44 pages • 1 hour read
Benito Perez GaldosMarianela
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1878A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Caverns of La Terrible
The caverns of La Terrible also include the hole in La Trascava where Nela’s mother took her life. The suicide haunts the caverns and is represented through the terrifying descriptions of the space. Upon Teodoro’s first tour of La Terrible, he spies the horrifying rock formations that resemble “deformed caricatures of humanity… all still, silent, and turned to stone” (9). The descriptions recognize the death of a human life that took place in the caverns before Teodoro’s discovery of Nela’s mother’s death. As Nela shares a special bond with this place, it also foreshadows Nela’s death at the end of the novel.
Nela’s connection to La Terrible is tied to the trauma of losing her mother in such a horrific way. As such, La Terrible represents a primordial pain that is linked to Nela’s representational role as a New World native. It also symbolizes the darkness that inhabits Nela’s imagination and that of Pablo’s, prior to being able to see. Nela believes that everything, “the rare and fleeting joys…the very misery she had known there; the memory of her friend…all the feelings of admiration or of sympathy” (154) are located in La Terrible. Upon news of Pablo’s successful surgery, she believes that she is fated to return to it. Pablo’s decision to relinquish his darkness in favor of sight means that she is alone in La Terrible.
Sight
The role of sight in the novel refers to the colonial gaze. Pablo’s progression as a blind boy to a seeing man changes the relationship between him and Nela—Old World and New World, the European and the native. Before Pablo’s surgery, the blind boy’s lack of sight binds him to Nela. They share a bond that mirrors that of colonial co-dependency, the Old World desiring the New World despite never having laid eyes on it. In turn, the impoverished New World relies on the Old World for definition, lacking the knowledge to articulate its own sense of self. This dynamic plays out through Pablo and Nela’s relationship and defines their early affections for one another. The promise of sight, however, troubles this dynamic and compels the relationship to change.
Through Teodoro’s skill as an eye surgeon, sight becomes a way of mastering discovery through conquest. Compared frequently to Columbus, Teodoro is the colonial explorer who desires to gift Pablo, the Old World, with knowledge of the world around him. Whereas the gift of sight permits Pablo to see in the way that Europe learns of the world through explorations of the Old World, it signals Nela’s doom. She fears entering Pablo’s colonial gaze, knowing that he will not like what he sees and reject her. In a frantic explanation to Teodoro about her fears, Nela cries, “To see Nela—but he never shall see Nela—Nela will never let him see her!” (164) Her fear of Pablo’s sight suggests the power of his gaze. When he does finally encounter Nela for the first time, his response is much like that of the Old World learning that the New World is not what it appears in his idealized imagination. The Old World does not conform to his idea of beauty. Recognizing that she will never match his vision, Nela expires.
The Virgin Mary
In the novel, the Virgin Mary appears in the form of Florentina, Pablo’s beautiful cousin. Nela mistakes Florentina for her version of the Virgin Mary as she had prayed the night before for the Virgin Mary’s intervention in her predicament. She implores the Virgin Mary to “make me beautiful or strike me dead” (117). In a sense, Florentina’s presence is complicit in informing Pablo’s shocked response to his encounter with Nela, leading to her death. As the representation of the Virgin Mary, Florentina accidentally fulfills the latter outcome of Nela’s prayer.
Nela compares Florentina to the Virgin Mary in the way that she possesses the Virgin’s beauty and benevolence. Upon first meeting Nela, Florentina instantly offers her companionship. Florentina makes a charitable vow to care for Nela when she marries Pablo, a promise that at once moves Nela and terrifies her, given her affections for Pablo. Nela’s discomfort around the Virgin Mary suggests the New World’s unease with Spanish Catholicism. While Nela adapts the Virgin Mary into her own spiritual views of the world, it does not seem to work for her when the Virgin Mary appears to her in the flesh in the form of Florentina. Despite Florentina’s insistent care, Nela rejects it at each turn, lacking the language to articulate why she refuses the lady’s gestures. Florentina determines it to be “Ingratitude” (150) when Nela cannot face her. Florentina reminds the young orphan of her own lack of beauty and self-worth. Thus, the novel suggests that Florentina and Nela’s relationship emblematizes the struggle of Spanish conquest, particularly religious conversion, in the Americas, as the presence of the Virgin Mary brings the native too close to the Old World, a place that will inevitably reject her.
