El conflicto entre Ana Ozores y la Regenta: deseo o destrucción

Abstract

In 1880 Leopoldo Alas, Clarín, affirmed in his well-known article El libre examen y nuestra literatura presente that the novel was "the vehicle that literature chooses in our time to carry general thought, common culture, the fertile germ of contemporary life [...]" (Alas 2001: 57). This consideration was connected to the intense literary debate that was generated in the press, and of which Alas was one of the main argumentators, about the purposes and aesthetics of the Naturalism movement in Spain. For Clarín, the novel (understood as the key genre for showing and reflecting the society of its time) harbored a reformist intention: the possibility of, through "our literary revolution" (ibidem), attacking customs and "sustained ideas sheltered from the Church by secular fanaticism" (idem: 58). The conception of Leopoldo Alas in writing La Regenta (1884-1885) is based on the idea of the "social importance" (idem: 54) of literature. A novel where a crude portrait of human relations is presented in an imagined provincial city: Vetusta. In this context, the protagonist, Ana Ozores, will become the main object of the dispute that is established between two power forces. One represented by the church, in the figure of the Magistral, and another represented by the city's oligarchy, who through Don Álvaro Mesía, wants to dominate and subdue the most precious piece of the city: la Regenta. A woman immersed in a (sometimes sickly) struggle between her natural drive, her relationship with her body and her sexuality, the emotion and spirituality with which she tries to transcend the degraded environment and the routine that surrounds her, as opposed to the weight of social demands, of the hypocritical culture of appearance and the demands of conduct imposed on women as holders of honor in a patriarchal society. Skipping the norm in the sight of all will suppose their social exclusion, censorship and the implacable isolation of a ruthless environment in front of what individual freedom represents.