Ghosts of Colonies Past and Present

Front matter

Spanish Imperialism in the Fiction of Benito Pérez Galdós

Mary L. Coffey

LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Managing the Loss of Empire

Part I: Benito Pérez Galdós and the Rewriting of Spanish History 2 Contextualizing the Trauma of Imperial Loss 54 3 End of an Empire and Birth of a Nation 93 Part II: A Tale of Two Plots 4 Historicizing Colonial Loss 126

Part III: The Remnants of Empire

6 The New Normal in Colonial Relations 232 Conclusion: Spanish History “para uso de los niños” 287 Works Cited 295

Index 311

Acknowledgments

There is an undeniable audacity in attempting to write a book that addresses the broad topic of Spanish imperialism in the work of an author who enjoyed such a long, prolific career and whose fiction has attracted the attention of so many scholars. Ghosts of Colonies Past and Present is the fruit of an entire career in Hispanic Studies, a field that has changed remarkably in the last two decades. This year marks the centenary of Galdós's death, and it is fitting to look back and reassess his career and his impact on the society of his time and on ours today. I can only hope that readers will find this an informative perspective from which to draw conclusions about the past and present. This was not an easy book to write, and I am indebted to many people for making it possible. To acknowledge all the support and encouragement I received from so many would result in a text of equally galdosian proportions. For that reason, I will attempt to be brief.

To the readers of my manuscript, thank you for your sharp eyes and sharp minds; you provided brilliant advice for improvements. Accordingly, any shortcomings of the book are mine alone. My gratitude as well goes to Liverpool University Press, and in particular to Chloe Johnson, who on the strength of a single chapter made the decision to contract the book. In the desperately uncertain times we find ourselves in, it is more important than ever that we learn about ourselves and our respective worlds through the medium of literature, and we are fortunate to have publishers who recognize the value of this particular kind of humanistic study. I also want to acknowledge summer research support provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Program for Cultural Cooperation Between Spain's Ministry of Culture and United States Universities.

I have gained much from the work of colleagues in Spanish literary and cultural studies over the years: Alda Blanco, Luisa Elena Delgado, Toni Dorca, Pura Fernández, David George, Hazel Gold, Michael Iarocci, Javier Krauel, Jo Labanyi, Susan Martín-Marquéz, Iñigo Sánchez Llama, Lisa Surwillo, Jesás Torrecilla, Akiko Tsuchiya, and Linda Willem, many of whom I cite in this book. Stephanie Sieburth, David Gies, Cathy Jaffe, and Rebecca Haidt, from our first meeting at the NIH Summer Institute in 1999 at Duke University, you have provided me with models of professional rigor, collegial support, and true friendship. In Spain, Dolores Troncoso Durán and Yolanda Arencibia always treated me with kindness, from my earliest forays as a scholar of Galdós's work, and they consistently provided intellectual insights. Similarly, I want to thank Peter Bly and Alan Smith for their scholarly work and for trusting me with the future of the Asociación Internacional de Galdosistas at a critical moment in its history.

I also want to mention the impact of those scholars who were taken from us far too soon. I met Tim McGovern when I was a junior faculty member, and we always thought we would have more time together. That has been a hard lesson learned. Similarly, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara and I met as doctoral students, studying in Madrid on Fulbright Fellowships. His life and work manifested like a brilliant and fast-burning comet, and I find myself still catching up to his scholarship as I think about the Spanish-speaking world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I think of both of them quite often, grateful for the time I had with them and for the work they leave behind.

I would be remiss not to mention the extraordinary mentorship of Harriet Turner, and the unequivocal support shown to me by Lee Skinner, my former colleague at the Claremont Colleges. I save my deepest thanks, nonetheless, to two very special friends and colleagues: Silvia Bermúdez and Roberta Johnson, without whom this book would never have been completed. They provided me with professional wisdom, intellectual guidance, and the loving friendship that made the difference when my energies flagged. I will forever be in their debt.

I have been fortunate to have a family who supported me and my career. But no one has been as engaged or as steadfast as my husband, Robert Pavich. He has walked this path with me for many decades and continues to offer to read and comment on my work. Words are insufficient to express the extent of how much he means to me. I am truly blessed to have such a partner.

In closing, I hope readers of this book will draw connections between the struggle of Spaniards to reimagine themselves after the loss of empire and our own time. We are experiencing seismic shifts across the globe that will undoubtedly have profound and lasting impacts on nations, on institutions, on cultural identities, and on the health of the planet as a whole. Whether we have the ability to direct these shifts toward positive outcomes remains to be seen. I continue to believe that literature offers viii

Acknowledgments valuable lessons to attentive readers, and I hope that this book will add, in small measure, to a body of knowledge that might actually help us navigate the stormy waters of our present environment. Galdós, in his study of Spanish history and culture, came quickly to the conclusion that greed and self-interest lead to devastating results for all, both in the moment and for subsequent generations. It is a lesson we must relearn as we strive for a world beyond the postcolonial.

Introduction: Managing the Loss of Empire

CHAPTER |

Benito Pérez Galdós (1843—1920) was one of Spain's most prolific authors, having published 78 novels, 23 plays, 15 short stories, and an extensive corpus of journalism over a career that spanned a half century. Stephen Gilman considered Galdós to be "Spain's first authentic nineteenth-century novelist" (Galdós and the Art of the European Novel 24), and many critics have favorably compared his literary production to that of other great European novelists, such as Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac, and Leo Tolstoy. Galdós's commitment to writing about Spain's past and its present, in his historical novels — the Episodios nacionales [National Episodes] — and his realist novels of contemporary Spanish life in the late nineteenth century — the novelas contemporáneas [contemporary novels] — has no counterpart in European literary history. Given the author's prolific output, writing a book about Benito Pérez Galdós's treatment of Spain's imperial history is a daunting task. Part of the challenge lies not just in the extensive number of works but also in the generally accepted opinion in contemporary Galdós studies that the author's intense focus on the metropolis precluded a lack of engagement with Spanish imperialism. The noted historian Michael Costeloe, for example, in his study of peninsular Spain's response to colonial revolution, has claimed that Galdós *makes only passing and superficial reference to the wars in America, and permits his characters almost no opinions on what Spaniards felt about the loss of empire" (2). Nevertheless, when one looks closely in Galdós's fiction for references to the Americas,

! See Harriet Turner's “The Poetics of Suffering in Galdós and Tolstoy” (Studies in Honor of Gilberto Paolini, Mercedes Vidal, ed. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta Press, 1996); Timothy McGovern's Dickens in Galdós (New York: Peter Lang, 2000); Charles Ley's “Galdós comparado con Balzac y Dickens como novelista nacional" (Actas del Primer Congreso Internacional de Estudios Galdosianos, Las Palmas: Excmo Cabildo Insular de Gran Canaria, 1977); and Fredric Jameson's The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013).

to Spanish imperialism, to the colonial experience, even if only from the perspective of the metropolitan citizen, the evidence is undeniably present. References are not always straightforward or reflected in purely historical terms. They are, as is often the case even in realist fiction, metaphorical and evocative in nature, addressing issues associated with empire and colonialism in unexpected ways. Galdós's fiction reveals, if one takes the time to examine the references within the larger context of the author's oeuvre, that Spanish national identity in the nineteenth century remained deeply enmeshed within the framework of imperialism and the country's colonial legacy.

Costeloe’s comment aside, the argument that Galdós's fiction, which so clearly engages with concepts of Spanish national identity, evidences a powerful engagement with empire should not be particularly contentious, since virtually no formulation of national identity in nineteenth-century Europe could escape connections to empire, even if those connections were often overlooked by critics. As Edward Said has clearly noted,

As a reference, as a point of definition, as an easily assumed place of travel, wealth, and service, the empire functions for much of the European nineteenth-century as a codified, if only marginally visible, presence in fiction, very much like the servants in grand households and in novels, whose work is taken for granted but scarcely ever more than named, rarely studied ... or given density. (63)

An examination of Galdós's work for evidence of empire has not been undertaken in any systematic fashion. This study constitutes an attempt to address that gap in scholarship. When we take the time to focus on some of the casual details in Galdós's novels and then link those details over time and across the author's literary career, we begin to see that the author's fiction exhibits a lifelong engagement with Spain's imperial past and its impact on the nation's present. The point of this volume is to demonstrate how Galdós's fiction constitutes part of a unique psychological process of coming to terms with the loss of empire and the resultant change in Spain's stature on the global stage. While I have attempted to address the trajectory of the author's thinking with respect to Spanish imperialism, I place special emphasis on Galdós's early works as examples of fiction that not only established his novelistic career and his stature in Spanish letters but also provided a fundamental framework for understanding how his more mature fiction engaged with issues of national identity and of Spain's imperial past and present, and the way those issues hovered, ghostlike and almost invisibly, over or just below the surface of his portraits of life in Spain throughout the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century. Before addressing more specific aspects of Galdós's fiction and the manifestation of his engagement with Spanish imperialism in his narratives, it is important to situate this argument within the larger framework of Spain's imperial history and its place in modern Spanish national consciousness.

Narratives, National Consciousness, and Imperial Trauma

Spain's defeat in the 1898 Spanish-American War, often referred to as "el desastre," is commonly identified as a definitive moment of national trauma, what Álvarez Junco has referred to as “el despertar de aquella somnolencia que había durado casi un siglo" [the awakening from that somnolence that had lasted nearly a century] (585). Despite the fact that Spain's imperial influence had been on the wane since the latter part of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth, the loss of Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and Guam sounded the death knell of the country's global empire. Throughout the nineteenth century the metropolis had attempted to ignore the growing restlessness of its remaining colonies, and the events of 1898 finally forced metropolitan citizens to recognize that Spain was no longer a colonial power or a significant force in world politics. Yet the tendency to focus on 1898 as the critical moment for the end of Spanish empire overlooks the importance of events in the early part of the nineteenth century, when Spain lost control over a significant portion of its colonial territories in the Americas. Indeed, the moment of national trauma associated with imperial loss should be more accurately situated much earlier, specifically within the first decades of the nineteenth century, when Spain fought Napoleon's army in the Peninsular War of Independence, when the colonial juntas began to envision greater autonomy and self-governance, when the prospect of independence gained currency for colonial citizens, and when the Spanish American wars of independence were undertaken and eventually won. In his 1944 induction into the Real Academia de Historia, Melchor Fernández Almagro gave a speech entitled La emancipación de América y su reflejo en la conciencia española in which he noted that, if Spaniards were asked when empire was lost, a majority would say 1898, and that those who might identify an earlier date would be hard pressed to be more specific about when that loss occurred.

Siendo innegable — y, desde luego, nadie lo niega, a poco que se fije la atención en el gran suceso — que el Imperio ultramarino de España, propiamente dicho, se perdió en la batalla de Ayacucho, dijérase que 1824, pese a todo, es año que pasa inadvertido en la común y elemental cultura histórica de nuestro pueblo. (10)

[Being undeniable — and of course, no one does denies it, given the little attention paid to that great event — that the overseas empire of Spain, properly speaking, was lost at the battle of Ayacucho, it could be said that 1824, in spite of everything, is a year that goes unnoticed in the common, elemental cultural history of our people.]

It is true there are no public acknowledgments in Spain of 1824 as a date worth historical remembrance, and this is not surprising, considering what the date means for metropolitan citizens. To conclude that “el espafiol de la calle, el de la tienda o de la covachuela, el de la sobremesa familiar, no sentía afectado por la querella exigentísima que se tramitaba en las Indias por el hierro y por el fuego" [the Spaniard in the street, the one in the store or in the hovel, the one engaged in after-dinner conversation, didn’t feel affected by the entrenched conflict taking place in the Indies by means of iron and fire] misses perhaps, the complexity of what was at stake (Fernández Almagro 14-15). In fact, attitudes within the metropolis relative to colonial loss and the end of empire had already begun to take shape during the early decades of the nineteenth century, and they continued to develop through subsequent decades. Unquestionably the imperial losses in the 1820s began a process of self-reflection that reached its height if not its culmination, with 1898. But, rather than consider the period between colonial losses as one of somnolence, as does Álvarez Junco, it is more useful to imagine the decades between losses as a period in which the national trauma of losing the empire manifested itself in subtle and unconscious ways in popular culture. For that reason, when thinking about how the metropolis managed the reality of imperial loss, it makes more sense to expect that the process of introspection and re-evaluation would be long, drawn out and complex. In truth, much of nineteenth-century Spanish literature offers evidence that literary producers and consumers were deeply involved in a process of coming to terms, slowly but steadily, with the nation's colonial history even as they struggled to construct a new definition of Spain as a nation.

Over the course of my academic career I have been struck by how much of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish culture involves defining a sense of national identity. In addition to understanding what it means to be Spanish in the present moment or, with respect to the nineteenth century, the nature of Spanish identity in comparison to the rest of Europe, much of Spanish culture demonstrates a concern with the nation's past, its former status as a global empire, and the profound contrast between the past and the present. As Javier Tusell noted in España: una angustia nacional, his meditation on the anxious national response to the centenary of 1898, “La persistencia en la interrogación acerca de lo español en ocasiones parece bordear la obsesión” [The persistence in the questions about what is Spanish on occasion seems to border on obsession] (53). Two anecdotes, one scholarly in nature and the other dealing with contemporary Spanish popular culture, serve to illustrate Tusell's observation and help set the stage for our examination of Galdós's fiction.

In October 1996 a two-day conference entitled "Spanish Nationalism: A Historical Perspective," led by José Álvarez Junco at Tufts University, brought together specialists in history, political science, literature, and culture, among them Noél Valis, Carlos Serrano, Carolyn Boyd, Enric Ucelay da Cal, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Edward Baker, Xosé Manoel Nuñez-Seixas, E. Inman Fox, and Adrian Shubert, to discuss nineteenth- and twentieth-century approaches to Spanish nationalism. In a final round-table discussion, the renowned Spanish political scientist and sociologist Juan Linz, in response to the two days of presentations, turned to the audience and members of the panel and rather spontaneously questioned what seemed to him to be an obsessive preoccupation with Spanish national identity. I am paraphrasing his words here, but essentially his comments were as follows: “Why do we keep asking who we are and what it means to be Spanish? The Swedes don't do this. The Germans don't do this. Why are we so anxious about our identity?" His unexpected outburst triggered some initial laughter, but also led to thoughtful musings from fellow panelists Hugh Thomas, Stanley Payne, and Benedict Anderson. Ultimately it stood as a defining moment for the conference. Why was Spanish national identity such a point of obsession for those who study Spain? Why would the question of national identity provoke such a sense of conflict and the need to compare one national tradition with another? As an assistant professor, new to the profession, I found Linz' point particularly relevant, in part because no one seemed to have an answer.

Years later, in September 2001, T VEI launched what was to become the longest-running and most critically acclaimed program in Spanish television history: Cuéntame cómo pasó. The dramatic series, still on the air in 2020, with additional seasons to come, presents a middle-class Spanish family's experiences, beginning in the late 1960s, continuing through the 1970s and 1980s, and most recently moving into the 1990s, spanning the last years of the Franco dictatorship, the country's transition to a constitutional democracy, and the years of the PSOE's political dominance under Prime Minister Felipe González. The program initially employed the voiceover of an adult looking back at his childhood and remembering key events, a perspective borrowed from the popular American television program The

Wonder Years. The series quickly garnered critical and popular acclaim for its realism, as writers and producers made a concerted attempt to present their fictionalized account of the effects of the Franco dictatorship and the transition to democracy within the framework of a verifiable history.? As one critic noted, “La serie no consiste simplemente en una recreación del pasado a través de recuerdos sino que antes de escribir los guiones se procede a un proceso de documentación para que la trama ficticia se fundamente sobre una base histórica sólida” [The series does not simply consist in a re-creation of the past through memories but rather before writing the scripts proceed through a process of documentation so that the fictional plot is based on solid historical evidence] (Sevillano Canicio 349—50). In an interview, the series” principal writer, Eduardo Ladrón de Guevara, claimed that “Aquellos años fueron ignominiosos y hay que contarlos” [Those years were ignominious, and they have to be told] (cited in Sevillano Canicio 349). Implicit in his statement is the belief that, by providing a historical narrative of the past, viewers would face the painful legacy of the Franco years and learn from history.

In its early years Cuéntame focused on Spain's emergence from Spain's relative isolation during the Franco dictatorship onto the global stage as a modern European nation, and nowhere was that central message made clearer than in the pilot episode, “El retorno del fugitivo” [The return of the fugitive], which concluded with the protagonists, the Alcántara family, gathered around a new black and white television set watching Massiel become the first Spaniard to win the Eurovision contest with the song “La la la.” The message — that Spain had achieved its desired status as a modern consumer society and member of a community of European nations — was unambiguous. This episode of Cuéntame included another fascinating scene that has not been examined in any of the many articles written to date on this monumental television series. The scene takes place in a schoolroom during a history lesson, and it allows the series to make a pointed reference, from its very inception, to a critical moment in the nation's past that occurred long before the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship. The scene begins with Carlos, the family's youngest son, passing notes

? See Elena Cueto Asín's "Memorias de progreso y violencia; La Guerra Civil en Cuéntame cómo pasó” (Historias de la pequeña pantalla: Representaciones históricas en la television de la España democrática. Francisca López, Elena Cueto Asín, and David George, eds (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2009), 137-56); Isabel Estrada's “Cuéntame cómo pasó o la revisión televisiva de la historia española reciente” (Hispanic Review 72:4 (2004): 547-64); and Ana Corbalán's “Reconstrucción del pasado histórico: Nostalgia reflexiva en Cuéntame cómo pasó” (Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 10:3 (2009): 341-57).

to his best friend, Luis, while their teacher, Don Severiano, lectures the class on Spanish history. The boys are passing notes with a sequence of numbers, which allow them to play a paper version of the game Battleship. Luis passes coordinates that result in a hit on one of Carlos's ships just as the teachers lecture turns, in a moment of brilliant counterpoint, to the history of Spain in the Americas and, in particular, to the events of 1898. Don Severiano rails against American perfidy, thus reminding twenty-firstcentury Spaniards that no portrait of Spain as a modern consumer nation can avoid a reference to the nation's imperial past.

These two stories illustrate that there are parallel yet connected impulses at work here. One involves the conflicted and perhaps even obsessive nature of the search for national identity. Juan Linzs impromptu references to other European nations and their respective, and apparently unproblematic, national identities reveal that there is something unique about Spain, at least from the perspective of Spaniards. I would suggest that the difference involves Spain's imperial history and the fact that it was the first nation in world history to achieve and then lose a global hegemonic empire. Don Severiano history lesson in the pilot episode of Cuéntame cómo pasó indicates that even more than a century after the Spanish-American War of 1898 the issue of colonial loss still resonates for many Spaniards and remains central to an ongoing national struggle to identify and accept a definition of what it means to be Spanish in today's world? “The other impulse at work here is the critical role of the representation of history in popular culture. Cuéntame cómo pasó, with more than 370 episodes spanning 20 seasons, is a contemporary confirmation of the enduring vitality of historical narratives that are designed to both instruct and entertain consumers of popular culture.

But there are antecedents to the popular culture phenomenon of Cuéntame cómo pasó, most notably in the nineteenth century, the period Christopher Schmidt-Nowara has described as Spain's “second empire,” in reference to Spain's colonial engagement after the Spanish American revolutions (3).* Indeed, nowhere in modern Spanish literature can we find a more ambitious project for the simultaneous entertainment and instruction

? See, for example, Javier Krauel's insightful Imperial Emotions: Cultural Responses to Mytbs of Empire in Fin-de Siécle Spain (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2013), which explores the complex cultural responses to Spain's loss in the Spanish-American War.

^ Christopher Schmidt-Nowara links the changed nature of Spain's colonial engagement to its expansion of Antillean slavery, noting that "Spain was not merely a feeble and decadent drain on Antillean resources, but an active player of consumers than the historical novels of Benito Pérez Galdós (1843—1920). Spanish history plays a unique role in virtually every one of Galdós's novels, from his earliest historical fiction — La Fontana de Oro (1870) and El audaz (1871) — to his Episodios nacionales — five series consisting of a total of 46 separate novels that chronicle Spanish history from 1805 to 1880 — to his later novelas contemporáneas [contemporary novels]. The first two series of Episodios nacionales, written between 1873 and 1879, play a central role in this study given that they cover the historical period in which Spain experienced its early colonial losses in the Americas. These two series, a total of 20 novels, represent an unprecedented effort to answer questions about national identity. The fact that these two series were completed within only seven years signals an obsessive need to chronicle the nation's history. Historians have long recognized how Galdós's historical novels participated in the creation of a renewed image of Spain, just as it was experiencing the political tumult of the Sexenio democrático [Democratic Sexenio] of 1868—74? But the question of why Galdós felt compelled to write them at such speed and with such a particular historical focus on the years 1805-34 is harder to answer until we undertake a comprehensive examination of the novels from the perspective of colonial loss. Scholars of Galdós's fiction rarely address the fact that Galdós's early novels were written at a time when Spain was already in a military fight to control Cuba, its most important remaining colony. From the perspective of Spain's imperial history, then, the author's crafting of early nineteenth-century Spanish history was taking place not only during a period of political turmoil in the metropolis but also as a significant colonial war was being waged in the background. As Ángel Bahamonde and José Cayuela have noted in their study of nineteenth-century colonial Spanish elites, the Ten Years War, from 1868 to 1878, was only the first step in a struggle that would resume in the Little War of 1879—80 and ultimately culminate with the successful in refashioning Atlantic slavery" (Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba and Puerto Rico, 1833—1874 (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1999), 3). Historians such as Raymond Carr, José María Jover Zamora, and Carlos Seco

II

Serrano have demonstrated a powerful interest in Galdós's historical narratives, often citing them in their work. See, for example, Carrs Spain 1808—1975 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford UP, 1993); Jover Zamora's Política, diplomacia y humanismo popular. Estudios sobre la vida española en el siglo XIX (Madrid: Ediciones Turner, 1976) and La imagen de la Primera República en la España de la Restauración (Madrid: Real Academic de la Historia, 1982); and Seco Serrano's "Los Episodios nacionales como fuente histórica” (Cuadernos hispanoamericanos 250—52 (1970—71)).

1895-98 Cuban War of Independence (362-63). That first attempt to break free of imperial control, occurring exactly at the time when Galdós was engaged in producing a version of Spanish history designed for the equivalent of a mass market, “marca un antes y un después en la relación entre la elite hispano-cubana y Europa" [marks a before and after in the relations between the Hispanic-Cuban elite and Europe] (Bahamonde and Cayuela 362). Viewed through the lens of empire, Galdós's early fiction attempts to redefine national identity at a critical juncture in time, during a period when the metropolis was deeply engaged in the process of coming to terms with its traumatic shift in fortunes on the global stage.

Galdóss Narratives of Spanish Metropolitan Society

In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said makes the claim that “Nearly everywhere in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British and French culture we find allusions to the facts of empire, but perhaps nowhere with more regularity and frequency than in the British novel" (62). Largely owing to the work of Said, we no longer read the works of the great nineteenth-century European authors, including those from national traditions other than the French and the British, without recognizing the assumptions about race, gender, and power that are uniquely linked to imperialism. 'The works of Benito Pérez Galdós, Spain's most prolific and best-known nineteenth-century novelist, should be no different. Besides providing us with a remarkable look at everyday life, Galdds’s realist and historical narratives are also windows into the nineteenth-century landscape of Spanish metropolitan and colonial interactions. Yet much of the literary production of Spain in the nineteenth century has not received the sustained critical attention it deserves with respect to empire and colonialism. Only recently have Galdos's novels begun to attract the attention of scholars in this regard.* The present challenge lies not only in

6 Literary scholars interested in Spanish colonialism have tended to look at Galdós's production in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, rather than his early novels or the first two series of Episodios nacionales. See, for example, John Sinnigen's “Cuba en Galdós” (Casas de las Américas 212 (1998); Eva Marie Copeland's “Empire, Nation, and the ¿indiano in Galdós's Tormento and La loca de la casa” (Hispanic Review 80 (2012)); Lisa Surwillo's Monsters by Trade. Slave Traffickers in Modern Spanish Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2014); Michael Ugarte's “The Spanish Empire on the Wane. Africa, Galdós, and the Moroccan Wars,” in Empires End (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UP, 2016); Susan Martín-Márquez's Disorientations (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, making more visible in Galdós's fiction what has been largely unrecognized by contemporary readers and scholars but also in deciding what these textual discoveries might say about the process of forming a new national identity.

Accordingly, Said's simile for the hidden references to empire — “as a coded, if only marginally visible, presence in fiction, very much like the servants in grand households" — is an apt way of describing how we might tease out the meaningful references in Galdós's novels (63). It requires us to pay close attention to subplots and secondary characters and the way they connect to Spanish colonialism. In addition, Galdós's narratives also contain a variety of metaphorical references that serve to elucidate attitudes toward Spain's changing national identity in the nineteenth century. Yet one must approach Galdóss texts from a contemporary, post-colonial perspective in order to recognize not only how his narratives participate in the formulation of a national identity but also how intent they are on separating a sense of national consciousness from Spain's imperial past. Though the very term post-colonial is a complicated one, in my use of it here I specifically mean from the perspective of historical chronology, after the loss of colonial territories.’ In other words, from a twenty-first-century perspective, in which peninsular Spain no longer automatically evokes in readers an assumed connection with the territorial immensity and the cultural and linguistic diversity of the Americas, it becomes possible to see, by examining Galdós's narratives, the degree to which nineteenth-century Spaniards continued to make that assumption of shared culture and heritage and, as a result, still struggled to internalize the end of their nation's formerly vast empire.’