Blood Novels: Gender, Caste, and Race in Spanish Realism by Julia H. Chang (review)

Reviewed by: Blood Novels: Gender, Caste, and Race in Spanish Realism by Julia H. Chang Erika Rodríguez Julia H. Chang. Blood Novels: Gender, Caste, and Race in Spanish Realism, University of Toronto Press, 2022, 256 pp. In this highly original contribution to the field of Iberian culture studies, Julia Chang explores the sanguine surges and corrupted bloodlines of the nineteenth-century Spanish novel, demonstrating the continued centrality of blood’s symbolic ordering power in modern narratives. Blood Novels traces the "masculinist anxieties” of fictional works that center on beautiful female protagonists who are characterized by disruptive bleeding and by their struggle against the symbolic power of tainted bloodlines — a rubric that emerges in Juan Valera’s Doña Luz, Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta, and Benito Pérez Galdós La desheredada and Fortunata y Jacinta. Read as blood novels, these canonical realist texts upend notions of periodicity and expand current understanding of the cultural politics of blood. Blood Novels finds that the shaping force of limpieza de sangre as a concept was not exclusive to the early modern period. Rather, concerns with blood purity continued to breathe life into late nineteenth-century Spanish social structures, rendering elite blood a currency of distinction, even as such rhetoric becomes mottled across other discourses of identification. Blood in the realist novel becomes a polysemic structuring element, animating cultural inscriptions of gender, bourgeois self-making, and transfusions of legitimacy in Restoration Spain. Traditionally, Iberian studies scholarship has privileged the importance of blood as an analytic in the pre-modern, early modern, and colonial contexts, and in doing so, reified a sense of ruptured symbolics that leave limpieza de sangre in Spain’s past, a relic to be definitively replaced by modernity’s visual racial schemas and the administration of sexuality. Blood Novels challenges this periodization, illuminating how blood-as-caste was not substituted by or conflated into modern notions of race but functioned alongside them, fleshing out discourses of legitimacy. The introduction provides historical and theoretical grounding for this intervention by dialoguing with recent work on Iberian race studies that interprets limpieza de sangre as an ideology that connected discourses of blood with cultural inscription, cohering into what we may understand as a long-standing racial concept “unique to the Iberian peninsula” (8). Blood novels reveal “the obvious paradox of the ideology of blood purity” — that for all its essentialisms, it requires faith in blood as an ideal so abstracted it appears to have “no origins at all” (21). This blood purity [End Page 169] paradox elicits a central tension between appearance and essence in Spanish realism. In the same novels, thick, dripping, gushing descriptions of bleeding bodies raise the stakes of the narrative by evoking urgent precarity, even as they mark the limits of representational power. In this sense, blood purity circulates the “unrelenting desire for the materiality that blood promises” (20) — a concept that Chang explores in dialogue with the theoretical works of Foucault, Butler, Stoler, and Grosz, as well as studies in gender and race in Spanish realism by Jo Labanyi, Harriet Turner, Akiko Tsuchiya, Hazel Gold, and Catherine Jagoe. The first chapter examines the trope of illegitimacy in Juan Valera’s Doña Luz in relation to the underexplored themes of colonialism and orientalism. The combination of Dona Luz’s aristocratic whiteness and illegitimate birth arouse orientalizing expressions of desire from her would-be lovers, both of whom enact imperialist projects in different ways. The masculine imperial gaze exoticizes Luz as an American Indian, an Annamite, and the Queen of the Amazons. Chang proposes that Luz’s tainted blood, apparent whiteness, and desirability combine to reflect a contemporary concern with the legitimacy of Spanish whiteness, as well as an ambivalence toward an imagined racial intimacy with Spanish colonies. In the second chapter, the racialization of illegitimacy gives way to “the chastity bind.” Like Doña Luz, Ana Ozores is haunted by her late mother’s unknown bloodline. But whereas Luz finds class acceptance (however provisional), in La Regenta, the administration of sexuality fails to supplant blood-based identification, leading to an entangled cultural logic in which “tainted blood renders chastity a moot point” (11). In both chapters, Chang...

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