Homosocial Desire and Homosexual Pani in "Lo prohibido (original) (raw)

Lo prohibido (1884) has been labeled by some critics one of Benito Pérez Galdós's weakest novéis. The late Stephen Gilman memorably wrote that the narrator, José María Bueno de Guzmán, is a "trivial Naturalistic rake" who has no conceivable reason for confessing his secrets and telling his tale (142-144), and it is this view which has largely shaped critical consensus about this novel. 1 Recently, however, there has been a renewal of interest in this novel on the part of critics who see it as more complex than previously recognized. Tríese critics' analyses frequently touch on the novel's incoherencies, such as the unreliability of the first-person narrator, the complication of Ido del Sagrario as the actual writer of the memoir, and the lack of apparently stable raale and female identities, 2 which has prompted critics to explore in Lo prohibido the limits and borders of gender and sexuality. For example, Akiko Tsuchiya very perceptively describes the novel as challenging "[...] culturally generated categories of gender and sexuality, and, ultimately, any notion of coherent subjectivity" (281). The studies noted have generally interpreted the first-person narrator, José María, as an example of the perceived blurring of the boundaries between genders during the last quarter of the nineteenth century in Spain. These same studies have generally focused attention on José María's heterosexual adulterous relationships with his female cousins: Eloísa, Maria Juana, and Camila. This essay argües that the exploration of limits and borders in Lo prohibido ultimately questions heterosexual normativity by examining José María's homosocial relationships with the cuckolded husbands. 3 My reading of Lo prohibido shifts the traditional critical emphasis from male-female adultery in the novel to the structure of male-male relations portrayed. This essay argües that Lo prohibido participates in this symbolic economy of desire, and, in the process, destabilizes the heterosexual norm by "queering" sexual normativity and thus any sort of "natural" sexuality. 4 This essay will ultimately afflrm that Lo prohibido represents a moment in which a male homoerotic identity is postulated and, in the moment of its possibility, is immediately repudiated. I am not saying that an identifiable homosexual identity in the modem (present-day) sense existed at this particular historical moment. 5 Rather, this reading focuses on the moments in the text in which the object of desire (for José María) switches from female to male, thus exposing slippages between sex, gender and desire. This is visible at the narrative level as well, especially in the play of binary terms, which to a large extent govern the text. These termsknown/unknown, secrecy/disclosure, and public/private-are indicative of the mechanism by which the possibility for a "queer" sexuality becomes visible at this time in this text. It is this possibility which is foreclosed at the end of the text and which I label homosexual pañic. 6 Before delving into a reading of Lo prohibido, it may be useful to look at the state of queer studies regarding nineteenth-century Spain. Queer studies, as Annamarie Jagose has