2020
Ce document est lié à :
Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos ; vol. 44 no. 3 (2020)
©, 2022ErikaRodríguez
Erika Rodríguez, « Care and Cultural Exclusion in Restoration Spain: Transgressive Caregiving in Galdós’s Misericordia », Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos / Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, ID : 10.18192/rceh.v44i3.6362
Benito Pérez Galdós’s Misericordia (1897) represents two opposing models of providing care for diseased, disabled, or degenerate subjects: custodial care aimed at controlling social deviance and caregiving that takes into account the needs of the care recipient. I propose that, through the caregiving model, the protagonist, Benina, establishes a powerful stance against medical and economic discourses that devalued the lives of marginal subjects. This analysis examines the relationship between the categories of disease, disability, and degeneration; the role of custodial care and caregiving in the nineteenth-century Spanish economy; and how both models respond to the possibility of contagion, as well as the political implications of these responses.