ABSTRACT
This essay explores the representation of Jews and caciques (political bosses) in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s 1890 sequel novels, Una cristiana (A Christian Woman) and La prueba (The Test), and her 1906 play, El becerro de metal (The Metal Calf). Her critique of modern Spain lies at the intersection of these three works. This essay proposes that Pardo Bazán deploys the Jew and the political boss as vehicles for conveying her condemnation of the excessive materialism of modern Spain and the primary symptom of its decadence, its attraction to el vil metal (filthy lucre) invoked in the play’s title. Thus in her novels she recasts Spain’s traditional denigration of its historic Jewish population as a metaphor for those aspects of contemporary Spanish culture she considers undesirable in a modern nation. Both novels center on a provincial middle-class character labeled a Jew by the narrator, while the female protagonist of the comedia dramática (dramatic comedy) belongs to a Parisian upper-class Jewish family with ancient roots in Spain. In both cases, the character’s identity necessarily traces back to Spain’s 1492 expulsion of its Jewish population and to their subsequent exile or conversion. The novels’ Christian woman and the play’s female convert to Catholicism figure the Spain endorsed by all three works in exalting the ideal Christian woman who abjures materialistic culture.1
