The contagious effects of rural violence: social pathologies and injured bodies in Blasco Ibáñez's La barraca (The cabin)

Abstract

The political drive of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s journalism and novels of social protest has often been categorised as distinct from the predominantly aesthetic renderings of environment in his Valencian fiction (Medina, 1984; Cameron, 2018). This article seeks to reframe the ideological impetus of one of his best-known works, La barraca [The Cabin] (1898), through a focus on vivid imagery of the pathological body as it interacts with the Valencian landscape. By applying late 19th-century theories of crowd psychology and emotional contagion to the portrait of the pathologised nature of rural violence in La barraca, this article analyses the novel’s thematic focus on social inequality in the context of literary Naturalism. It contends that the trope of stagnant water, channelled through the fertile Valencian plain as a conduit of contamination, echoes the moral sickness of rural society that results from a powerful combination of environmental determinism and imitative behaviour. Scholars have widely concurred that in his social protest novels, Blasco Ibáñez critiques the capitalist exploitation of the proletariat. Extending earlier studies of the author’s naturalist fiction, this article proposes that the representation of contagious violence perpetrated by the landless rural labourers in La barraca draws implicitly on bourgeois discourses. It thereby aims to problematise the ideological foundation for the novel’s exposition of social injustice in late 19th-century Spain.