Mediators of intimacy, negotiators of scandal: domestic in the end-of-century radical naturalist novel

Abstract

The inner workings and secrets of domestic life help form the novelesque plots
of radical Spanish Naturalism in the 1880s. In these works, the maids constitute the invisible figure of reference due to their skills as mediators in the private lives of others, and as exhibitors of the inconsistencies and falseness of the social and sexual morality of the times. Thus, the Naturalist novel establishes an equivalency between the state of feminine submission and the modern slavery which servitude presupposes, which often leads to prostitution. Prostitutes and maids share a literary destiny and in them one funds the weapon which is capable of destabilizing the principal and generating cell of the social model: the family; and at the same time, the ability to maintain it, due to the possibility of channeling masculine desire without altering traditional monogamous order. But they also function as the door of scandal which can destroy the reputation of their bosses as they redefine the limits between public and private life and reveal the behavior and hidden practices of the ruling class in a type of public court which is very much tied in with the work of the press, as the shaper of public opinion.