Shamed Women in the Novels of Juan Valera: Enslaved to the Other‪.‬

JUAN Valera is a nineteenth-century Spanish novelist known for his unique style, sometimes called "internal realism," which focuses on characters' complex psychological states and does not fit nicely into the popular literary movements of his time--romanticism, realism and naturalism. Part of what separates Valera from these movements is his treatment of desire and rejection of determinism. Desire is the motivating force behind action in Valera's novels, but it does not emanate spontaneously from his characters; their desire is profoundly imitative. This mimesis traps some characters in a downward spiral to catastrophe, yet others thrive. This study analyzes the aspirations and outcomes of the three female protagonists in Juanita la Larga, Dona Luz and Genio y figura. All three are illegitimate children and thus feel burdened with a sense of social shame throughout their lives. As adults they are obsessed with their social standing and reputations. Their sense of identity is wholly dependent on an Other, which inspires in them coquettishness, vanity, and a profound ambivalence of behavior toward other characters and groups: feelings of love mixed with hate, attraction with repulsion, and admiration with resentment. In searching for a frame of reference that would help me understand this ambivalence, I found Rene Girard's theories of human behavior, especially his theory of mimetic desire, to be immensely helpful. Girard explains that human desire always depends on someone else and is intrinsically ambivalent because the subject both admires the mediator of her desire (the "model") and at the same time could resent her as a rival.