UC Berkeley

With the exception of the well-known figure of the ángel del hogar, concepts of purity in post-inquisitional Spain have rarely been used as central categories of analysis. This dissertation aims to address an important lacuna within nineteenth-century Spanish studies by tracing the complex ways in which purity, as an ideological regime, continued to operate as a less explicit but important construct in modern Spain. Rather than declining, such regimes metamorphosed into an array of discourses that positioned purity as a foundational ideological category for modern subjectivity and national identity in late imperial Spain. Specifically, I turn to the major realist novelists of the nineteenth century - Juan Valera, Leopoldo Alas, Emilia Pardo Bazán, and Benito Pérez Galdós -- to examine how realist fiction stages counter-narratives to essentialist notions of purity and impurity formulated and consequently deployed by Medicine, the Church, and the State. The dissertation traces the ways in which historical notions of pure lineage or pure blood underwrite "modern" and "post-inquisitional" notions of sexual, racial, and bodily purity, particularly in the last third of the nineteenth century, also known as the Restoration period.

I advance a critical understanding of these diverse forms of purity through what I identify as the discourse of casta. Originating from the Latin castus (clean, pure), casta can be translated into English as "caste" or "chaste," a profoundly revealing ambiguity that drives my analysis. Over the course of the dissertation I chart casta's semantic permutations including: female sexual purity (castidad); heritage, blood, and lineage (casta/o); and national purity (lo castizo/casticismo). The usage of casta/o and its related terms is always a gendered, racialized, and class-specific articulation of purity. The common thread that links these diverse definitions together, I argue, is the regulation of gender. Sexual purity, (and later racial, class- and national purity) is an implicit part of what casta evokes across its semantic evolutions. The texts examined here reveal that the discourse of casta is central to the production of idealized national subjects during a time of political instability and imperial decline. While casticismo appears to be fundamental to the production of the nation, its ambivalent and polyvalent nature complicates and at times undermines the success of nationalist projects