Fantasy, Seduction, and the Woman Reader: Rosalía de Castro's Novels

AbstractTo find an intervention in 19th-century Spanish discourse about women's reading that confronts the subordinating effects of all types of fiction on women, we must turn to the fiction of Pilar Sinués's contemporary Rosalía de Castro. Castro sidesteps the question of morality and explores in her novels the connected issues of fiction, female fantasy, and women's oppression. What Jessica Benjamin has termed ‘the intricate relationship between woman's desire and women's submission’ becomes the implicit problem posed in the narratives that Castro situates within or in relation to the genre of romance fiction, or popular Romantic melodrama. This chapter discusses at length Rosalía de Castro's engagement with this problem in her fourth novel, El caballero de las botas azules [The Knight of the Blue Boots]. The chapter first considers Castro's treatment of seduction in her first novel, La hija del mar [Daughter of the Sea].