrator; or as the same group of elderly ladies who described Amelia as «un cromo», «un grabado de La Ilustración». This phrase could represent a brief instance of indirect free style, being an unmediated reporting of Germán's description of what he felt when dancing with Amelia. This last possibility is consistent with the phrase «sin elegir frases», for it represents the mental processing which occurs (or, in this case, does not occur) before one speaks; the perspective must, then, be that of Germán, the focalization internal.

Amelia's response, finally, is related purely from the point of view of Germán. While the narrator could have said that Amelia «contestó que sí», which would at least posit Amelia as the syntactic subject of the sentence, the narrator curiously manages to report an utterance of Amelia's (admittedly a short one, consisting only of the word «sí») with Germán as the syntactic and logical subject: «recogió un "sí" espontáneo». Further, the verb chosen

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suggests the image of Amelia's affirmative reply, her utterance, as an object of some sort, a reward or a flower, to be plucked; lovely, but an object nevertheless, not an act of speech. The narrator seems to momentarily present the perspective of Amelia with the description of the «sí» as «espontáneo, medio involuntario». For, just as only Germán can know that his sentences have not been consciously chosen, only Amelia can know that her answer is really spontaneous. But even the phrase «medio involuntario» which refers to a partial lack of conscious choice on Amelia's part, emphasizes Amelia's passivity, her lack of autonomy, even as it presents her point of view. Finally, the adjectival «doblemente delicioso» can only be filtered through the perception of Germán; the answer is delicious to him, not to the narrator nor to anyone else.

The terms in which the narrator relates Germán's marriage proposal to Amelia, then, reflect the dynamics of the entire engagement itself. When syntactic empathy is with the referent of «Amelia», other syntactic or lexical elements in the construction of the narrator's discourse indicate a presentation of Amelia in almost inanimate terms, in terms of an object. Syntactically, the empathy of the narrator is with Germán surprisingly often, considering that the story, as indicated by its title, is supposedly «about» Amelia. His perspective is even presented by means of the use of free indirect style, further indicating a greater degree of identification on the narrator's part with the discourse of Germán. Syntactically, Germán is frequently a subject; the referent of «Germán», the character, acts. «Amelia» has been the syntactic subject, up to this point, only of the copulative verbs ser and estar, and of the verb asistir, which is quite low in agentivity.

As the narrator's recounting of the engagement period progresses, this pattern remains constant. Germán acts, Amelia reacts; or rather, Germán acts and then acts again, while Amelia observes and waits for him to finally perform the act he has promised: that of marrying her. While the experience related is that of Amelia, her name rarely figures as the subject of a verb. This in itself might not necessarily indicate that the narrator is distanced from the perspective of Amelia; narrative techniques such as stream of consciousness or indirect free style would suppress the use of the full noun phrase referring to the character whose perspective is being adopted, since that character would not name him or herself in direct discourse. Indeed, since the story of Amelia's decision to break her engagement to Germán is framed as a confession told to the priest, one might expect that the narrative would be related through the use of these techniques. But this is not the case: with few exceptions, the focalization is on Amelia, not through her. The woman does not determine her own future; she is observed and acted upon.

Even when, in the section detailing the engagement period, the narrator relates Amelia's emotions and reactions, constructions are used which exclude Amelia as syntactic subject. The narrator summarizes six years of the engagement, for example, with the possibly ironic «los seis primeros años fueron encantadores» (167). It would have been possible, and perhaps less marked, for the narrator to summarize those six years with a sentence in which Amelia might figure more actively, such as «Amelia estuvo encantada con los seis primeros años»; instead she does not merit even the status of indirect object, as she would in a sentence like «Los seis primeros años le encantaron a Amelia». Likewise, we are told that «el tiempo se deslizaba insensible para Amelia» (167), rather than that Amelia did not note the passage of time. Amelia is the subject of only one verb in the paragraph which contains the above quotations: the verb saber What she knows is that Germán would dedicate the full duration of all his vacations to her. Again, Germán is the one who is actually acting: «Las vacaciones eran grato paréntesis, y todo el tiempo que durasen ya sabía Amelia que se lo dedicaría íntegro su novio». (167)

Germán's absence, restricting the possible interaction of the two to written form and of course totally eliminating any sort of physical contact, does not, for Amelia, present any obstacle to their courtship in this period before her «awakening». In fact, she revels in his absence:

While this sentence might, at first glance, seem to describe a positive aspect of Amelia's life, and to allude to at least some kind of affect, what fills Amelia's existence is not,

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curiously, the special nature of the relationship which Amelia might establish with Germán because of the limitation of their time together. Rather, what is expressed is the absence itself, a lack which paradoxically fills another lack (for in order to be filled, there must be avoid to begin with). Amelia's existence, then, is defined by absence, the physical absence of the man who, she faithfully believes, will some day marry her. Once again, Amelia does not act upon this absence, take advantage of it or in any other way interact with it. The subject of the sentence is «la ausencia»; it is even the absence which performs the action of filling Amelia's existence. Amelia's faithfulness consists in her acceptance, even her embracing, of this lack of physical interaction with her fiancé. She is faithful because she does not desire or need the physical presence of Germán, much less any physical relationship with him or with any other man.

Amelia's friends do encourage her to act at that point in her engagement when Germán has gone off to Madrid and has begun to neglect her («Germán apenas escribía: billetes garrapateados al vuelo, quizás sobre la mesa de un café, concisos, insulsos, sin jugo de ternura» [168]):

Amelia has no knowledge of Germán's degree of commitment to her at this point. When she is offered knowledge of his infidelities to her, she refuses to accept that knowledge, much less to act upon it. She now has the opportunity to begin to take control of sexual knowledge, at least of knowledge of Germán's expressions of sexuality, and to begin to overcome her passivity. But she refuses both knowledge and action. In this regard, Amelia is fulfilling the role society has established for her. She is right to ignore her friends' suggestions, as indicated by the narrator's ironic reference to them as «amiguitas caritativas»; motivated by «perfidia burlona».

Amelia continues to be faithful, to be «la novia fiel» but now the denomination of «fiel» begins to take on a slightly different nuance her faith is of that sort which springs from a willful ignorance. The engagement may continue only because of Amelia's refusal to believe what her friends say. She does, it turns out, harbor some doubts and suspicions regarding Germán, but we are told about them only as Amelia forgets them. They are thus presented in terms of their absence:

The courtship progresses to the point that Germán is allowed to visit Amelia at home, and does so every night. Amelia now participates in the relationship to the extent that she reciprocates Germán's actions; now Germán is not the only subject of the sentences relating their courtship. Rather, third-person plural verbs and even a reciprocal reflexive construction are used:

The engagement is now at its high point:

The question «¿qué podía desear?» could originate, at first glance, either with Amelia or with the narrator, although the temporal gap between the narration and the events narrated argue against the second possibility. But the diminutive ending of «posicioncita» and the use of «por ejemplo» indicate that this is reported discourse; the rhetorical «¿qué podía desear?» is, then, Amelia's question to herself. The temporal element of narration now becomes important; the narrator's report of Amelia's thoughts seems now to be ironic, in fight of the fact that the narrator begins the narrative by presenting the rupture of the engagement. Although Amelia seems not to dare to answer this question, the very fact that it is posed indicates that Amelia could indeed feel some void. The narrator's (and the readers') greater knowledge further suggests that the answer to the question is that the engagement does, indeed, leave a great deal to be desired, in all senses of the word.

When Germán's latest plan necessitates a further limitation of his time with Amelia, she finally acts, to the extent of expressing her regret about the situation:

This is the first time in the text that Amelia is posited as the syntactic subject of any verb which is not remarkably low in agentivity. But even this relatively mild action¹⁰⁷ is immediately and even rather violently squashed: «Germán se vindicaba plenamente». Not only is Amelia not allowed by Germán to try to control the progress of the courtship even to the point of lamenting their decreased time together, but she is asked, as indicated in the use of free indirect discourse, to content herself with knowledge which she does not, in fact, have: «ya sabía Amelia que un día u otro se casarían». This is precisely what Amelia does not know and which she must accept on faith. She continues to be faithful, then, in her blind acceptance of Germán's promises and excuses.

Germán's greater power over the relationship is reflected not only in the narrator's use of this more active verb (as well as in others), but in the identification of the narrator's and the character's perspectives, through the merging of the character's and the narrator's speech in free indirect style. This technique could be employed here, it might be argued, in order to present the perspective of Amelia, by reporting what she heard, thus placing Amelia in the same position as the reader, as she would be the narratee in this passage, the one to whom the discourse is addressed. But that the perspective here is not that of Amelia becomes clear when the narrator continues by asserting Germán's good intentions, conveying knowledge which would be available only to Germán, and not to Amelia: «En efecto, Germán continuaba con el firme propósito de casarse, así que se lo permitiesen las circunstancias». (169)

At this point in the text, the narrator begins to describe the illness to which Amelia falls prey, and which will ultimately cause her to break off the engagement after nine years of patient waiting. Now there is a sudden increase in clauses which contain Amelia (or other terms for the same referent) as the syntactic subject, although the focus is still on Amelia, rather than through her perspective, and the verbs used are still extremely low in level of agentivity:

But when Amelia does find out the cause of her illness, that knowledge does not help to cure her, for the recognition of one's sexual needs (especially if one was a woman) in nineteenth-century Spain presented further problems. Aldaraca notes that, in nineteenth-century Spanish society, «so entrenched is the belief that a good woman does not know sexual desire that "indecorous" manifestations to the contrary were often recorded as symptoms of insanity». (78)¹⁰⁸

Indeed, it is unclear, in this passage, whether denial and frustration of sexual desire is a cause of illness, or whether it is in fact the illness itself. In any case, this discovery was not one which would suddenly free Amelia to «cure» herself; the knowledge is not an object which Amelia pursues, but rather it emanates from her surroundings:

The last sentence of this passage is ambiguous in that it is not clear whether the preposition de is to be understood as linking any (or all) of the first three nouns to casarse: a desire to marry, an anxiousness to marry, hurry to marry, and need to marry; or desire, anxiety, haste and need to marry. But a reference to sexual desire is made clear in the narrator's use of the adjective impúdica to modify precisión, and in the allusion to the veil of the Egyptian goddess of fertility.

This section clearly makes reference to feminine sexuality, and yet its ambiguity relieves the speaker (and the author) of any accountability for the mention of the unmentionable. Pardo Bazán manages to both make the «secret» an open one, through the publication of this story, and simultaneously, to «keep» it. Amelia's reaction to this realization is one of shame and humiliation, for she has discovered what must be kept secret, what must never be mentioned:

It is this discovery, this knowledge which is forbidden to the «doncella»; which in fact constitutes Amelia's real sin, which must be confessed to the priest.

Ameba's sudden and mysterious knowledge of her own desire forces her fidelity to take a new form, for she now recognizes the need to act on that desire. She must remain passive in order not to transgress societal and religious injunctions, and yet she no longer can be passive in the same way as before. She must, then, channel her activity, transform it into a power which will control her and allow her to remain faithful to the model of passive resignation which is imposed upon her:

Amelia is anguished at her realization that she has needs which must be met and which she is powerless to meet, but even worse is the reflection that Germán has been completely calm throughout the entire engagement. Her new understanding of the reason for his tranquility and patience is, like the awareness of her own sexual needs, also due to a sudden apprehension of knowledge, an end to her partial blindness:

Just as the revelation of Amelia's own secret sexuality was preceded by a period in which her body seemed to rebel against her passivity, so this final knowledge, that of Germán's continued sexual infidelity, causes her to lose control of her body:

The physical release which comes from Amelia's knowledge, a seeming inversion, perhaps, of the pleasurable release which comes of carnal knowledge, finally compels Amelia to act. The balance of activity and passivity, knowledge and ingenuousness, has been irrevocably upset; the relationship between Amelia and Germán cannot, then, continue:

The «novia fiel» seems, now, to be no longer faithful; she no longer patiently waits for Germán to set a wedding date; she shows no faith that he will someday marry her; she is not, now, faithful even to the attempt to patiently resign herself to Germán's will.

The priest understands her motivation for the sudden rupture to be her intolerance of Germán's sexual infidelity, which does not constitute sufficient justification for an action which will significantly reduce her chances for marriage in the future:

The priest's reaction, representative of societal values which posit a woman's worth in terms of the man who marries her and which maintain a double standard of sexual conduct for men and women, may represent also an anticipation of the readers' reaction to the story presented up until this point. «La novia fiel» is, after all, about a young woman who finally ends her engagement because her fiancé is having sexual relations with other women. Since the relationship conforms entirely to the rules for acceptable conduct for men and for women, Amelia's decision may be inscrutable to those who accept this system of sexual mores and societal values¹¹¹.

The final explanation Amelia gives for her conduct is consistent with the morality which has been instilled in her: «si no le dejo... le imito! ¡Yo también!» (171). Amelia acts, then, in order to continue to be sexually inactive. Knowing her desire, and discovering the secret of how Germán deals with his own desire, she acts to change her situation so that her desire will not be excited, so that she will not, inevitably, become sexually active with other men. She is, then, after all «la novia fiel» in yet another sense of the word. No longer passively waiting for her life to begin while her fiancé continues his own life, she

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now maintains an active fidelity to Germán, one which consists in her conscious control over her life.

Women's sexuality remains, then, secret, unmentionable, within the story world of «La novia fiel». Rather than consciously deciding to act upon her sexual desire, the «good girl», mortified to discover even the existence of such a desire, acts to bury it, to insure that it will never be acted upon outside of the socially inscribed norms, to insure that it will be kept secret¹¹².

Pardo Bazán, then, focuses, in this story, on the humiliation associated with Amelia's sudden knowledge of her own sexuality, thus managing both to expose the «secret» of the power of feminine sexual desire and to acquit herself of any accountability for the exposure of that «secret». It is in the language itself, in the syntax of agentivity and passivity, that the secret irrepressibly exposes itself.

Aldaraca, Bridget. «El ángel del hogar: The Cult of Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century Spain». Theory and Practice of Feminist Literary Criticism. Ed. Gabriela Mora and Karen S. Van Hooft. Ypsilantc Bilingual Press, 1982: 62-87.

Bal, Mieke. «Narration et focalisation: Pour une théorie ties instances du récit». Poétique 29 (1977): 107-27.

Bravo-Villasante, Carmen. Vida y obra de Emilia Pardo Bazán. Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1962.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1980. Trans. of La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1976.

Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.

Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University

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Press, 1979.

González Torres, Rafael. Los cuentos de Emilia Pardo Bazán. Boston: Florentia, 1977.

Kuno, S. and E. Kaburaki. «Empathy and Syntax». Linguistic Inquiry 8 (1977): 627-72.

Pardo Bazán, Emilio. Cuentos de amor. Madrid: V. Prieto, 1898.

Pardo Bazán, Emilia. «La mujer española». La España Moderna, mayo 1890: 101-13.

Hispania [Publicaciones periódicas]. Volume 72, Number 4, December 1989