The importance of fashion in the construction and representation of
gender and the formation of modern society in nineteenth-century Spanish
narrative is the focus of Dorota Heneghan's Striking Their Modern
Pose. The study moves beyond traditional interpretations that equate
female passion for finery with symptoms of social ambition and the
decline of the Spanish nation, and brings to light the manners in which
nineteenth-century Spanish novelists drew attention to the connection
between the complexities of fashionable female protagonists and the
shifting limits of conventional womanhood to address the need to
reformulate customary ideals of gender as a necessary condition for
Spain to advance in the process of modernization. The project also sheds
light on an area largely unexplored by previous studies: men's pursuit
of fashion. Through the analysis of the richness of sartorial subtleties
in Benito Pérez Galdós's and Emilia Pardo Bazán's portraits of their
male characters, this book brings forward these writers' exposure of the
much-denied bourgeois men's love for self-adornment and the
incoherencies and contradictions in the allegedly monolithic, stable
concept of nineteenth-century Spanish masculinity. While highlighting
the ways in which the art of dressing smartly provided
nineteenth-century Spanish novelists with effective means to voice their
critique of conventional gender order, the book also lends insight into
these authors' methods of manipulating sartorial signs to explore and to
envision (as in the case of Pardo Bazán and Jacinto Octavio Picón)
alternative models of masculinity and femininity. Threading through all
chapters of the study is the idea propagated by all three of these
writers that Spain's full integration into modernity required not only
the redefinition of the feminine role, but the reconfiguration of the
masculine one as well.
