Spanish Realism and Naturalism: Society and Literature
4. Realism and Naturalism in Spain
4.1. Society
a) Time lag between population growth and economic development: while the population grows rapidly, industrialization only occurs in the Basque Country and Catalonia; the rest remains agricultural and semi-feudal. This is a pre-industrial nation.
b) The bourgeois liberal state is established, albeit with the threat of the Carlist civil wars and the weakness of the bourgeois class, which leads to political insecurity and military intervention in support of the political regime. The liberal bourgeoisie is split between conservatives and progressives. To its left are the Democrats and Republicans.
c) The labor forces are organized, and Pablo Iglesias founded the PSOE in 1879.
d) After the 1868 revolution, the progressive bourgeoisie wins, and the constitution of 1869 proclaims broad freedoms. In 1874, the monarchy was restored.
4.2 Specific Traits of Realism in Spain
a) Due to historical and social causes, such as the smaller extension of the bourgeois public and the remarkable survival of the traditional ideology, Spain lags behind the rest of Europe. Its consolidation occurred from 1868 – the first novel by Galdós, La Fontana de Oro, was published in 1870 – and reached its maximum development in the eighties and nineties.
b) Factors that contributed to the triumph of realism: the folkloric tradition and its development in pre-reality; authors who combined a romantic sensibility with descriptive accuracy and observation (Fernán Caballero, 1796-1877, and Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, 1833-1891); translations of foreign works; and the evolution of society and its tastes.
c) The writers give importance to the documentation prior to the composition of a novel, but rarely fully conform to the canons of realism from other countries.
Even so, both the application of techniques such as selection of topics will depend on the ideological orientation of the Spanish authors. Writers on the progressive line, Galdós and Clarín, carried the realistic approach further.
4.3 Naturalism in Spain
Spanish writers were ideologically more progressive. They favored Zola’s naturalism from the publication in Spain of La Taberna (1877), but were critical of the more extreme ideological aspects of French naturalism (materialism and determinism) and the pleasure in describing the unpleasant, ugly, or repulsive.
They attempted to strike a balance between idealism and naturalism, convinced that the spiritual component of the individual can overcome the most adverse conditions. They still took some themes from the French naturalist school, such as the complaint of the material and moral aspects of the most degrading and unjust society and the influence (not determined) of heredity and environment on the individual.
Emilia Pardo Bazán defended Naturalism in her essay The Throbbing Question, but was against determinism and materialism. In her novels, Mother Nature and Los Pazos de Ulloa, social factors and passions influence the behavior of the characters.
In The Disinherited and Marianela, Galdós takes traits of Naturalism. For his part, Clarín accepted experimentalism, by causing circumstances that force the characters to move as indicated by the logic of the background (The Judge’s Wife, His Only Son).