Cuerpos artificiales y su fetichizacion: Las 'maquinaciones' de la produccion cultural espanola, 1892--1930 (Spanish text, Benito Perez Galdos, Jose Diaz Fernandez)

This dissertation reconsiders the conceptualisation of two feminine characters in the novels Tristana (1892) by Benito Perez Galdos, and La Venus mecanica (1929) by Jose Diaz Fernandez. The bodies of the two protagonists express symbolically the sense of engagement and denunciation of both authors with respect to the situation of middle-class women in the turn-of-the-century society in which Galdos lived and the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, under which Diaz Fernandez conceived his novel.; The dissertation aims to show how the ideological and cultural principles of the bourgeois patriarchy concerning the role of Spanish women in the years 1890--1930 influenced the presentation of the two protagonists. As a result, Perez Galdos and Diaz Fernandez maintain an ambiguous attitude towards the idea of the emancipation of women.; I employ two methodological concepts in order to analyze the novels: machination and fetishization. I understand machination as the attitude that seeks to denaturalize, deconstruct and reinvent a body, both literally and metaphorically, with the further intention to dominate and regulate the dissidence of that body, to the extent that the body threatens the dominant ideology. On the other hand, fetishization explains how a body can become denaturalized and converted into a fetish by socially accepted and unquestioned attitudes that emanate from a discourse of power. This discourse takes concrete form in medical treatises, newspaper articles, sociological studies, and reports on eugenics, for example. The thesis also shows how the concept of fetishization is a double-edged sword, given that an artificial body, converted into a fetish, has the subversive power to enchant the Subject who has denaturalized it and converted it into an Object.; The thesis offers a historical panorama of the diverse ways through which discourse machinates against the feminine body at the end of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth. In addition, I survey a series of artificial bodies in European literary and film texts from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, in order to contextualize the works of Peninsular literature that I have studied in this dissertation.