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scrutiny of an urban, bourgeois world which views the social and the corporeal as fatally entwined-a world in which the body is the principal object of the intervention of power- marks an important stage in Galdós's understanding of the society he repeatedly portrayed in his novéis. In fact} this understanding entaüs Galdós' s move toward a politics of spatiality.
In a lecture of 1967, Foucault noted that "the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time" (23), and, indeed, postmodern geographers such as Edward Soja have reconfigured Foucault's díalectic of power and knowíedge as a discursive triad that includes space as íts third axis (Soja 148). In Miseri- cordia, the apparent demise of temporality and history is paraíleled by Galdós's increasing preoccupation with spatial relations and the ways in which such relations not only regúlate behaviour within the populatíon at large but also determine the very conditions of possíbil- ity of the subject's singularity, thus effecting a merger of the concepts of identification and identity (Matsuda 123).
In Galdós's examination of the spatial practices of everyday life, one site in par- ticular, both as presence and as absence, is highlighted in Misericordia: the home. Moreo- ver, the loss of home not only afflicts Galdós's urban characters, trapped by the draconian realities of the new capitalist order. It also comes to symbolize the very form of the modem novel, in which íanguage begins to become unanchored and narrative's familiar grounding in representations of the real is displaced by the appearance of the uncanny ("das unheimliche") and/or the dispersal of knowíedge, in nomadic fashion, throughout shifting centres of perception. Readers will recall that Lukács inscribed into his theory of the novel the notion of the "transcendental homelessness" of the genre (41), born when the world of essences of the epic is shattered and thrast into immanence. The novel's response to this historical situation is to give form by (re)constructing the concealed totality of life; its hero becomes "a projection of man's experience of his self-made environment as a prison in- stead of a parental home" (64). The first modern novel to depict this, Cervantes's Don Quijote, dates from "when the Christian God began to forsake the world, when man be- came lonely and could find meaning and substance only in his own soul, whose home was nowhere" (103). Bakhtin, by contrast, dispenses with the nostalgic temper of Lukács's theory, predicating a somewhat different génesis for the genre: "The novel begins by pre- suming a verbal and semantic decentering of the ideological world, a certain linguistic homelessness of literary consciousness" (387). By this Bakhtin means that authoritarian discourse, which reduces interpretive possibilities to a minimum, gives way to the heteroglossic condition that is the hallmark of the novel as a dialogical mode of expression.
As will become evident, both in structure and theme, Misericordia conforms in large meas- ure to the Lukácsian assessment of reality and the novel form. However, by the novel's end, there occurs a subtle shift-mirrored in Benina's ultimate assertion of faith-toward Bakhtin's more affirmative, liberatory stance.
Home is the symbolíc heart of the nineteenth-century novel, a space that is at once metaphorical and material. The "ángel del hogar" is perhaps the best known of the many avatars of bourgeois culture that enshrine the family hearth as the locus of social relations.
By contrast, Misericordia depicts a society in which numerous sectors of the populace, especially the petty bourgeoisie and the lower classes, either have no permanent domicile
OUTSIDER ART: HOMELESSNESS IN MISERICORDIA 143 or Uve with the constant threat of eviction. Homelessness is a circumstance shared by niany: the beggars who swarm the entrance of the church of San Sebastián, the rapidly declining Frasquito Ponte, Benina and her friend, Almudena. The latter dwells perma- nently in the nether regions of poverty, as much exiled from the elegant world of official Madrid as from his native Morocco and the Semitic culture in which he was formed; the former is thrown out of Doña Paca's house by Juliana at the end of the novel. Without the security afforded by a fixed domicile, they are condemned to the harsh, contingent life of the new urban nomads, a heterogeneous class of inhabitants of the capital which includes many di verse species: immigrants from the countryside in search of work, repatriated sol- diers from the colonial wars, indigents, madmen, abandoned children, "golfos" and profes- sional delinquents, gypsies.3 Vagrancy and mendicancy, thus, become markers of the struc- tural and economic imbalances that afflict Spain's larger cities on the threshold of a moder- nity being realized only with considerable difficulty. Both for moralists and legislators, the ills of vagrancy and begging are perceived as an attack on public order; to defend against this siege, a regulatory system of prisons, shelters, hospitals, asylums, and workhouses is established. By examining Galdós's novelistic representation of vagabondage and home- lessness in the context of their criminalization during the second half of the nineteenth century, readers are compelled to víew from a different angle the anxieties over degenera- tion and regeneration so often commented upon by those who, following Casalduero, limit their discussion oí Misericordia to Benina's transcendental philanthropy and the evangeli- cal message it portends. In Rodríguez Puértolas's words, "esta obra encierra muchas más cosas que ese espiritualismo a lo Tolstoy del que tanto se ha hablado" (101).
Homelessness and begging, so graphically reported in this novel, belie the myth of the immanent evolution of bourgeois society during the Restoratíon. Ponte, Benina, Almudena, Casiana, Pulido, and the rest of the "cuadrilla de la miseria" place in sharp relief the spurious promises of the economic bonanza whose expansión fuels the growth of the nineteenth-century liberal state. Rubbing elbows with prosperous merchants and fashion- ably dressed housewives amid the city's "contested landscapes" (Wright 2)-for example, the north face of the church of San Sebastián-, they are a conspicuous reminder that the dream of the bourgeoisie programmatically exeludes certain classes of citizens or may fail even those it includes. Misericordia's emphasis on homelessness and begging, thus, lays bare a series of epistemological fissures, in both the social and the narrative realms, that cannot be repaired. First, they reveal a crisis of personal identity, for urban nomadism engenders isolation and marginalization. The homeless subject is not interpellated, since society neither recognizes ñor addresses those who have no address. Second, they signal a crisis of social authority. The itinerant life of the beggar posits a challenge to the ordered, collective life of the community, which, as represented by jurists, doctors, hygienists, mor- alists, and philanthropists, responds by enacting laws and assaying new penitentiary régimes in an effort to defend its integrity. The preferred method of control is, invariably, the dispersal and seclusion of those subjeets deemed suspicious before they can contamínate the social body. As explained by the lawyer, Manuel Colmeiro, author of Derecho Administrativo español (1850), they must be isolated "como a un miembro corrompido o gangrenado se le separa del cuerpo humano" (cited in Trinidad Fernández 144).4 Third,
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homelessness and mendicity poínt to a looming crisis of national image and identity, which colours the writings of Spanish intellectuals throughout the decade of the 1890s and culmi- nates in the colonial disaster of 1898, only one year following the publication of Galdós's novel. Don Romualdo summarizes this unease, noting that Spain is in peril of turning into some giant poorhouse, thereby reinforcing the perception of her economic, technological, and cultural inferiority: "Podríamos creer que es nuestro país inmensa gusanera de pobres, y que debemos hacer de la nación un asilo sin fin, donde quepamos todos, desde el primero al último. Al paso que vamos, pronto seremos el más grande hospicio de Europa" (775).5
As the nineteenth century draws to a cióse and confidence wanes in the represen- tational practices that dominate the arts, the notion of subjectivity undergoes a reformula- tion; the illusion of a coherent, unified subject which had sustained realist writing begins to unravei. Referring to the European "fin de siglo," Valis observes that "una profunda revolución en la conciencia humana [...] últimamente iba a disolver el sentido de comunidad, subjetivizar la realidad y fragmentar la personalidad individual" (403). Readers have fre- quently remarked that the constantly changing ñames and epithets by which characters are known in Misericordia put into question the ontological and social definition of the self.
Galdós's protagonist is variousíy referred to by the narrator and by her fellow characters as
"Benina de Casia, Benigna, seña Benina, Nina," and "Santa Rita de Casia." Her compan- ion, Almudena, also goes by the ñames "Mordejái, Josef Marien Almudena, José María de la Almudena," and the epithets, "el moro" and "el africano." Benina's mistress ("Francisca Juárez de Zapata, Frasquita, doña Paca, Curra Juárez") and the miraculous priest ("Don Romualdo, Romualdo Cedrón") offer additional examples of the vacillation of ñames and signs in the novel that unsteadies the relationship of the self to language. This same indentitary instability can be traced in the transient condition of the novel's principal figures. None of the protagonists is originally from Madrid. Benina, for instance, was born in a small town near Guadalajara (763) and stiíl sounds "foreign" to the ear of her neighbours; her "acentillo andaluz persistía, aunque muy atenuado, después de cuarenta años de residencia en Ma- drid" (699). Doña Paca and Don Romualdo are natives of Ronda,6 Ponte is from Algeciras (742), and Almudena, in a possible recreation of the archetypal wandering Jew, has trav- elled from his bírthplace, Ullah de Bergel, to Fez, Aígiers, and Oran, and then from the Near East to the neighbouring, Mediterranean nations of France and Portugal, before fi- nally settling in Madrid (719). Even when these characters are at ease, they are not at home, for, in Galdós's house of fiction, home is always elsewhere. fn this respect, Misericordia communicates an unsurprisingly accurate account of Spanish urban demographics and the rootlessness of the populations that inhabit the larger cities of the península. The situation is most acute in the capital; as Magnien records, "en 1898, la mitad de los habitantes de Madrid no son oriundos de la ciudad" (110).7
The effect on Galdós's characters of this first instance of uprooting and dispíace- ment from their respective geographicaí origins is compounded when worsening financial straits forcé them to move repeatedly from house to hovel, from hovel to gutter. Obdulia, now married and living in "un sotabanco en la calle de la Cabeza, mal abrigada y peor comida" (707), is fearful that her landlord will put her out on the street. Her mother, Paca,
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manages to keep a roof over her head, but, as her financial situation deteriorates steadily, so too does the quality of her housing. From the stately Calle Claudio Coello in the Barrio de Salamanca she is obliged to relocate to the successively poorer "barrios" of Lavapiés (Calle del Olmo), Cuatro Caminos (Calle Saúco), Puerta Cerrada (Calle Almendro), and the Plaza Mayor (Calle Imperial).8 When in 1880 Frasquito Ponte's fortunes hitbottom, "se determinó a no tener domicilio, y después de unos días de horrorosa crisis, en que pudo compararse al caracol por el aquel de llevar su casa consigo, entendióse con la. seña Bernarda, la dueña de los dormitorios de la calle del Mediodía Grande" (727). Eventually, he rents still cheaper lodgings in el Comadreja 's house, and more than once, including the last night before his death, he is reduced to sleeping outdoors (740; 792). The extreme precariousness of Almudena's situation can similarly be mapped over the urban grid. Obliged to vacate his shabby room on Santa Casilda, described as a "vasta colmena de viviendas baratas alineadas en corredores sobrepuestos" (696), he resettles in Las Cambroneras, a remote district on the banks of the Manzanares, where many of Madrid's impoverished congrégate in tenements:
"en cuadras también borriqueñas, no menos inmundas que las otras, acudían a dormir de noche muchos pobres de los que andan por Madrid: por diez céntimos se les daba una parte del suelo, y a vivir" (756). In the final chapters of the novel, Almudena, having exhausted all possible resources, is exiled to "los quintos infiernos": a shack on the Carretera de To- ledo which he shares with the now homeless Benina, the victim of her former mistress's ingratitude, who has rescued him from the open-air garbage dump where he had been liv- ing.9
The crisis of the subject illustrated by the lack of a fixed domicile is typical of populations displaced by the clash between industrial capitalism and surviving structural elements of a pre-capitalist economy; not only money, but also deracinated individuáis, are placed in constant circulation (Matsuda 127). In Misericordia, this coexistence of non- homogeneous phases of economic development is allegorized in the friendship of Almudena and Benina. He is a professíonal, blind beggar who belongs to the culture of poverty inher- ited from the ancien régime; she is an economic beggar, whose predicament can be traced to social and structural transformations of the nineteenth century (rural exodus,
"desamortizaciones," urban growth and industrialization) and the limitations of Madrid's labour market (Bahamonde 171). In Galdós's text, the dispossessed become anonymous, mobile subjects, whose urban migrations dramatize a scandalous negation of the "señas de identidad" most closely ídentified with the bourgeoisie of Restoration Spain: work and family. In tfieir margination, theirs is a negative identity based on what they do not have (home, money) and what they do not do (practice a profession or trade).
The case of Benina, who carne to Madrid when she was 20 seeking employment as a maid, is especially telling. Twice banished from Doña Paca's household, each time she returns, eventually ending up sharing a bedroom with her místress. The lack of a "room of one's own," paraphrasing Virginia Woolf, is significant, because the figure of the servant is, in some ways, always already homeless. Living in other people's households, servants are symbolic of the threshold between the public and the prívate spheres; moreover, "they bring with them across that barrier 'anxieties' and 'divisions' from the outside world [...]
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that are inconsistent with the peaceful, orderly picture that domestic ideology seeks to paint"
(Jordán 80). Benina, to better serve her destitute mistress, takes to the streets to beg for alms and is eventually cast out into those same streets, once Paca receives her portion of a family inheritance. Because she insists on keeping company with the leprous Almudena after their reléase from San Bernardino, she is no longer welcome in Paca's new home.
Juliana, sensing Benina is a carrier of physical and social contagión, promises her the fami- ly's leftovers on condition that she not cross the threshold of the front door: "Sí, sí; la comida es tuya ..., pero ... verás lo que debes hacer ... Te llegas al portal a la hora que yo te fije, y mi prima Hilaria te la bajará y te la dará ..., acercándose a ti lo menos que pueda"
(793). In joining the rag-tag army of Madrid's homeless beggars, Benina symbolically challenges the foundational nineteenth-century institutions of family and marriage upon which bourgeois society rests. However, the threat she now poses-her deviance, if we wish to cali it that-is no longer based soleíy on class (the bourgeoisie' s fear of a rebellious, urban proletariat), as when la Burlada warns of "la rigolución mu gorda, mu gorda, que ha de venir" (692), but also on gender (the fear of a woman no longer anchored to the home).
When women move continuously between the sphere of the home and that of the street, as Benina does for much of the novel, or when they are displaced from one to the other, as happens to her in the final four chapters, the potential anarchy they unleash is simultane- ously political and sexual in nature.
In studying the role played in French realist fiction by women servants, Gantrel observes that "if it is true that servants represent the repressed of their employers, then homelessness, when it is associated with maids, may be the repressed not only of domestic Ufe and the family institution, but of any cultural construct of femininity which takes itself for reality" (262). Such a construct most often entails the erotic, given the notorious asso- ciations between homeless women and promiscuity, but may also involve the maternal.
Because of her altruistic exercise of charity and her invention of a compensatory, fictional universe in which social justice is served (i.e., her tale about Don Romualdo), numerous critics have equated Benina with Christ, with Don Quijote, and even with the author-figure of Galdós, as Bauer notes. The effect of such comparisons, however, is to neutralize her gendered body and to erase those signs of her characterization, such as her maternal atten- tions to Almudena, Paca, and Juliana, that are speciñcally encoded as female (242-43).10 But, just as the repressed always returns, the maternal figure of Benina is called upon by Almudena and especially Juliana, who seeks in her words of absolution what is "heimlich"
or "heimisch," a kind of spiritual home or comfort. The discourse of domestic authority in the nineteenth century finds expression in numerous forms, among them home-manage- ment guides that instract middle-class wives in how to hire butlers, cooks, maids, and nurses.
What is, perhaps, most striking about these advisory manuals is the near- total absence of subjectivity that characterizes their treatment of domestic workers. Benina, by compari- son, represents the opposite pole, inasmuch as Misericordia 's plot rests precisely on the revelation of the plenitude of her subjectivity. But with this fullness also comes loss of place and the forfeiture of stability: "homelessness, in a way, is the price the servant has to pay for usurping the center of the novel's stage" (Gantrel 262). Benina sends Juliana back to her house and her babies, even as she herself is shut outside.
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The ambiguities of personal identity and subjectivity that characterize this novel are accompanied by a crisis of social authority that is no less pronounced. Living in a society that categorizes its citizens according to narrow legal and moral codes, the home- less of Misericordia elude attempts to classify them, whether by means of street aliases, physiognomic charts, pólice files, or other statistical data. The anxiety they provoke is not only due to worries over the material costs that institutionalized charity must pay to insure their survival; it also stems from the confounding of economic and moral categories. As in such novéis as Fortunata y Jacinta, La de Bringas, and La desheredada, Galdós again notes ín Misericordia the blurring of class distinctions that typify his age: "Sólo en nuestra sociedad heterogénea [...] se da el caso de que un hidalguete, poseedor de cuatro terruños, o un empleadillo de mediano sueldo, se confundan con marqueses y condes de sangre azul o con los proceres del dinero" (726). This commingling of classes is especially alarming to Christian moralists, who see in the inequities between rich and poor a necessary pre-condi- tion to social organization; as Molina writes in the 1860s, "sin esas desigualdades de fortuna, sin esas jerarquías de condición y de clase, es inconcebible la existencia de la sociedad"
(30; see also Shubert). Equally troubling for the State as well as for the Church is the indiscriminate confusión of exemplary, moral attributes and delinquent behaviours, whether in a single individual or an ostensibly homogeneous social grouping. As the reader discov- ers, the saintly Benina is a portentous liar and a "sisona"; la Pedra, a hardened alcoholic, is also capable of displays of great generosity; the devout Almudena beats la Pedra and Benina.
The problem is clear: how can one distinguish between "alcohólicos tambaleándose, mendigos, ciegos acompañados de su perro, jornaleros sin trabajo, criadas de servir desocupadas, randas y golfos, y la multitud de tipos abominables o inofensivos hermanados en la desgracia?" (Bernaldo de Quirós and Llanas Aguilaniedo 131).11 Considerable criti- cal commentary has expectedly centred on the priest, Don Romualdo, whose dubious iden- tity raises the ontological enigma of human existence. Is he the uncanny ("unheimlich") incarnation of an illusory figure conjured up out of Benina's imagination, somehow cor- roborated by Doña Paca's dream and Almudena's magical summoning of el rey Sarndai, or is he an autonomous being, who coincidentally shares the same ñame? The itinerant poor who live on Madrid 's streets also arouse apprehension over their identity, although in quite a different quarter. These "tipos heterogéneos y proteiformes" (Bernaldo de Quirós and Llanas Aguilaniedo 10) characterize a world in which external signifiers may no longer correspond to moral character, in which idlers and the truly incapacitated-the undeserving and the deserving poor-are indistinguishable from each other.
When the subjectivity of the individual is perceived as opaque, fragmentary, or unintelligible, it also becomes threatening. Although neither homelessness ñor destitution are new phenomena in the nineteenth century, they are increasingly managed by methods which focus vigilance on the impoverished classes. Spain enacted early a vagrancy law, in 1821; by 1849 the penal code recognized vagrants as crimináis subjecttoarrestandimpris- onment. In a monograph on pauperism published in 1866, Manuel Pérez de Molina insists that education and moralizing are insufficient to control and correct so-called "sujetos de mal vivir": "no sólo es menester que se acostumbren los pobres al trabajo y a la economía