Imposture, Dilettantism, and the Artificiality of Tradition in Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta

Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta is a testimony of the conflicting historical forces that characterized Spain’s fin de siglo. By 1885, year of the publication of the second and final part of the novel, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo’s project of political stabilization had already consolidated.^[1] The system was conceived as a mechanism of power alternation that, in principle, would facilitate the coexistence of opposing perspectives in the debates around the country’s problematic modernization. On the one hand, conservative forces defended a Catholic society organized around a constitutional monarchy and a centralized state led by the aristocracy. Liberals, for their part, believed in the separation of the State and the Church, and the relevant role that the bourgeoisie had in advancing the growing and consolidation of the industrial economy. Yet both groups, despite their ideological differences and at times irreconcilable political postures, shared a vision of the values that were considered constitutive of the national character, particularly traditional stances related to religion, family, and social hierarchies. Unsurprisingly, and given the ambiguities derived from this complex socio-political scenario, pretense, falseness, and imposture prevailed in the public sphere, and in many cases were expected and even accepted deportments. Through disingenuous attitudes, social actors were able to negotiate their differences and justify the prevalence of practices that were in part responsible for the country’s social and economic stagnation. The feasibility of wearing masks without social sanction, of impersonating ideologies and faiths, made possible many of the aspirations of balance and concord embodied in Cánovas’s basic propositions. Alas’s masterpiece captures all the nuances of this artificiality, revealing a sharp critique of the country’s situation at the end of the century. The dilettantism and dissipated way of life of different actors in the novel indeed emphasizes the ruling classes’ apathy for assuming their roles as agents in the national transformation. As I show in what follows, Alas’s characters are developed around their evident disposition to participate in this game of pretense; furthermore, questioning honesty as a token at the service of progress, their duplicity also exposes the malleable nature of history, tradition, and identity. By means of a manifest imposture, then, the dysfunctional society portrayed in the novel reaffirms its dubious ethics and validates its mannered personality.

A commentary on Vetusta’s inauthenticity, La Regenta exposes the middle classes’ social anxiety about their aspirational status.^[2] Recent scholarship has identified this insufficiency as a possible cause for the affectedness that distinguishes the characters in the novel, and that particularly shapes their conflictive lives. Exploring Ana Ozores’s spirituality in relation to ideas of sainthood, for example, cultural critic Kathy Bacon sees in Ana’s tormented mysticism a frivolous imitation of Teresa de Ávila inspired by her (mis)reading of the saint’s celebrated autobiography (Bacon 92–93, 104). Imposture in this case becomes a site of ideological struggle between competing discourses on propriety and virtue, anticipating the novel’s intricate metafictional structure. In fact, in the text, literature is one of the most important referents for negotiating reality, as it mirrors and supports the different games of impersonation, dissimulation, and falseness framing the plot. Alas, as critic Stephanie Sieburth shows, uses intertextuality to problematize the way in which actors in the story understand the world, shape their moral values, and fashion their personae (1-7, 65-75).^[3]

Following similar approaches to the novel, studies addressing deception, falseness, or pretense, as well as their implications on the author’s critique of modernization, have mostly focused on formal aspects, overlooking the symbolic valences implied in the characters’ social, spiritual, and emotional contradictions.^[4] From my perspective, however, the artificial essence of Spanish society is also problematized in the text through a comment on the unreliability of male authority. In that sense, I am interested in how the novel anatomizes the upper classes’ falseness by reflecting on the discipline of history, the influence of priesthood, and the practicality of romantic love. I examine three male characters that in one way or another are conflicted by the nature of their private aspirations and the responsibilities of their public role: Saturnino Bermúdez, Vetusta’s historian and guardian of tradition, Fermín de Pas, leading figure of the Church, and Álvaro Mesía, president of the local liberal party and representative of the bourgeoisie. Supplementing Alas’s diagnosis of modernization, these characters’ dilettantism and deceitfulness reveal an oblivious society that justifies and even celebrates its pretense in order to hide the frailty and instability of the social construct. While critics have commented extensively on the novel’s treatment of gender, politics, or the historical moment, among many other aspects, the persistence of imposture and artifice as some of the plot’s constitutive tropes deserves a closer examination; their ubiquity, as I suggest here, points to questions about the function that dishonesty and other negative attributes had in legitimizing the country’s distorted ethos.^[5]

La Regenta as a Theater of Deception

La Regenta is a story of falsity and betrayal; every action in the novel is motivated and mediated by second intentions, secret agendas, hypocrisy, or low passions, particularly lust, envy and loathing. Alas’s social critique develops around three identifiable axes that expose the general lack of transparency and moral principles in this fictional universe: the unreliability of history, the false virtues of priesthood, and the insincerity of romantic love. The author emphasizes the present decay of Vetusta’s society, and by extension of the country, by contrasting it to a vision of the past clearly influenced by literature—one in which the highest values prevailed over primal behaviors common in contexts of constant economic and political disarray. As critic Jo Labanyi has identified in many works of the period, this negative representation of society contributed to consolidate in the collective imagination a catastrophic vision of the future—the belief that the country’s history was doomed to fail, that there was a recurrent curse “without even the possibility of redemption,” and that the present was always on the verge of disaster (Myth 45). This kind of appropriation of the myth of decline was not new; as a matter of fact, negative perspectives on the country’s reality had become intrinsic to the forging of identity, offering an explanation, almost a justification, for every turn of events in the nation’s recent history (Kamen 172). Such fatalism, however, was in clear conflict with political articulations that sought to highlight the positive traits of the national character, and in tension with the archaeology of the past that many historians of Spain undertook during this period with analogous purposes.^[6] One way of negotiating the disparity between past, myth, and expectations within this context was historical revisionism. Intellectual disputes around the impact that tradition had had on the country’s progress attests to this mission, to which history aficionados, dilettantes, and laymen also adhered with their own vision of the past. This multiplication of accounts not only contributed to political polarization, increasing feelings of distrust in the established institutions, but also facilitated the dissemination of misconceptions about the country and national identity. From its onset, the novel criticizes this problematic appropriation of the past, placing Vetusta’s historical cathedral at the center of the action—religion, tradition, and history are thus presented as pivots around which society’s dishonesty can thrive.

Critics have described how Alas’s novel recreates the social and religious interactions that characterized fin-de-siglo Spain, particularly illustrating people’s qualms about the Restoration’s political system and the consolidation of anticlerical sentiments in response to the Church’s abuses of power and manipulative use of religion.^[7] The negotiations of these misgivings about the nation and its institutions questioned the teleological nature of progress at the same time that reinforced the country’s need for revisiting its past. Such past was, as Labanyi has aptly pointed out in her analysis of post-Franco Spain, a sort of supernatural entity; that is, a recurrent motif to which academics and politicians, among other social actors, turned to in order to close “unfinished business” that, like ghosts, kept haunting collective imagination (“History and Hauntology” 65). Altering historical facts, or for that matter misrepresenting them, thus constituted a sort of imposture, a denial of truth that facilitated the negotiation of progress by offering grounds for the way in which history and tradition had shaped the present. Similarly, in the novel honesty and deception constantly overlap, creating blurry, fragmented images of reality, and offering an atypical plasticity to otherwise uncompromising values such as faithfulness and objectivity. In this context, the practice of history becomes more an aspirational projection of ideas about the present than a rigorous analysis of facts. A good example of this perspective is Saturnino Bermúdez’s intervention at the opening of the novel (to which I will return later in this essay), where he is shown lecturing a group of visitors to Vetusta’s cathedral on the qualities of a painting: “Tal era el personaje que explicaba a dos señoras y a un caballero el mérito de un cuadro todo negro, en medio del cual se veía apenas una calavera de color de aceituna y el talón de un pie descarnado” (Alas I: 39). According to the guide, the glory of the painting, and by analogy that of Vetusta’s artistic tradition, resides in features that are invisible (and that everyone pretends to see notwithstanding). The scene is telling of Alas’s critique: it is certainly contentious that in this frame of reference whoever projects authority has also the power to hide or distort the facts, reaffirming representations that merely resemble reality but that are accepted as such.

Similar negotiations take place in the affirmation of faith and the ennoblement of romantic love in the novel. In the nineteenth century, language was key in the attempts of literature at validating tradition through the falsification of meaning. It is not a coincidence, for example, that the historical novel lived a moment of popularity in this period, for it was a demonstration of both the rhetorical possibilities of verbal expression to generate alternate facts and project particular visions of the past, and evidence of the growing demand for celebratory, or even exculpatory, versions of history that legitimized the national personality.^[8] Similarly, apostasy and adultery, as they highlighted the duplicity of morals, became issues of public scrutiny and were among some of the most recurrent topics in fictional works written during the second part of the century. It is evident that writing provided a very flexible space for the problematization of conventions and, on that account, of the national character in relation to certain rules of conduct. As historian Alexander Macfie explains, fiction “offers an unusually productive means of challenging fixed ideas of selfhood, historical progression, and objectivity; destabilising cultural hegemonies and challenging normality” (6). One can argue that it may also work as a tool to defend tradition or provide the necessary elements to invent one that fit within the specific political and ideological goals of the ruling classes. Indeed, a deliberate manipulation of the limits of morality through literature was an important component in Spain’s institutional efforts to consolidate identity. As many cultural critics have explained, nations rely on foundational myths and other stories of transgression (disseminated through textbooks, popular literature, and customs) to foreground a collective appreciation of their present (Kamen 209). In that sense, the different narrative strategies deployed in La Regenta allow the exploration of unanticipated connections between imposture and traditional views of love and religion, leading to an understanding of deception as a constitutive element of the national genius.

Primarily the story of the fight for the spiritual and sexual control of Ana Ozores, La Regenta is also a depiction of a society in decay. In Vetusta, the power and authority that the aristocracy and the Church still exert relies in part on people’s need for keeping a public image (fabricated or not) in which traditional mandates are rigorously observed. Unsurprisingly, in this context social interactions become instruments of scrutiny, lenses into the characters’ private lives that reveal unfitting behaviors and problematic ideological inclinations. Vetusta’s society, as critic Akiko Tsuchiya remarks, capitalizes on this sort of collective surveillance, linking mechanism such as tattling and pretense to the upper classes’ constant search for social legitimation (395). Artifice becomes a strategy to negotiate one’s position within the established structure of power. As representative of the Church, for example, Fermín de Pas’s projection of authority materializes in the confessionary, through the negotiation of his confessants’ private affairs and their public image; in that way, the Magistral’s constant surveillance foists pretense and deceit as conventional deportments, forcing the splitting of reality into two separate discourses (private and public) with different transactional values. Similar dynamics take place in sites of exchange like the Casino, wherein processes of social legitimation heavily rely on the value of public perception (Mercer 129). As a matter of fact, the disciplinary society recreated in these spaces operates under assumed premises of manipulation and falsity, thereby emphasizing the author’s critique of traditional structures that, as cultural critic Carole Filliére suggests, allowed, and in some way profited from, the circulation of false narratives (99). It is precisely within these configurations of power, then, that characters in the novel are compelled to fashion their public personas using resources like imposture, imitation, and dilettantism.

At the narrative level, imposture manifests in the novel as irony—author, narrator and characters constantly ironize to criticize reality, thus highlighting the separation between appearances and authenticity.^[9] Falsity and pretense are ubiquitous in modern society; scholars of deception as a historical and sociological phenomenon agree that fraudulence and lying have been essential in the development of modern culture.^[10] Interestingly, rather than disapproval or criticism, in many social contexts the ability to delude others is a reason for praise; so is the talent to defraud, betray, cheat, and so forth. In Spain, literature attests to a strong picaresque tradition supported, among others, by the art of seduction—cunning and guile, in this scenario, were considered the distinctive talents of (anti)heroes that in one way or another personified the national identity. The multiples meanings of playing (games, a role, a trick) are relevant here to understand the function that pretense has within the fictional universe of the novel. Taking social interaction as an act or a game also explains how, within the plot, systems of belief related to history, religion, and romantic love are recast in terms of farce, travesty, and amusement.

Imitation is one of the forms through which playing defines the characters in the novel. Presented as the upper classes’ predominant deportment, it confirms the extent to which artificiality has permeated practically every aspect of the social fabric. Assuming Vetusta’s peripheral condition, in the mimicking game proposed by the novel, the local aristocracy sees in Madrid a referent in questions of fashion, social conventions, and taste. People in the capital, in turn, look up to the behaviors, language, and customs displayed in Paris, taking France as a model for defining their feigned class affiliations. For Vetustans, then, the fact that someone has lived in Madrid or recurrently visits Paris becomes a validation of their propriety. It is this obsession with the metropolis that explains why most male characters in the novel try to emulate, unsuccessfully, Alvaro Mesía’s style, manners, and posture—as the narrator insistingly remarks throughout the text, Mesía has lived in the capital and spent extended periods in France (Alas I: 156, 200-1, 291-92; II: 44, 173, 479). Similar imitative impulses afflict clergymen and certain well-positioned lay males, who see in Fermín de Pas a beacon of comportment and appearance.^[11] Mimicry here may be read beyond the criticism it suggests of the upper classes’ identity feebleness; in fact, recurrent impersonations also point to the parodic nature of public life. The distorted reality (re)created in the novel is therefore a consequence of normalizing role playing, pretense, and falseness as social currency.^[12] Of particular interest in this regard is the scene wherein the main characters participate in the Casino’s annual ball. Because everyone in the event wants to project a particular image of themselves that confirms or upholds their acceptance into a social circle, imitation and (dis)simulation play an essential part in the diversion: “Unos fingían desdeñar el ridículo placer de dar vueltas por allí como una peonza… para nada. Otros hacían alardes de desidia, de escepticismo, de cualquier cosa que fuera incompatible con el frac, según ellos” (Alas II: 324). Anxious about how to represent themselves, participants in this sort of spectacle mimic those who they consider paragons of manners, in most cases overlooking their questionable moral qualities. In their fret over acceptance and their reverence for social status, characters assume that their models’ lack of integrity is not only acceptable but also unexceptional.

Dilettantism is also an admissible, even desirable trait for those aspiring to fit in a socially advantageous environment. Fear of externalizing ignorance, inauthenticity, or inexperience constituted one of the main sources of social anxiety for the emerging bourgeoisie. As a class consolidating its position and role within the national project, they feel the need to prod the country into accepting a particular vision of progress in which their historical relevance was justified. The idea was to naturalize notions of identity that recognized and endorsed tradition and at the same time adapted it to the demands of modernization. One notorious contradictory aspect of the society presented in the novel is the bourgeoisie’s reluctance to assume this important mission of transformation, favoring instead a superficial imitation of the aristocracy and its way of living. Alas presents the country’s modernization as an impossible project, transforming the refashioning of tradition into what historian James Cook characterizes as artful deception (3). Seen as a form of entertainment, history is manipulated to extol the present as a natural extension of the past—the time being was thus acceptable, even desirable, as long as it endorsed reactionary visions of the national identity. Spectacles and exhibitions were particularly important within this task: it is not surprising that in the novel Vetusta’s cathedral is recast as a museum, a touristic attraction that offers a testimony of the undeniable bonds between two distant temporalities—between the present-day ruling classes in the city and obscure(d) historical figures to whom historians (or dilettantes) attributed the origin and consolidation of Spanishness.

The Deceptions of History

The responsibility of making this connection between past and present falls on the aforementioned Saturnino Bermúdez, whose act as the town’s official historian and archivist reveals once again the artificiality and spuriousness of tradition. Bermúdez’s characterization problematizes the idea of historical falsification; in fact, he has a leading part in the portrayal of the city and its heritage offered in the novel’s opening chapter. In this episode, after situating the action in the town’s cathedral, the narrator masterfully guides the reader through the tribulations of a group of visitors profaning the sacred space’s solemnity to admire the pieces that decorate its naves. The guided tour, with its detailed and theatrical exposition, configures what Cook aptly describes as “a perceptual contest played out between showman and viewer, in which the curiosity on display [is] approached by the public as dubious and evaluated according to competing claims of authenticity set out by the showman’s advertisements” (14). Saturnino’s self-confidence, his artful deception, can then be seen as one of the cathedral’s attractions:

Se le pasó por la imaginación [one of the visitors’] si estaría burlándose de ellos porque eran de un pueblo de pesca. Pero, no; aquella cara [Saturnino’s] no debía de mentir; hablaba de veras; era verdad lo del rey Veremundo y lo de la emigración de la pina pérsica a las columnas árabes; sólo que todo aquello ¡qué le importaba a él que era un compromisario! (Alas I: 70)

Here, Bermúdez’s authority is a projection supported on his performance (his demeanor and aplomb)—through his staging, the guide is able to call into question the visitors’ preconceived beliefs and ideas about the country’s past. For Fillière, Saturnino is one of those characters that “encarnan los excesos de una erudición estéril y ridícula” (85). In fact, Bermúdez’s passion for archeology and history blinds him to the inconsistencies of the national narrative he champions, leading to a historical falsification that borders on the absurd. Part of this obsession with the old times stems from a lack of confidence in his own role and position within Vetusta’s social and cultural scaffold. The blurry space occupied by the bourgeoisie in fin-de-siglo Spain, a society that refused to reconceive its internal and institutional structures to accommodate to the economic and social demands of modernization, offered an ideal canvas for the flourishing of such insecurities.

As critic Clemens Hagen contends in his approach to false erudition in the novel, the characters’ self-consciousness, particularly that of personages in questionable positions of authority, stems from a cognitive fluctuation between ideals and reality, authenticity and falseness, that in the text is resolved through the use of derisive descriptions (42). Bermúdez’s interest in tracing (or fabricating) the lineage of Vetusta’s most notable families attests to Alas’s scoffing of the upper classes’ authenticity anxiety. The chronicler’s search for legitimation thus turns into an obsession that he even extends to his own ancestry: “Don Saturnino Bermúdez, que juraba tener documentos que probaban al inteligente en heráldica venirle el Bermúdez del rey Bermudo en persona, era el más perito en la materia de contar la historia de cada uno de aquellos caserones, que él consideraba otras tantas glorias nacionales” (Alas I: 28). The importance given here to documental or archival evidence, however, outlines Saturnino’s particular vision of the discipline of history, a perspective that is also deployed in his prolific scholarship about the city’s past (as it is highlighted in the character’s initial descriptions, he is the author of several volumes on the evolution of Vetusta [Alas I: 36]) and in his detailed disquisitions on the Cathedral’s artwork collection. Besides paying attention to content, as an art historian Saturnino also centers his work around the materiality and spatiality of the artistic object. The parallel suggested in the novel between the Cathedral as a building, with its naves functioning as galleries, and the museum as a site of identity negotiation, is thus pertinent to understand this definition of history. As critic Hazel Gold explains, the museum has always functioned as a place for interpreting tradition (48); through the accumulation of objects upon which experts have bestowed historical value, the museum and the archive provide a space for collecting and curating artifacts (a mission usually in the hands of the erudite), two essential stages in the reconstruction (or fabrication) of the past.

Part of the characters’ distinctive artificiality and dilettantism in the novel stems from their lack of originality or their incapability to reproduce, conditions symbolized in Bermúdez’s obsession with studying and preserving what has been done. The allocation of all his (re)productive efforts in forging a representation of old glories, rather than in developing something new, reveals a fear of being creative, an apprehension that, according to Gold, is not unrelated to Vetusta’s strong attachments to tradition (57). In this context it is telling that Bermúdez is presented as a highly educated individual, perhaps the city’s most prepared academic: “Pues era don Saturnino Bermúdez, doctor en teología, en ambos derechos, civil y canónico, licenciado en filosofía y letras y bachiller en ciencias: el autor, ni más ni menos, de Vetusta Romana, Vetusta Goda, Vetusta Feudal, Vetusta Cristiana, y Vetusta Transformada, a tomo por Vetusta” (Alas I: 36). His intellectual undertakings, however, do not imply a social or pedagogical commitment; on the contrary, all those efforts are presented as part of a personal quest dedicated to flatter his vanity, thus contradicting some of the essential educational and enlightening purposes of scholarly work.

Since Bermúdez’s attainments have not been conceived for an audience, his position and ideas have never been submitted to debate; without critical readers, he is hence regarded as the highest authority in matters related to the city’s historical value: “publicaba en El Lábaro, el órgano de los ultramontanos de Vetusta, largos artículos que nadie leía, y que el alcalde no hubiera entendido, de haberlos leído; en ellos ponía por las nubes el mérito arqueológico de cada tabique, y si se trataba de una pared maestra, demostraba que era todo un monumento” (Alas I: 28). Saturnino’s exaltation of the past, notwithstanding its academic merit, turns out to be artificial and even superficial. The recurrent topic of his scholarship—Vetusta—also denotes a lack of perspective and certain provincialism that challenge his authority and signal once again the anxieties triggered by a society in transformation.^[13] In a city where time has erased, obscured, or deteriorated the past (as happened with the paintings in the Cathedral), Bermúdez’s job consists of manipulating the historical narrative to embellish an outdated image of the country that refuses to fade. If ruins are the habitat of specters, as Labanyi suggests in her analysis of post-Franco’s Spain (“History and Hauntology” 65-82), then Saturnino’s attempt at recovering the past by seeing in those ghosts the pillars for the vitality of the present, is yet another layer in Alas’s criticism of the burdens of tradition.

Saturnino’s contradictory interventions in the task of keeping the spirits of the past alive become completely evident in the foregoing scene in which he is lecturing a group of visitors on the artistic values of Vetusta’s cathedral. His description of a painting obscured by the long-term accumulation of soot from candles, for example, is encrypted in symbolic undertones that expand on the novel’s critique:

El cuadro que miraban estaba casi en la sombra y parecía una gran mancha de negro mate. De otro color no se veía más que el frontal de una calavera y el tarso de un pie desnudo y descarnado. Sin embargo, cinco minutos llevaba don Saturnino Bermúdez empleados en explicar el mérito de la pintura a aquellas señoras y al caballero que llenos de fe y con la boca abierta escuchaban al arqueólogo. (Alas I: 32)

After realizing that the audience fails at seeing all the elements extolled in his presentation, the archeologist alters his pitch to suggest that the glory of the painting resides precisely in that which is invisible. Two elements need to be highlighted in this approach to the Cathedral’s works of art as repositories of the glories of the past and, as a consequence, of the achievements of the national genius: on the one hand, it is evident that historians have the discretion to hide or distort information, rendering an image of the past that merely resembles reality; on the other hand, it can be said that part of the success of such a flagrant con relies on the audience playing along, pretending they can see the same things than the historian. Language’s symbolic possibilities are relevant in this context to recognize how Bermúdez manipulates reality—as Sieburth suggests, historians have the faculty to conveniently dissociate signifier and signified in order to convey their particular vision of the past (23). Saturnino’s lecture on the painting’s indiscernible values in this scene seeks precisely to reaffirm contemporary Vetustans’, and by extension Spaniards’, unclear connection to the alleged splendor of the old times.

Bermúdez’s successful projection as an erudite and rigorous archeologist of the city can be explained, in part, to his extraordinary capacity to mystify audiences through the use of an arcane language and the production of complicated yet irrelevant genealogies:

y ya no sabía [the audience] cuáles eran más de ochocientos, si las columnas o los califas; el orden dórico, el jónico y el corintio los mezclaba con los Alfonsos de Castilla, y ya dudaba si la fundación de Vetusta se debía a un fraile descalzo o al arco de medio punto; reasumiendo, como decía el sabio; sentía náuseas invencibles y apenas oía al arqueólogo, preocupándole más sus esfuerzos por contener impulsos del estómago cuya expansión hubiera sido una irreverencia. (Alas I: 70)

His performance, nonetheless, can overburden the audience. Oblivious to the effects that his long-winded speech is causing, Saturnino keeps on bemusing his onlookers to the point of dizzying and even sickening them, always relying on the fact that the reverence for knowledge and the profound respect for sacred spaces would prevent a snub. The situation also displays a contempt for the devotional compound—the group’s interruption of established liturgical procedures can be interpreted as a profanation: “[El Magistral] Se acercó a un grupo que en el otro extremo de la sacristía cuchicheaba con la voz apagada de la conversación profana que quiere irrespetar el lugar sagrado” (Alas I: 32). Through this contrast of perspectives, Alas associates national history (Vetusta’s, specifically) with religious faith, the monarchy, and the arts—architecture, sculpture, and painting are then the materialization of tradition, and as such, are considered sacred. The lack of respect implied in Saturnino’s performance in the premises of the Cathedral, and the way in which audiences react to his ostensible elucidations, set the parameters for the novel’s social critique (it is worth noting once again that this episode takes place in the opening chapter), particularly the author’s reproval of the bourgeoisie and its characteristic dilettantism.

Love, Faith, and Dilettantism

In the context of his performance, Vetusta’s archeologist operates as a sort of priest capable of congregating an audience to spread the Word of history. As it happens with religion, historical truth here is to a large extent substantiated by faith; in the absence of concrete evidence, the congregation trusts in the interpretations provided by their guide. Not surprisingly, when Saturnino concludes his preaching, the audience exclaims so it be: “—¡Amén! —exclamó la lugareña sin poder contenerse; mientras Obdulia felicitaba a Bermúdez con un apretón de manos, en la sombra” (Alas I: 48). Mystification thus seems to be key in producing acts of faith—trust in history, belief in God, confidence in love. In fact, other characters’ behavior in the novel, such as Fermín de Pas’s or Álvaro Mesía’s, hinges on the skilled manipulation and deception of their prey. The animalistic metaphor is pertinent here to illustrate the kind of vying for status and recognition that pervades the society depicted in the novel; it is precisely in competitive environments, as cultural critics Julie Codell and Linda Hughes contend, that pretense and artifice can be decoded as natural, even inevitable mechanisms, of social, intellectual, and physical equalization (210). Dilettantism and imposture are therefore not necessarily the symptoms of a dysfunctional society, but organic expressions of the anxieties produced by the emergence and consolidation of the bourgeoisie as a social force (the case of Mesía) and the declining power of the Church (the situation of the Magistral).

With regard to self-perception, no substantial differences separate Saturnino’s personality from that of characters like Mesía or de Pas, for all of them are convinced of their own abilities to arouse others’ curiosity, passion, and devotion. Of the historian, the narrator explains: “Porque además del primer anticuario de la provincia, creía ser —y esto era verdad— el hombre más fino y cortés de España. […] Bermúdez quería pasar por el hombre más espiritual de Vetusta, y el más capaz de comprender una pasión profunda y alambicada” (Alas I: 33–34; my emphasis). In the same way that Mesía’s promises come to be false and de Pas’s piety turns out to be spurious, Saturnino’s homilies are also calculated acts: “No cabe duda que el señor don Saturnino, siquiera fuese por bien del arte, mentía no poco, y abusaba de lo románisco y de lo mudejar” (Alas I: 28). As sociologist Ignacio Mendiola aptly suggests in his revealing analysis on mendacity, lying tend to be an extended, almost organic practice in the public and private domains of every society (26). In the novel, lying is normalized to the point that all characters vie for stretching the truth to manipulate others. In this competition for seducing their targets, however, Mesía has a particular advantage: while Bermúdez, as the narrator underscores, may be the most elegant and courteous person in town (Alas I: 33), these authentic attributes somehow undermine his appeal and limit his possibilities as a competent suitor within his social circle. Despite the fact that de Pas, according to descriptions in the novel, is probably the strongest and most handsome man of his age in Vetusta (Alas I: 14-15, 460-62), his vow of celibacy prevents him from openly persuading his female acolytes to transcend spiritual bonds. Conversely, Mesía is free to use his chameleonic talents to present himself as spiritual, courteous, or compassionate to suit every opportunity of seducing his targets. Furthermore, and increasing the characters’ unevenness, Alas explicitly emasculates Saturnino (“Bermúdez era un sabio, un santo, pero no un hombre” (Alas I: 449), de Pas (“era un buen hijo, humilde, dócil… un niño, un niño que nunca se hacía hombre” (Alas I: 358), and even don Víctor (“Ese estúpido de don Víctor con sus pájaros y sus comedias […] no es un hombre” (Alas I: 258), to instead validate Mesía’s Don Juan behavior and personality.

As spiritual companion and confidant, Mesía’s pose is that of a practicing Catholic, a man of composure, and a sensitive and even cultivated individual—someone able to appreciate the beauty in literature and art, and to reflect on the human condition. Hence his observations about Zorrilla’s play Don Juan Tenorio, whose main character’s story reflects his own—as a con man conscious of his lack of faith, Mesía, perhaps thinking about his own end, is not completely convinced of the hero’s redemption at the conclusion of the play: “Pero es claro que lo de creer era decir que se creía. Él no tenía fe alguna, ni bendita la falta, a no ser cuando le entraba el miedo de la muerte” (Alas I: 291). Yet that is not an obstacle for his pretending to be deeply touched by this act of contrition during a representation of the work in the theater, feigning an emotional sensitivity that he knows will resonate with Ana’s interpretation of the drama:

No fue posible tratar cosa de provecho, y el tenorio vetustense procuró ponerse en la cuerda de su amiga y hacerse el sentimental disimulado, como los hay en las comedias y en las novelas de Feuillet: mucho sprit que oculta un corazón de oro que se esconde por miedo a las espinas de la realidad… esto era el colmo de la distinción según lo entendía don Álvaro, y así procuró aquella noche presentarse a la Regenta, a quien estaba visto que había de enamorar por todo lo alto. (Alas II: 46; emphasis in original)

Dissimulation operates here as a marker of distinction, a trait Mesía uses in his courtship of Ana notwithstanding the artificiality and perversion of moral values that it might reveal. Manipulating reality (or people) is thus legitimized as a social practice and as a valid means to an end.

In Mesía’s perspective, social institutions such as marriage were outdated; a revision of some of its basic premises would make acceptable liberal practices that he had observed or experienced in more progressive social contexts, such as those of Madrid or Paris.^[14] There, don Álvaro had seen how adultery was connived at as long as it was discreet, functioning also as a way of contesting the Church’s strict control over the private domain and in particular over women’s sexuality. In that sense not only was this contravention ideologically justified, but its toleration would facilitate his predatory aspirations. Despite having clear convictions in this regard, Mesía does not divulge his point of view; on the contrary, as an experienced player, he projects a different image of himself in order to subjugate Ana:

En su narración tuvo que alterar la verdad histórica, porque a la Regenta no se le podía hablar francamente de amores con una mujer casada (tan atrasada estaba aquella señora), pero vino a dar a entender, como pudo, que él había despreciado la pasión de una mujer codiciada por muchos… porque… porque… para el hijo de su madre los amoríos ya no eran ni siquiera un pasatiempo, desde que el amor le había caído encima del alma como un castigo. (Alas II: 335)

Mesía’s dissolute past, or his “verdad histórica,” is thus altered to help construct a false persona, a version of the gentleman type that populated the mystic and romantic literature Ana uses as a reference in her life.^[15] Confirming that each society has its own policy of truth, as literary critic María Soledad Fernández argues, in the provincial and bourgeois world of the novel convenience and appearances prevail over authentic love, which, in turn, is considered a threat to Vetusta’s apparent stability and integrity (268). Under these circumstances, it is easier for Ana to accept Mesía’s false image than to question his intentions, distancing him from his unmistakable materialistic lust, to relocate him closer to the spiritual and mystical prototype of the Magistral. Conscious of this association, don Álvaro nimbly adjusts his performance: “por agradarla, se había hecho el romántico también, el espiritual, el místico…” (Alas II: 47; emphasis in original). Through this calculated representation, he manages to contrive his profile as a confidant, thus gaining access to Ana’s circle of trust—the only advantage that the Magistral seemed to have in the battle over her will.

Seen from this perspective, Mesía’s victory is unsurprising: he was not only able to exercise his masculinity with no restrictions, but also to express different identities by emulating the physical, intellectual, and even spiritual advantages of his rivals. Albeit Saturnino and de Pas deploy elaborated strategies of deception, pretense, and dissimulation to achieve their goals, Mesía’s vast experience and practical knowledge end up prevailing over manipulations based on faith or erudition. In contrast to Bermúdez, however, the Magistral does not easily concede; his cunning skills are sophisticated—a dilettante with respect to his spiritual commitment, he is also a deeply materialistic individual, a feature instilled in him by a mother determined to escape the limitations of her social origin. Despite his mundane ambitions, becoming Vetusta’s spiritual beacon was a con easy to concoct for someone with his charisma and ability to manipulate through the pulpit and the confessionary: “Este fingimiento era en él [De Pas] segunda naturaleza. Tenía el don de estar hablando con mucho pulso mientras pensaba en otra cosa” (Alas I: 360). But in the same way that Mesía’s dilettantism is at odds with his persistence as a seducer, and Saturnino’s dabbler seems to be incompatible with his dedication to document Vetusta’s past, de Pas’s spiritual tinkering is the only aspect of his priesthood in which he is at fault. In fact, the Magistral successfully presides over numerous fronts: he is a prolific historian of religion; he serves as the confessor and spiritual guide of many influential families; he manages the diocese’s ecclesiastical organization and finances; he leads the Church’s evangelization efforts in Vetusta and is one of its most respected preachers. It is precisely his rising trajectory and aspirations that have gained him many enemies, who also begrudge his closeness to the city’s elite. Through the confessionary, de Pas has effectively penetrated Vetusta’s private circles, accumulating knowledge and power—assets that he believes will grant him control over Ana’s body and soul before Mesía, forgetting that his spiritual insincerity would invalidate his capacity of persuasion.^[16]

Confession, nonetheless, is de Pas’s main tool of manipulation; as Sieburth identifies in her reading of the novel, the confessionary functions not only as an instrument of social regulation but also as a space of representation wherein the truth is constantly negotiated by the parties involved (22). In fact, confession can be understood as an act, a performance that demonstrates once again how artificiality and deceit have been normalized in Vetusta. Alas understood these practices as reprovable, for they demonstrated the devious dispute of hegemonic forces for controlling people’s past, present, and future. The impossibility of concretizing this ambition manifests in the novel as unscrupulousness, a perversion that the Magistral tries to hide behind his cassock. As critic Ten Doménech explains, for de Pas the priesthood has become an unsurmountable obstacle for materializing his real aspirations; since he is well aware of his physical and intellectual superiority, it is his vileness that tormented him (742). Fermín’s farce, his constant performance, becomes an instrument to cope with the frustration of having to conceal his basic instincts. This internal struggle with the constrictions of his vocation can then be read as part of the allegory with which the novel criticizes society’s resistance to embrace modernization—a potential for transformation willfully truncated by the established structures (religious, social, institutional) of power. Disregarding these impediments, de Pas chooses to misread the intellectual, almost platonic bond that Ana has established with him. In this portrayal of a failed (and nonviable) foundational romance, the possibilities of modernization are no more than a delusional longing: “y arrojar yo la máscara, y la ropa negra, y ser quien soy [a man], lejos de aquí donde no lo puedo ser” (Alas II: 544). The Magistral is coerced to live a lie in order to buttress the traditional order, thereby disregarding authenticity as an essential trait in the transformation of society.

Conclusion

The artificiality of Vetusta’s society, a mirror of the national shallowness that Alas condemns in his novel, is revealed in the characters’ manifest imposture. One can say that the performative nature of their public personas in the text operates within the category of “pobreza ostentosa” (Alas II: 335).^[17] Either Saturnino’s flamboyant display of knowledge, Mesía’s passionate love, or de Pas’s exalted spirituality underscore the characters’ banality and dilettantism, in the same way that the poor’s impersonation or (mis)appropriation of the higher classes’ customs and behaviors exposes the mockery, the counterfeit. Among the three characters studied in this essay, de Pas is the only one that confronts his own pretense: whereas Saturnino and Mesía have internalized deceit as an essential trait of their personality, the Magistral’s embodiment of priesthood is an external attribute that he rejects. The cassock functions as a disguise, a cover that grants him access to reserved circles of intimacy and power, but it soon becomes also the prison that confines his real nature, a liminal space that facilitates and at the same time curbs his Machiavellian maneuvers. While Mesía acknowledges his powers of seduction and Saturnino is convinced of his unparalleled erudition, de Pas does not believe for a moment that he is a real spiritual beacon. Yet he is able to project this image with the prowess of an authentic con artist. If Alas’s critique of Spain’s complex modernization includes a reflection on the vices of national identity, the decay of the ruling classes, and the mediocrity of the emerging bourgeoisie, developing his characters as products of the artificiality and pretense of such society allows him to highlight the numerous anxieties that this process produced. Moral decomposition in the novel thus mirrors the instability caused by the refashioning of traditional institutions. Following this reading, the novel also seems to suggest that fundamental aspects of the collective construction of society, like history, religion, or romantic love should be undertaken by committed individuals and not just dilettantes. A committed bourgeoisie (as opposed to the superficial one criticized in the text), with aptness for history, science, politics, and education, could then contribute to forge a national agenda to amend, rather than imitate, the vices of the past.